Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Another Racing Game gets the Bike treatment

It seems like more racing games (mainly arcade racers) are adding more than just cars as the main vehicle of choice. The Midnight Club series (started with 2) pretty much made bikes in console racers kind of fun and changed up the gameplay a bit. Now more racing games have seem to add bikes with PGR4, Test Drive Unlimited, and Mario Kart Wii. Looks like another racing game will add bikes into their repertoire of cars, which is Burnout Paradise.

The folks of Criterion are still piling up the DLC for the latest Burnout game, with a recent auto-update showing up on 360 (later this week on PS3) even though it is causing framerate issues.  They will fix that issue and the "Bogart" update will return in May 2. Meanwhile, that screenshot of a bike in Paradise City is also in a different time of the day. They also plan towards putting nighttime in Paradise along with bikes and supposedly planes in their "Davis" update later this summer before their "Eastwood" update, which is the promised expansion of Paradise City with another island to explore. Before those two updates is the "Cagney" update adding this SUV, which can't boost at all (pic below) as well new types of freeburn challenges and more online modes (mentioned in a previous post) to mess with (some of those are timed). Plus, PS3 fans will be happy of getting custom soundtracks in that update as well.

It is just impressive that Criterion is still willing to make Burnout Paradise better way after its release as other companies would just put up some pointless items up for download and stop there. They are pushing the concept of DLC to a whole level and all of this will be surprisingly free, which is awesome. The addition of bikes to Burnout could lead to some new challenges for the developers and how they can maintain what makes Burnout the intense racing game it is with different vehicles.