I bought Burnout Paradise The Ultimate Box for around £3 off the Steam sales, as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, however I haven’t gone into detail about it. First off, for those who aren’t aware, it’s somewhat a racing game. The reason I say somewhat, unlike traditional racing games, it’s totally fine to crash into your opponent’s cars and take them out, in fact you’re rewarded for doing so and get extra Nitro boost for it! So Burnout has always had crashes in its games, and taking out opponents. Burnout Paradise is different in that you’re placed in a city called Paradise City, and are free to roam about wherever you wish. As you roam about, you’ll find events at traffic lights and can trigger them by pressing the accelerate and brake buttons together.

These events can vary from Road Rage, where you have to take out a certain number of opponents, to Races to Marked Man, where you have to get to a destination and survive your car being totalled by other drivers. What makes the game so great is the fact you have the full city open to you and can drive wherever and however you wish. Imagine a Grand Theft Auto game with no police and Nitro on your car, free to roam wherever you wish. Add to that really cool slow motion replays of when you crash or perform a stunt, and you’re in for a treat!

The game looks stunning as well. The graphics are great and it runs smoothly without any hitches on my Alienware M11x. To get a better experience, I actually plug it into my wall mounted 32″ HD TV and use an XBox 360 controller, since it’s much easier playing with a controller rather than a keyboard.

On the whole, Burnout Paradise is an awesome game. It’s encouraged me to purchase the PSP edition Burnout Dominator. I’ve played and completed Burnout Legends in the past, so thought Dominator would be a good game to play on my PSP. A good excuse to use my PSP at all, since haven’t touched it in a good couple of months.

I’ve also been playing Defense Grid: The Awakening, which is a tower defense game for the PC. I’m planning on going into it in more detail in a future post, but it’s by far one of the best games of its genre. It has an air of professionalism to it which is unparalleled in the genre and definitely makes it stand out. You can find out more at the website.

I have finally got around to completing the third and final Mass Effect book, Retribution. This book takes place between Mass Effect 2 and the upcoming third game of the trilogy. However, it plays a peripheral part to the main Mass Effect plot.

In all the Mass Effect books, there is no Commander Shepard apart from being a passing mention here and there. Rather, Captain Anderson takes a fairly primary role, especially in the first and last book, along with a scientist called Kahlee Sanders who does appear somewhere in the game.

It’s an enjoyable read, focusing on the threat of the Reapers and also the activities of Cerberus. It’ll be interesting to see how the third game starts off since some events from the book will certainly influence what happens there. It’s difficult to discuss the book in more detail without giving spoilers, so I’ll have to call it there, but here’s a picture of the book!

After a pretty lengthy sleep in, I decided to finally get around to watching Zombieland. I’ve heard great things about it, and seeing that I enjoy Left 4 Dead so much, I thought it would be a good movie to watch. I haven’t seen a movie for some time now, so seemed a bit appropriate to get one to watch.

For starters, Zombieland is pretty much a comedy film without going over the top. It’s humour is well balanced and the character personalities is what makes it work. We’ve got Jesse Eisenberg playing the main character, who is looking to travel across to Columbus (also his nickname in the movie) to find his parents amidst the zombie apocalypse. We also have Woody Harrelson, in my opinion the show stealer, playing the tough dude ready to kill zombies in whatever manner he feels like and generally unleash anger and rage even if there aren’t any zombies around. Emma Stone is also here, along with Abigail Breslin, completing the group of four survivors who eventually find themselves together.

The movie is obviously about these four survivors travelling through what’s now called Zombieland and killing some zombies. In searching for some information about this game, I did come across this amusing picture of a GTA version of Zombieland poster:

But anyway, it’s an enjoyable movie to watch. It’s not scary by any means, unless you find zombies scary anyway (or clowns). In fact, makes me feel like playing some Left 4 Dead 2…