Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box
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Language - Mild,Violence
Publisher: Electronic Arts Genre(s): Action, Sports / Racing Home Page: http://www.criteriongames.com/pack...
Thumbs Up In Paradise City, there are no speed limits and shortcuts are everywhere. Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box is a high quality PC conversion of a great console game. It's not a dumb port and even if some of the menus are console-y and slightly clumsy when used with a keyboard, you don't really play the menus. The actual gameplay counts and that part works great even with just keyboard and mouse. There has never been any overabundance of arcade racers on the PC and as Need For Speed series has been heading off a cliff with stupid design decisions, it's great to see another high quality arcade racing series on the PC. The biggest flaw of the PC version is really the lack of tie-in to an established online friends system - if your friends are on Steam or (god forbid) Games for Windows LIVE, you can't form up spontaneous online games without going outside the game. This greatly reduces the value of otherwise fun online game modes as game-specific friends lists are next to useless - and in this case it matters as the single player aspect of Burnout Paradise can get repetitive over time and the real competition is online. I'm aware of EAs "Not Invented Here" syndrome - they are trying really hard to make their own EA.com account and related services into their own system, yet they keep failing miserably. Criterion has done a good job with the community features within the restrictions of having to use EA.com accounts for the whole thing, but the system is still fairly useless when you compare it to the user-friendliness of Steam. In fact, Burnout Paradise is a living proof that PC desperately needs a single, universal, common friends list/messaging system with game integration to facilitate online multiplayer. A LIVE-style "meta" scoring (Gamerscore, Achievements) would also be nice. Steam is the current king based on user count and implementation quality and in my opinion the big guns - EA, Activision-Blizzard, Microsoft and their kind - should just eat the damn humble pie and work out a standard with Valve already. This is not rocket science and the issue is mostly political - everyone wants to be the controlling party of any online system. On consoles Microsoft and Sony as hardware vendors of a locked platform can dictate their own terms and that works there. On the PC we get numerous "islands" that don't talk to each other and many otherwise great games suffer because of it. Realism freaks should look elsewhere and those with Xbox 360 or PS3 versions already in their game library have no real reason to be interested of the PC version. For the rest - if you seek mindless racing fun on two or four wheels, Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box is probably the best option on the PC right now. Summary of YouGamers Hardware TestingThe publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:
To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:
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