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Editor's note: As Burnout Paradise finally arrives on the backwards compatibility list for Xbox One, we thought it was time to revisit this astonishing game.This was meant to be a piece on Battlefield 1. Then it was meant to be a piece on Titanfall 2. Then someone asked if I might fancy writing a little something about Mass Effect. No. I might not fancy that. I might not fancy any of that. Instead I will do what I have been doing instead of all those other things I should have done. I have been circling and circling in Paradise City, picking up speed and picking up speed until the whole place becomes a particle accelerator that I flow through, rush through, course through, travelling faster and faster, burnout piling upon burnout until time and space have been so roughly treated by proceedings that they break down completely and I collide with myself coming back the other way and then watch as the world fragments in a blinding pulse of white light. This will happen. I am certain of it. It's the Burnout Paradise end-game that I have always suspected is out there somewhere, lurking deep in the code just ten, twenty, thirty mph beyond my reach.
Burnout Paradise is a game that I feel bad for liking as much as I do, almost as if it were a chinchilla hair coat that, annoyingly, goes just perfectly with my favourite trousers. Many games come with a human cost, of course - the long hours of development, the neglected families, the unfortunate tantrums and the jumping up and down on other people's desks. But with a game as brilliantly machine-tooled as Paradise, that cost is suddenly unavoidably obvious. The way the arcing curves of its freeways meet up, ideal transitions you will rarely even notice as sheer speed spins you from one arm of the city to the next? These are elements that, in their near-perfect invisibility, nonetheless make themselves felt just enough to nod you towards the pain and suffering that must have been required in order to locate them and implement them. You feel the seams shifting in the concrete and are given pause. Someone must have seriously busted out the protractor and engineer's quadrille on this one.
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