Paradise Lost… and Found!

No, I won’t be talking about the upcoming game based on Dante’s Inferno… not yet anyway.  Instead, I’m talking about Burnout Paradise.  I’ve had the game for quite some time.  I finished the original game and all its online challenges, and even did some ranked racing (I think I got as high as 150 on the ranks at one point), and then I stopped playing.  Not because the game was boring, but that other games were new.  I kept coming back to Paradise City though.

Recently, the guys over at Criterion have been putting out new cars for the old game, and I have to say that I discovered that the right new cars can make the game feel like new again.

Sure, its still doing the same old races and the same old challenges, but I get quite a kick out of doing them all as Marty McFly, Michael Knight, a Ghostbuster or a law dodging resident of Hazzard county.  And the newest vehicles, the toy cars and bikes, make me giggle.

Much like the ongoing DLC for games like Rock Band, simple additions for small prices can totally revitalize a game.  With Burnout, Rock Band, Guitar Hero, and even new DLC adopters like Fable II and Fallout 3, it looks like more and more companies are trying to lengthen the life of their products without having to put a new box on the shelf down at Best Buy.  And I, for one, think this is a great thing… well, as long as they don’t start putting out “half games” they plan to complete with pay DLC later.

Grand Theft Auto IV: The End of the World

That isn’t actually the title of the game, but if you read enough stories in the media surrounding the game’s release, you might think that it should be.

Myself, I’ve never played a GTA game.  No wait, that’s not entirely true.  I’m pretty sure that back in 1997 I pirated a copy of the original game off a BBS and played it for about an hour.  I was bored.  My brother also gave me his copy of GTA: Vice City for the PC, which I’ve been meaning to install and play for a couple years now, but haven’t.  All in all, I’m just not excited about the series.

I’m not worried about the violence or the sex… the reason I’m not excited is because I just don’t generally enjoy playing the “bad guy” in games, unless I know there is going to be redemption.  I play games to be the good guy, the hero, the one man who stands in the way of the complete annihilation of the human race, or something like that.  Being the villain just isn’t my bag, baby.

There is a video floating around, I’m not going to link to it, showing clips of a few of the sex encounters with hookers from GTA IV.  Its definitely something I wouldn’t want my children to see if I had kids, at least not until we’d had the “sex talk” and I was sure they understood the difference between games and reality.  Of course, the sex is actually the least of the reasons why I’d want to keep the game from my kid… the way your character treats the women actually sits above that, and then there is all the violence which is actually at the top of the list.  But then, the game is rated M, so my kids wouldn’t get to play it, unless I were sure they could handle it, which is something I would determine for my child on a child by child basis… that’s what I hear is called “parenting”.  I certainly wouldn’t need the media or the government to make that decision for me.

Wil Wheaton (yeah, the kid who was on Star Trek: The Next Generation) has posted was I think is an excellent summary of how I feel on the whole brouhaha over the game.  Thanks to Ryan at Nerfbat for the link.

Anyway… unless someone tells me that GTA IV allows you to play through the game without being a criminal, or that you can play such that your criminal actions are for the greater good, I’m going to continue my course of not playing the GTA games.  Do they make GTA style games for good guys?  That I might be interesting in playing…