YMMV / Burnout Paradise

For YMMV tropes on this game's parent series in general, click here.

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• Awesome Music: Criterion sure knows its deal in terms of licensed music. Here are some examples:
  • "Paradise City" by Guns N' Roses
  • "Girlfriend" by Avril Lavigne^note Which was also in Burnout Dominator in Japanese, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese versions as well as the original English version. Paradise uses the English version only.
  • "I Wanna Rock" by Twisted Sister^note Not the original version, however.
  • "Friction" by B'z^note Also appeared in Burnout Dominator
  • "Nothing to Lose" by Operator
  • "Come Clean" by Mexicolas
  • "Stop!" by Jane's Addiction
  • "My Curse" by Killswitch Engage
  • "The Archers' Bows Have Broken" by Brand New
  • Jason Nevins' remix of "Rock Star" by N.E.R.D.
  • Junkie XL and Lauren Rocket's Covered Up version of "Cities in Dust"
  • "Epic" by Faith No More
  • "Collapse" by Saosin
  • "Us v. Them" by LCD Soundsystem
  • "Too Much, Too Young, Too Fast" by Airbourne
  • "Rusty Cage" by Soundgarden - doubly awesome for being a Shout-Out to Road Rash.
  • And all that sweet classical music.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Showtime Mode. Tap the two shoulder buttons and the game suddenly turns from a high-speed racing game to a smoldering wreck of a car tumbling down the road and smashing everything in sight.
• Broken Base:
  • Paradise was adored by critics and arcade racing game fans, but became hated by core Burnout fans because of the open world element that they find inferior to closed circuits (see also They Changed It, Now It Sucks!), the removal of popular features such as Aftertouch Takedowns, and Showtime mode taking over for Crash mode. Until Crash came out.
  • It still goes on a decade later, as the release of Burnout Paradise Remastered not only excited fans and critics of the game, but also brought out the classic Burnout fans to continue berating the game and complain about EA not remastering "superior" entries including 2, 3, or Revenge. Some of those fans do cautiously hope that should Paradise Remastered succeed, EA may (and it's a big may) consider remastering one of those entries, but even then they wouldn't give their hopes up. (At the very least, the Xbox 360 version of Revenge has since been made backward compatible with the Xbox One.)
• Catharsis Factor: Showtime Mode. There's something magical about guiding your car into hapless drivers as it bounces along the road like a destructive rubber ball.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Get ready to see dozens of Carson GT Nighthawks online. Especially in Remastered, which has no DLC restrictions.
  • In a non-character variation, most online lobbies have the In-Universe Game Clock set to always be noon, likely for visibility's sake.
• Fridge Brilliance: A race is triggered by holding the brake and accelerator at the same time, also known as a burnout.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Carson GT Nighthawk. Let's see - One of the toughest cars to take down in a head-on collision? Check. Great speed and acceleration? Check. Easy to handle? Check. It's best just to avoid getting into a fight with the driver of one.
  • The Carson Extreme Hotrod, thanks to its peculiar boost mechanics (once you use the boost, it's on until you either crash or brake hard enough to bring the car to a halt), and extremely high stats, is possibly one of the few other vehicles to match the Nighthawk in terms of performance. Sure, all that speed might be too much at first, but once you get the hang of it, you become so blindingly fast the CPU opponents shouldn't even bother racing with you. It is also fast enough to let it Takedown cars twice its size (such as the Hunter Takedown 4x4), making it also a great choice for Road Rage events.
  • The Jansen P12 and variants (especially the Toy version, the 88 Special, and the Toy 88 Special) are absolute monsters at Stunt Runs. The Carson GT Concept and the Montgomery Hawker do just as well, but the P12 gets unlocked much earlier than the last two cars mentioned.
• Goddamned Bats: The series tradition of Goddamned Traffic. Although there is a Good Bad Bug that allows you to get rid of traffic in Online Freeburn sessions in the console versions. Traffic can also be turned off in the Vanity Pack 2.0 mod for PC. (See below for either one.)
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Disabling traffic in the console versions can be done if you and a friend have the Cops and Robbers DLC, as the Cops and Robbers mode itself removes traffic. One person hosts an Online Freeburn session, then starts Cops and Robbers, then kicks out the other player from the session. (If it was a two-player session then Cops and Robbers ends automatically.) The other player then hosts an Online Freeburn session of their own and sends an invite to the previous host player. Once that person joins in, then the traffic will disappear. Players can easily beat their friends' Timed Road Rules with this. It will also work for bikes, provided that the kicked-out player changes vehicles in a junkyard before hosting their new session. Said bug has also been used by Criterion themselves for an experiment on which is the fastest car in the game.
  • There's a small part on a ramp outside of the Wildcats Baseball Stadium which counts as being in the stadium.
• Never Live It Down: As of Remastered's release, apparently Burnout Paradise will never live down having "Girlfriend" as part of its soundtrack.
• Obvious Beta: The original release of Paradise. The Ultimate Box version was supposed to be the intended product and includes bikes, fog, an in-game clock, and several features they couldn't finish on time. That said, the unpatched/outdated version plays fine with no game-breaking bugs, making The Ultimate Box a "Director's Cut" if anything. The devs were also lauded for including those gameplay changes free-of-charge for existing players in an early era of horse armor microtransactions.
• Polished Port:
  • Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box release on PC; a graphically superior version of the game that contains a lot of content not found in the original release. However, this was negated by being a version of the game whose majority of new content being stuff that have been released in free updates for the original game^note Party Mode being the sole exception; it's still premium DLC for the standard console versions. while lacking in other content. Only the premium DLC car packs were released for download on PC, while neither the "Cops 'n Robbers" game mode nor the Big Surf Island expansion ever saw the light of day on this version for the platform. Even worse, the PC servers were shut down about a year later, so the Burnout Store is no longer available for computers. However, the premium car packs are still legally available for download on Amazon in the US and Green Man Gaming in the UK, and modders have aimed to bring Big Surf Island to the PC version with the Vanity Pack. "Cops 'n Robbers" mode remains unavailable, however. Thankfully, Burnout Paradise Remastered brings the missing content to PC for the first time, and now with EA back on Steam with Burnout Paradise Remastered in tow, the only thing players have to worry is buying the game again if they got the original version before.
  • On a lesser note, the PS3 version was very impressive for running smoothly at release during a time when unreliable PS3 versions of multiconsole games were becoming a notorious issue.
  • Remastered should also be praised for allowing 4K/60 FPS^* native 4K on Xbox One X, checkerboard-rendered 4K on PS4 Pro driving and crashes on consoles. Hell, Criterion and Stellar Entertainment Software getting the long since ended RenderWare engine running on the eighth-gen consoles is something to applaud itself (although it probably wasn't too hard to give it an update). Also, while the Nintendo Switch doesn't support 4K, it still runs the game at 1080p docked and 720p undocked at 60 FPS (with a pinch to zoom map, too), allowing for a truly portable Burnout experience, with the only minor losses being no webcam support or analog triggers (blame both on Nintendo).
  • Porting Disaster: On the flip side, the PS4 version is plagued with random crashes and corrupted saves when connected online.
• Replacement Scrappy: Showtime Mode replacing Crash Mode in Paradise.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: Paradise is this to Burnout Revenge. Unless you were only going for Bronze medals, Revenge could get pretty damn hard (especially the Burning Routes, where if you wrecked even once you could kiss that Gold medal goodbye). Paradise's Burning Routes, on the other hand, can easily be finished with over thirty seconds to spare if you drive well enough. Most of the events are an absolute cakewalk for most of the game, and the challenge seems to come from simply not missing a turn and going the wrong way. The game does start to get some of its edge back when you're going for the Burnout Elite license, but even then it's not as hard as Revenge. This could have something to do with the fact that there's no medals in Paradise; just one target that you either pass or you don't.
• Scrappy Mechanic: The game doesn't allow you to switch between cars on the fly or even fast travel, both of which have become staple features in modern-day open-world racing games (especially the Forza Horizon series), instead having to drive back to a junkyard to change cars. For most part this isn't a problem since there's no event that's really impossible even if you take the wrong spec car, but the Burning Route events can only be started with a specific car. Driving along the road, discover a Burning Route and want to complete it? You better hope you have the right car, or you'll have to drive two miles to the nearest junkyard and another two miles right back to do so.
• That One Achievement: "Running Scared", which is earned by successfully completing an Offline Marked Man event with the Krieger Racing WTR, is universally regarded as one of Paradise's hardest-to-achieve awards. Take note, it takes only two crashes to lose an Offline Marked Man/Road Rage event in that car. Thankfully for Xbox 360 owners, this is not one of the achievements found on their system's version of the game.
• That One Level: The Carson 500 GT Burning Route event is particularly reviled among most of the player base. The car in question is the Speed-Boost Glass Cannon of A License cars with a nasty habit of fishtailing below certain speeds, hampering your drifting exit despite its fairly good handling. And the game's recommended route takes you to one of the most traffic-heavy segment of White Mountain with two hard corners you have to take at very high speed if you want to beat the clock (First is the packed entryway to Lawrence Tunnel where the opposite roads are split vertically into two levels meaning you can miss out on your potential boost gain for the entire tunnel if you entered the wrong lane, and the other one is behind dirt road split and billboard jumps just before Uphill Drive to the finish that can easily detour you if you don't know what you're looking at) Taking other "safer" route to the north of White Mountain requires you to go the long way around with absolutely clean driving (no crashes in a series known for goddamned traffic) at breakneck pace just to make it in time. These all combine into one of the more (if not the most) unforgiving Burning Route in Paradise.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Burnout Paradise got this from long-time Burnout fans for taking the game out of its closed-circuit roots and thrusting it into an open world without a restart function (initially) or a useful compass. Very mixed, though. Again, it was still regarded better than the next (and last) Burnout title.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: This game is a decade old and runs on a now-outdated engine, yet its graphics, especially the crashes, hold up very well today. Remastered makes it look even better. 4K at 60 FPS, anyone?

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