Anyfuck, I updated Paradise to see how well integrated motorcycles can get in a game where the main idea is competing with Twisted Metal to see who has the hugest daddy issues. The short answer, because it’s largely unimportant to this article; They side-stepped it. It’s like a completely separate motorcycle racing game, just with the same map, music, and whiny white guy reminding you of crap you frankly don’t need to be reminded of. It’s not all bad, it’s a pretty good motorcycle racer that will do the trick in light of the Road Rash-shaped hole in my heart, but it’s mostly just checkpoint and time trial races; You’re the only motorcycle on the road. Feels a bit incomplete, but it works for now.

Next: Hey guys, you want the VGA awards to have a “Best DLC support” category because you think you’d clean up? Failing to allow us to skip the opening spiels fails you, as does failing to cut the considerable load times every time I choose a new color for the car. I still go with defaults because I’d like to start racing sometime before Duke Nukem Forever comes out. You may be in the running for the VGA Awards, but you’re pretty much shit out of luck with the much more coveted Reflex Gamer Moral Panic & More Awards.

And remove the goddamn parked cars. I might think of them as an acceptable obstacle except your game gets too dark at night to see them, making them invisible land mines in a game where split-second reflexes are already a must.

The biggest crime against nature, however, is a different part of the same paragraph where they hope for an award that actually exists and try to bribe VGA judge Geoff “Asshole” Keighley with what is to him the ultimate lubricant: Praise that he didn’t have to write himself. The last thing we need is this guy being called “respected” by anybody besides an anonymous wikipedia user or his own fucking bio page. He can obviously bend forward far enough to fellate himself, and often has. You’re only going to make him louder.

Congrats, Electronic Arts and Criterion. Your stock was starting to rise with us after a few ballsy releases like Mirror’s Edge, but you just experienced Black Thursday. Get back to us when you’re done tonguing some hack’s puckered ring.