With Mr Tidler finally picking up a copy of Burnout: Paradise, I finally got to experience a decent game online… I’d dabbled in it before with complete strangers, but unfortunately I only ever managed to end up in 1v1 races with the other person always getting butthurt after I’d win, and leaving. So it wasn’t much fun.
The online “Easy Drive” mode seems unintuitive at first, but once you get the hang of it it’s actually a blast. We completed a few challenges, not realizing that they’re actually cooperative instead of competitive (we tried to beat each other off the roof of the parking garage for the first two-player challenge, and wound up failing it the first time).
Exploring Paradise City with at least one friend is a huge amount of fun, and I’d imagine the fun goes up exponentially with more friends. If you have a PS3, Burnout Paradise and a Microphone, feel free to add me on PSN. I like that the Billboards in the game are actual advertisements (I think the online maintainers make money off them, so it’s a cute and un-intrusive way to offset the costs of maintaining servers) and there’s nothing quite so fun as crashing through a billboard for weight loss supplements or Plasma TVs a fraction of a second before your friend does, because unless we were doing it wrong they don’t get credit for breaking a billboard that you jacked them on, so they’ll have to come back for it. ;D
The racing was fun too, once we opened our lobby up to the public it quickly filled up with 8 drivers completely and utterly whipping our asses for the most part (my best was third I think). The easier filling up could be to do with that my WAP is now DMZed, so UPnP works as expected and my PS3 is now capable of opening ports up for itself.
On the whole, I had a really great time and I’m looking forward to doing it some more. There’s a huge lack of Burnout players who actually have mics, so we mainly just banter to ourselves. 