Five minutes with Burnout Paradise

I picked up Burnout Paradise from my local Best Buy today at lunch. It was a good day to telecommute anyway, which made the trip that much easier. I have found that using the same windows live ID for Xbox Live and the MSN messenger account I use at work does motivate me to actually work when I telecommute but that's besides the point.

So tonight I've had time to spend maybe 5-15 minutes with the game. Initial thoughts are that the game itself is much much better than the demo. On the flip side, I have found that starting events in multi-player != starting events in single-player. Multi-player treats the city as a giant lobby that you can tool around in while the host figures out what to make a match out of. It actually took me most of my play time to figure out how to actually start a race.

That said, Burnout definitely steels from both Xbox Live with the friends list integration and Sony's home with the 'avatar based lobby'.

I'll probably be posting more about the game in the coming weeks, as I fully expect to play the ever living crap out of the game. In fact I'm thinking I might be nothing but this, a little Halo 3 and a bit of Half Life 2 until the Next Big Thing™ comes out. So much for buying Mass Effect and Tomb Raider Anniversary :)