We chat about videogames and videogame accessories.

I've been playing Burnout Paradise because I guess I wanted to smash up cars in a sort of sad, EA-built, stripped down GTA experience. But I've been playing the shit out of it, so I assume some part of my brain wants to collect shiny cars and ramp them off of cliffsides while barrel rolling them and also flat spinning (is it still flat spinning if you're barrel rolling at the same time? I think that's just called 'tumbling head over heels oh god you're about to hit that tree') before landing them perfectly because this is the 20th time you've done this race and you realllllllyyyy want to nail that perfect stunt sequence etc. etc.

For an EA-made game, the constant requests for your money are surprisingly few and far between. And by that I mean that it's limited to a single request on startup to log into an EA account and... you can actually not? You can play the fucking game without having to sell your soul to EA, because oh look we're in the bizarro dimension.

One thing that does stick out at me, though? The product placement. Billboards have real ads on them, vans advertising Gillette's nuclear-powered razor blades drive around Paradise City, and your radio DJ (who you can't change away from) is an actual podcast person who does actual podcasts and radio stuff apparently. Like hell I'm going to actually look him up and give him hits though, after about thirty consecutive losses and condescending 'helpful tips' from him I've begun to envision him as some kind of goblin living in a barrel of low-grade douchebag ([i]"I'd love to get out there and race the streets myself, but I gotta stay up here and give you updates!" "This is DJ Atomica from CrashFM, with a traffic report: I'm looking out of my window and yup, there's traffic everywhere." "That guy just rammed his car into the side of a bus! That's gonna hurt tomorrow morning (okay I suppose this is some kind of weird world where you can crash your car all the time and just respawn but still, it's really jarring to hear him talk about injuries that would normally kill people as like a 'walk it off' kind of thing)"

On that note, it's also really jarring whenever you crash your car - there's always a slow motion dealio where the wreck of your car goes flying down the road, glass breaks, doors fly off, etc... and you can see into your car AND THERE'S NO ONE DRIVING IT. THERE ARE NO PEOPLE MODELS. THEY DIDN'T EVEN PUT A DUMMY IN THERE. THE CARS ARE ALL DRIVEN BY GHOSTS.

WE ARE THE GHOOOOSSSSTTSSS