For a few days, I was on a roll with Split/Second. I was really enjoying the progression through the career mode and I thought this wouldn’t end like my experiences with Burnout Paradise or Blur, where I hit a figurative brick wall. In both games, I hit a point where I needed “x” amount of points to move onto the next set of challenges, yet I couldn’t muster up the skills to make the necessary progress. At first, I was finishing second or third in my Split/Second races, which was enough to get me to the next episode. However, my lack of perfection eventually caught up.
burnout paradise
Using ‘Cost Per Hour’ to Determine the Value of a Game
Over the past few years of following podcasts, message boards and reviews, there seems to be this weird metric that creeps into discussions in one way or another. For the purposes of this post, I will refer to it as ‘cost per hour’. It’s a metric that people directly or indirectly use to judge a game’s value based on how much it costs and how long the experience is. I will express it with the following formula:
Value = Cost of Game/Number of Hours Played
In a perfect world, where money directly translates into valuable experiences, these types of metrics could work as a means of judging a game’s value. However, this logic is flawed, because neither cost or value variables are consistent. You can’t make a blanket statement saying that Limbo is too expensive at $15 dollars because it’s only a 3-hour experience, because it might go on sale, someone may take longer/shorter to beat it, and subjective opinion may say that their time with it was totally worth that price.
The price you pay for that experience and the length of that experience are viable factors in determining a game’s value, but not the whole picture. However, what if we did take away all of the other factors? Is it possible to come up with a consensus cost per hour rate to determine whether or not a game is worth it? I take a few examples from my collection and crunch the numbers to find out.
Game Design Talk: Burnout Paradise and the Feeling of Progression
For a game that is fairly one-dimensional at its core, Burnout Paradise does a lot of little things to motivate players to keep playing. You will unlock new cars by either winning races or taking them out as they randomly drive by you on the road. The game keeps track of all the super jumps you complete, fences you smash and billboards you drive through. You can even race for the best time on basically every street in the game against your friends or against the world.
Those little things have kept me playing this game longer than I usually plan to. However, each of my sessions usually ends when I realize how far away I am to making progress in the most important measure of progression in the game: the licenses.
Where the Grass is Green and the Girls Are Pretty
Burnout Paradise was a game I’ve had on my radar for quite some time. The series first caught my eye when I played the Burnout Revenge demo that came with my XBOX 360, which came with a really cool take down mode. However, the demo for Burnout Paradise left me skeptical. The sensation of going fast was intact, as well as the joy of wrecking other cars (as well as your own), but the demo didn’t really give me a sense of how the open-world structure of the game would work.
I may be two years too late, and the developers have added a ton of free and paid additional content to the game since I last tried it, but I recently got a copy of Burnout Paradise at the bargain basement price of $5 at a Blockbuster Video sale. Was this ticket to paradise well worth it?
In Third Person 