Criteron Games have recently released the official route map of Paradise City. Now we can see what’s beyond those pesky concrete barriers that you hit all to often in the Burnout Paradise demo. All I’ve got to do now is memorise all those routes and I’m away. Easy.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you the Paradise City map:

Those avid TAG readers will notice that the map shown above has changed somewhat since we first revealed it nearly a year ago. Here’s what the Paradise city map looked like 12 months ago:

Amongst all the route changes, large chunks of the map have been chopped, including the airport. Did you have to cut the airport, Criterion? I quite fancied going all GTA 3 and driving recklessly between all the planes. Boo. Anyway, the map is still pretty big, as anyone whose played the Burnout Paradise demo will testify.

You can download a hi-res version of the map from Criterion’s Burnout Paradise Downloads page.

Update 2nd Mar 08: Here’s a great interactive Burnout Paradise map. It contains all the locations of the super jumps, smashes, billboards etc.

Update 2nd Jan 09: Criterion is releasing the Big Surf Island download pack in 2009 to expand the Burnout Paradise map eastwards (the bit where the airport used to be on the old map). From the media that Criterion have released about this pack it looks like the airport has gone, to be replaced by a hotel, palm tress and a construction yard (with jumps).

Burnout Paradise is out now on Xbox 360 and Playstation 3

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What makes games fun? With all the money being spent on game development and the obsession over framerates, HDR lighting, ridiculously expensive hardware requirements and all that other stuff, you’d expect that games these days are better and brighter that ever, wouldn’t you? Then how come they’re not? Look at Black and White 2 and Perfect Dark Zero’s single-player campaign. Years of development but would anyone call them legendary games? Hardly.

So what makes a good game? Is it story? Characters? Explosions? AI? Competition? Emotion? Graphics? Boobie physics? You’d think so with the amount of work that goes into them, wouldn’t you?

No, the answer is much simpler than that.

It is fun gameplay. Duh!

To be more specific, it comes down to low learning curve mechanics (see Why Don’t People Play Games - Interface), variation and a good challenge:reward ratio. Nothing more, nothing less. Look at the original Mario Bros - still a fun game after all these years. I wonder how many designers take those three variables into consideration - they’re the staples of gaming so you’d think they all would but let’s look at some examples: Continue Reading

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