The Details Racing Games Want You To Ignore

I'm standing here in the parking lot of a strip mall in the hit 2008 open World Racing game Burnout Paradise if the developers of this game Criterion games had their way I would ignore this how crazy is that now the reason I would ignore it is because in a racing game what you're primarily supposed to do is race you're supposed to break the speed limit Drive the wrong way down the highway crash into cars you're supposed to never stop moving and this is true of any racing game go play Mario Kart and stop moving and just watch all the toads in the audience it's unnerving to see them as uh unwilling participants in emphasizing how great you are as the driver of the car they don't really have a role other than that you are the main character just not that different to how I view these people walking around outside my house actually right now just sort of they're just here to Hype me up but the fact of the matter is if you want to have a racing game in a world in a place that feels like a world it has to be filled with stuff but it only has to be filled with stuff that's believable at 80 mph that stuff doesn't really have to carry all of its own weight in the same way that if I take my glasses off it doesn't matter as much how dirty my house is cuz I can't see it I'm supposed to ignore the dust just like I'm supposed to ignore this really cool back alley me for God's sake look at this thing it's a stunning quiet little sliver of a world without human life but with human infrastructure like Brit I mean there's power lines here why now as I said Burnout Paradise is a 2008 racing video game developed by Criterion games and published by Electronic Arts everybody loves them the footage you're looking at is from the remastered version of that game which came out on digital platforms or whatever you can buy it for like 40 bucks or 20 bucks or I don't know who cares and the game is set in a fictional city called Paradise City it's an open world game where you can drive around and compete in a variety of different competitive game modes within that same open world it's almost like if you built a racing game inside of grand theft Auto now if you've never played this game don't worry about it too much you can kind of substitute anything that I'm saying for any open world racing game for example Forza Horizon 5 a lot of the same principles there's tons of stuff in that game that you're not meant to stop and look at even more so than most games in fact despite its uh relative Fidelity Forza Horizon 5 even has plenty of funny little things they expect you to ignore if you actually take the time to look inside a lot of the buildings that are around the cities you'll find instances where there are four or five of the exact same convenience store within a one city block radius there are ice cream shops that look like coffee shops inside there are coffee shops that look like coffee shops inside there are cafes that look like coffee shops inside but really the underlying point is that as these games get more technologically advanced they get closer to being a full fact simile but never all the way there this is kind of an uncanny valley conversation but not exactly cuz it's not uncanny so this isn't a case of you know Heavy Rain being close but not quite there and it's really unnerving the these worlds generally aren't very unnerving cuz you don't actually stop to look very closely at them cuz these games are built to be viewed at 80 mph right they're not meant to be viewed stopping and looking at all these little details if you walk around the back alleys of Burnout Paradise and you walk around the back alleys of real human Earth life you'll be able to tell the difference between those two things but there is a point at which if you go through the back alleys of a realworld city block at faster and faster speeds there is a speed at which that back alley will be indistinguishable from the back alley in Burnout Paradise and that's the trick that they're playing on you now this does happen in other genres of games of course and it also happens in other eras of genres of games but it presents a little bit differently so take Mario 64 for example you know I've spent a lot of time talking about these odd and unremarkable spaces in a game like Mario 64 and it's fair to say that there are spots in Mario 64 that the developers intended you to ignore places that they didn't put extra work in to make them interesting to look at but the funny thing about these older games is that the whole game is so low Fidelity that the parts you aren't supposed to look at don't actually look that much different than the parts you are supposed to look at so while you can find things in Mario 64 that certainly they weren't intending you to look at for example the ceiling of this room or even just looking at things from different angles it's not like they look fundamentally uh less touched than the rest of the game Mario Kart 64 another great example of this we've spent plenty of time talking about the inside of the tunnel on calamari desert or just staring into the valley on Donkey Kong Valley or what's that whatever the level's called I have a whole video about it but those things are unusual just cuz we're not used to looking at them not because they actually look any different than the rest of the game you see what I'm saying you're picking up what I'm putting down the thing I'm talking about with Burnout Paradise required that we get a little further technologically so the restriction on the vision became time and energy rather than console horse power you know games are hundreds of gigabytes in size now they take 5 to 10 years to develop at times so as long as you have the vision and the drive to work your employees into the ground you can really make anything you want which means the human brains of the developers are the things metering the decisions about what to pay attention to and what not to rather than the technology and that's where these little ignored spaces can slip through now there's also the other end of the spectrum where game developers pushed the uh time and energy to such limits that there really wasn't much that wasn't meant to be looked at but we'll get to that a little bit later the point is there are a lot of places like this that I absolutely love and this is probably my favorite one this strip mall parking lot I regularly come back here to take in sort of the energy of it I think there's a lot of space to discuss Burnout Paradise as being a uh wonderful microcosm of life in 2008 for a certain type of suburban teenager and I think this strip mall parking lot does a good job of evoking that feeling but there's lots of other places in this game that have that same one for example entire parking garages that nobody parks in cuz there's only two types of cars in this game there's cars that are moving and there are cars that are parked there are no parked cars that move and no move cars that Park unless you do it yourself wouldn't it be interesting to watch somebody park a car in Burnout Paradise because you're not supposed to do that well you're in luck because I did it take a look at this and oh there we go parked the grocery store parking lot meme is huge people are finally coming to terms with the uh vapid Suburban philosophical beauty of concrete asphalt utility infrastructure the sunsets in the Target parking lot are better than the sunsets on a mountain literally true no but it does change the tone of how you interpret it when your feet hurt and the wheel on the cart doesn't want to move and you drop your keys on the asphalt the Eternal beauty of the universe hits you uh differently it's not even the universe it's just Earth actually universe is Dark full of Darkness but Earth is nice speaking of beautiful sunsets over Lakes I also love standing in the middle of the road in Burnout Paradise I love uh seeing and feeling the cars whiz by me look out going to get hit by a I love watching the game do its absolute best to uh uh in fatigue that's the worst word I've ever said that is the most pretentious word I've ever said I love watching the game indefatigably repeat the performance of the the hustle and bustle of the real world it never stops trying to convince you that this is a place with stuff but it's not another thing that we're supposed to ignore when we play Burnout Paradise is are the newspapers in the newspaper stands you're not supposed to look at them you're not even supposed to know that there's a newspaper stand there other than when it hits the front of your car it's just fodder to imply that you're causing chaos but take a look at what's actually written on these front page sports news is mountain climbers what kind of place is this where's Lebron James somebody's hosting a tango dance Festival front page news and also I can't read that one can we enhance that so we can see what that actually says five children took Charlie moment whipped tonight at temple Hall what does that say and that actually gets to the core of one of the reasons why I think Burnout Paradise in particular is such an incredible game because as we've said with any racing game there's so much stuff that you're supposed to whiz by and not look at but all of this stuff in the case of Burnout Paradise has to look like a a microcosm of American culture at a particular time they want it to feel like you're in kind of the perfect early 2000s utopian Suburban but not too Suburban city in America which means it has to look like that from a distance but it doesn't have to look like that up close well what you get up close is what was this game developers immediate thought about what might constitute American culture in its most thoughtless form you know if you look closely everything uh in print out paradise is on sale literally every shop is just has a for sale sign the Billboards are for streaming services Police recruitment coffee or some sort of milk some sort of nasty beef milk you know there's a real rawness and like an immediacy to the way that racing game worlds feel because of that which isn't necessarily the case with the non-racing equivalents I said earlier that there are these super high fidelity games like games uh made by companies like Rockstar you can even include something like Mario Odyssey from Nintendo on that list one of my favorite examples is Grand Theft Auto 4 because Grand Theft Auto 4 was really the first game I can remember that was huge in scope and thorough in execution so there's plenty of stuff in this game that they didn't expect us to look at but very little stuff that they didn't look at themselves you know they didn't expect us to stop and hang out with these people on the street we weren't meant to keep this Porter company on his break at work in outside of the whatever whatever that machine is I don't know but all that stuff is there so if you do pay attention to it it's reciprocated even the ambient City infrastructure feels uh thought out and cohesive which does beg the question whether all of this piping actually goes somewhere like if we followed the power lines from Grand Theft Auto would they go from a house to a substation to a power plant it's a question for another day don't steal my ideas the point is with Burnout Paradise you often get a sort of Frey and slip interpretation of the uh environment that they're trying to ape whereas with something like Grand Theft Auto 4 you're getting more of a thought out uh dissertation on the object of parody the point that I'm trying to make here is this next time you beat a racing game once you've gotten all the gold medals you've unlocked all the cars and the parts you've had your fun with the online multiplayer before you put put it down stop look around drive backwards on the track you might just find something neat odd amusing or beautiful to look at and it might just give you that childlike love of video games that you've been chasing ever since you had to get a full-time job and now you're stressed out all the time you know what are you going to do thanks for watching see you guys next time I don't know exactly what I wanted to do with my time and I did it [Music]

Channel: Any Austin

Views: 349,898

Keywords:

Id: 0KvNJhW1FaU

Length: 11min 33sec (693 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 22 2024