Those who know me well enough know that my sons and I are huge fans of EA and Criterion Game's Burnout Paradise for the XBox 360. As a matter of fact, the addiction level of this game for my 4 year-old son Drew can be quite frightening.
Drew at play with Burnout Paradise, using the XBox Steering Wheel
Criterion Games is taking a great approach to keeping this game fresh and exciting and in doing so is making the Xbox Live platform live up to one my earliest expectations of the platform.
In addition of all of the great content that the XBox Live platform delivers (movies, TV shows, downloadable games), I always envisioned the platform as a means of delivering all levels of purchased game content on demand. While Xbox Live is regularly used for minor patches to games and some add-ons, I always have waited for a game creator to provide a significant content download that fundamentally creates something of a "new version" of the game without the need to purchase a new DVD. While there are always challenges for both the game creator and the consumer here (bandwidth and disk space come to mind), I still believed the value-add for both Microsoft and the game creator would be huge. All of this brings me back to Burnout Paradise.
I have been watching for months with anticipation in a planned release of Burnout Paradise that fundamentally takes the game to a whole new level. Rather than explain it all (which would require covering a full background of the game itself), I will instead point you to the Criterion Games web site for all the details. Once you look at this, I think you will agree that the scope of this update is huge. I could conceivably see many vendors considering this level of enhancement as an entirely new version of the game and requiring the re-purchase of the product. Criterion Games, however, has chosen not to go this route and I applaud it.
In an age where software updates are often readily available for download, the computer gaming industry is at times a little archaic in their thinking and business models. With gaming platforms now having access to the Internet and delivery mechanisms like XBox Live, my hope of breathing life into existing games beyond the simple add-on seems to be coming true. I hope more game software designers and publishers follow this model. For me, Criterion Games has an even greater loyalty from myself and my boys for what they are doing, and I assure you that future Burnout franchise titles will become members of our Xbox 360 library.