BURNOUT PARADISE (E10+)
Rating: ****
Electronic Arts
Xbox 360
If your vision of paradise doesn’t include a mangled car wreck occurring every couple minutes, then you don’t play enough Burnout. In jumping to the current generation of consoles, this classic arcade-style racer, famous for leaving twisted metal smoking in its wake, has given us its most revolutionary change to date: a sandbox-style, open world. A playground for destruction.
Instead of selecting one race after another from a menu screen, you explore (and decimate) a sprawling city, looking for starting points as you go. It’s a promising idea that hasn’t quite been perfected yet. With a plethora of different open-world paths to every finish line, it can be difficult to find the best one, and when you’re down to repeatedly losing your last few races, you’ll probably wish you had a “restart” option, so you wouldn’t have to drive all the way back to the beginning. Nevertheless, Paradise adds depth to the franchise, giving Burnout a promising new start. Let’s just hope it doesn’t crash and burn.
ENDLESS OCEAN (E)
Rating: **1/2
Nintendo
Wii
Remember that vast, gorgeous (and mostly empty) landscape we rode across between boss battles in Shadow of the Colossus? Endless Ocean is like the underwater equivalent of that, with breathtaking ocean-floor vistas to explore in peace before getting back in the action. Except … there is no action. There’s just swimming. Then more swimming. Then maybe stopping to pet a fish. Then more swimming. Developer Arika did a great job of creating a huge virtual ocean, but I wish they put something in it for us to do. As is, we’re just treading water ’til somebody hands us a towel.
NITROBIKE (E10+)
Rating: **
Ubisoft
Wii
If you kick up enough off-road dust in this game to hide your vehicle, you might think you’re playing Excite Truck. The courses look identical. The steering is the same. Even the heads-up display is similar. But quickly you’ll realize you’re playing an altogether different game—not because the dust will clear to reveal you’re using a bike rather than a truck, but because the floaty controls and buggy courses will make this game far less fun than Excite Truck on its worst day.
PURSUIT FORCE: EXTREME JUSTICE (T)
Rating: ***1/2
Sony Computer Entertainment
PlayStation Portable
Some action games will give you one ridiculous move, which defies both credibility and the fundamental laws of physics. Usually this insane move comes in the form of a rare power-up, but in the Pursuit Force games, it’s just your main move. These games are all about leapfrogging from one speeding vehicle to another, often while shooting the driver of your next vehicle. In mid-air. In slow-motion. This sequel lowers the difficulty and makes the bosses more interesting, but otherwise, it’s the same over-the-top, action flick of a game the first one was.
When Las Vegas Weekly contributor Matthew Scott Hunter realized his career as a lab technician was seriously interfering with his gaming, he pink-slipped himself into a successful career as a freelance writer. Bug the hell out of him at [email protected]