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Burnout: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

I gotta hand it to the charitable folks over at Criterion; since last January's release of Burnout: Paradise, they've released quite a few substantial DLC updates at absolutely no cost to the consumer. Where companies like Namco-Bandai are content to find ridiculous ways to get their hands on your hard-earned money, Criterion doesn't seem to mind playing Santa three times a year to support one of the greatest racing games we've seen this generation. And even though they plan on charging for their upcoming pack of downloadable cars that absolutely don't infringe on any copyrights whatsoever, the creators of Burnout have at least one more free update coming out on February 6.

While the last free Burnout updates were largely content-related, this new one appears to be a complete under-the-hood overhaul; and the addition of one hugely-missed option is definitely going to bring me back to a game I should have honestly played a lot longer. The big announcement?

You ask – we deliver. Restart is in! You can now quit or fail an event and choose to restart it. You’ll be transferred to the start location ready for action. We’ve always enjoyed the feeling of freedom that Paradise City’s open world delivers, but we appreciate that as you run low on events towards the end of the game, you can spend a little too long in transit.

While I certainly thought the open-world nature of Paradise was a nice change of pace, the annoyance of having to drive back to the starting point of failed events made the game much more tedious than it needed to be.

Yeah, But Is It Art?: Crazy Taxi

Time is both the best friend and worst enemy of art. Culture shifts and morphs daily into new language and new modes of expression, and the voice of the past either becomes timeless or unintelligible in tandem. Author David Lindsay was no one in the 1920s while he was still publishing. He was thirty years dead by the time his hallucinatory novel A Voyage to Arcturus was celebrated by academia. Alternatively, Our American Cousin was considered great comedy and great theater a century and a half back. Today, you’d be hard pressed to understand what the damn script even means. Enduring works persist for a number of reasons. They speak to an unchanging facet of human experience (love, loss, etc.) or they stay durable through sheer architectural integrity, perfect examples of their medium (I can find no other reason why people continue to read Melville.) Sometimes, though, art survives as a time capsule, something that takes a place and a time, no matter how insignificant, and preserves it.

Crazy Taxi, in its American Dreamcast release, is the millennial turn preserved in digital amber.

Brett Favrerererer Wins: The Inexplicable Popularity of Madden

You may or may not have noticed this whilst reading 61 Frames Per Second, but we don’t talk about simulators that often. Personally, and you’ll most likely find this true of the rest of the team, I don’t play Gran Turismo or Microsoft Flight Simulator. If I’m playing a videogame, I want my cars going too fast and defying physics a la Burnout. If I’m playing a videogame, I want my airplane to be shooting many other planes while looking awesome and defying physics a la After Burner. The same goes for sports. Tecmo Bowl, NHLPA ’93, and Hot Shots Golf are fun because they don’t provide authentic football, hockey, and golf experiences. This is why I’ve always been somewhat mystified by the Madden franchise’s massive popularity; in its modern incarnations, it is a brutally realistic simulation of football. In order to play Madden well – not competition level, but actually using the game’s mechanics properly – you need to have both a deep understanding of the actual sport’s rules as well as the game’s incredibly complex controls. Football rules, sure, but how did a game so hard become so damn popular?

about the blogger

John Constantine, our superhero, was raised by birds and then attended Penn State University. He is currently working on a novel about a fictional city that exists only in his mind. John has an astonishingly extensive knowledge of Scientology. Ultimately he would like to learn how to effectively use his brain. He continues to keep Wu-Tang's secret to himself.

Derrick Sanskrit is a self-professed geek in a variety of fields including typography, graphic design, comic books, music and cartoons. As a professional hipster graphic designer, his recent clients have included Nerve, Pitchfork and MoCCA, among others.

Amber Ahlborn - artist, writer, gamer and DigiPen survivor, she maintains a day job as a graphic artist. By night Amber moonlights as a professional Metroid Fanatic and keeps a metal suit in the closet just in case. Has lived in the state of Washington and insists that it really doesn't rain as much as everyone says it does.

Nadia Oxford is a housekeeping robot who was refurbished into a warrior when the world's need for justice was great. Now that the galaxy is at peace (give or take a conflict here or there), she works as a freelance writer for various sites and magazines. Based in Toronto, Nadia prizes the certificate from the Ministry of Health declaring her tick and rabies-free.

Bob Mackey is a grad student, writer, and cyborg, who uses the powerful girl-repelling nanomachines mad science grafted onto his body to allocate time towards interests of the nerd persuasion. He believes that complaining about things on the Internet is akin to the fine art of wine tasting, but with more spitting into buckets.

Joe Keiser has a programming degree from Johns Hopkins University, a tiny apartment in Brooklyn, and a fake toy guitar built in the hollowed-out shell of a real guitar. He writes about games and technology for a variety of outlets. One day he will stop doing this. The day after that, police will find his body under a collapsed pile of (formerly neatly alphabetized) collector's edition tchotchkes.

Cole Stryker is an American freelance writer living in York, England, where he resides with his archeologist wife. He writes for a travel company by day and argues about pop culture on the internet by night. Find him writing regularly here and here.

Peter Smith is like the lead character of Irwin Shaw's The 80-Yard Run, except less athletic. He considers himself very lucky to have this job. But it's a little premature to take "jack-off of all trades" off his resume. Besides writing, travelling, and painting houses, Pete plays guitar in a rock trio called The Aye-Ayes. He calls them a 'power pop' band, but they generally sound more like Motorhead on a drinking binge.