Paradise City and Futuristic Hover-Car Racing

A couple things today, both dealing with recently purchased games. I'm having a hard time getting into Burnout Paradise. No, its not because of the game itself, but rather its patches. I had heard a trophy patch was coming out for the title, and I didn't really want to start up a new game until that happened. I had originally heard the trophies weren't retroactive. Then, I read on Criterion's site, of all places, that they would be. So, Wednesday evening, the day the game arrived in the mail, I booted it up, downloaded the bikes patch and away I went for a solid two hours.

The very next morning I find out that the trophy patch was available and...the trophies were not retroactive. So, I had to start over with a new game. This isn't really much of a problem, I suppose. I had only run a handful of races, but I had explored the city quite a bit in that two hours the previous evening. So, anyway, no big deal, right? I got home yesterday afternoon, booted up the game and the patch wouldn't download. In fact, the in-game news ticker said I couldn't connect to their servers.

Now, this had happened the day before too, but that had been the result of my ISP's DNS servers having issues and that had since been resolved, so I knew it wasn't that. I got reading online and found out many people were having this issue. To solve it, they completely deleted their patch 1.40 data, booted up the game again, and it connected and downloaded the patch 1.50 data (which is the trophy patch). Indeed, it worked just like that for me, as well. So, I'm good to start a real game this time.

In other news, I downloaded Wipeout HD last night and...wow, that game looks and feels amazing. The difficulty and learning curve are there, but only time will tell if things are too difficult. I did every race in the first section of career mode, some of them several times, and ended up with three gold medals, a few silver and one bronze. A couple of the silver metal races I ran multiple times and still could not snag the gold. This is going to take some work.

Needless to say, I don't get bored of the tracks or races because the game looks so amazing, plus I can put my own music to it and just race away. I'm quite hopeful this game will improve even more over time with new DLC, and I look forward to playing it online, as well as getting in some much-needed two-player split-screen action.