Practicum #4 - Jeff

Hey everybody. Tomorrow is our presentation, so here is a little blog to set that up. Bur first, I want to talk a little about Burnout: Paradise.

Burnout Paradise is a recent entry to the Burnout car racing series, which is famous for its great sense of speed and ridiculous crashes. The world map is similar to Red Dead Redemption in that it is an open environment, and that environment is also used for the multiplayer experience. This time one of my roommates also had a copy of the game, so we ventured online together. He joined my game through a simple interface, and we made our game open to strangers. Within minutes, there were between six and eight other players driving around the city with us.

Multiplayer game types are set up in an easy to access menu by the host. First, we played "marked man," where one player is a target and the rest have to try to cause the target to crash. Then one player discovered a secret stunt park, so we decided to play a few games where players either try to rack up the most points by pulling stunts, or cause others to crash in the process. A few stunt events and races later made it clear that everyone in the game was all about crashing, so we started holding competitions for who could cause the most damage in a traffic collision, known in the game as "showtime" mode.

The video above is some in game footage (again, not my own) that highlights the crashes. Did I mention there are a lot of crashes in this game? :) Skip the first half minute or so to avoid some nonsense.

Self representation is limited to what kind of car you choose to drive and what color scheme you want it to have. Most of the players in our game started off with sports cars, but we traded them in for vans and pickup trucks when we were trying to cause destruction.

The game also makes use of in game advertising. While cruising around the city, you will see a lot of billboard ads for Vizio TV's, and Diesel clothing, and I was sabotaged more than once by the Gillette Fusion van that seems to be everywhere at once.

With that, I will present you with a couple of questions to consider for our presentation tomorrow. I will ask the class how you feel about Microsoft's attempt to create and control their own currency through Microsoft Points, and how you feel about charging for downloadable content add-ons.