Yes, that’s right, we’re now publishing reader reviews here on Kotaku. This is your chance to deliver sensible game purchasing advice to the rest of the Kotaku community.

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This review was submitted by Ben Latimore. If you’ve played Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box, or just want to ask Ben more about it, leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Burnout Paradise: The Ultimate Box (PC)

Speed, speed… whoops, crashed. Burnout Paradise comes to the computer, with a new open world. But does the new concept work for it?

Loved

Open World: The conversion from the earlier World Tour modes to an open world works fantastic, with just a couple of little problems here and there, but nothing too major.

Freakin’ Gorgeous: Every individual piece scrap metal in the game is just BEAUTIFUL – you really become immersed in the environment.

It’s Showtime! The new crash mode – some people have been sticking dings in it; me, I love it. Causing multiple-street pileups really makes my day.

Blaster Soundtrack: Everything from good songs to classic Burnout music to just classical music, the soundtrack was perfectly picked, and the music never feels out of place here. Who doesn’t love Guns ‘n’ Roses?

Party! Party! Party! Hundreds of challenges to take with your friends online will keep you busy for weeks, not to mention having a Party with friends at the same computer.

Hated

A.I.: The AI has a few nicks at it – it doesn’t know where the shortcuts are, and usually you can take them out in one fell swoop – unless in Marked Man, where they do the same to you.

We’re Lagging Behind: The PC doesn’t have Big Surf Island or Cops and Robbers yet – come on, Criterion! We want them too!

Burnout is always an awesome game, and the Paradise incarnation is no exception. The requirements are a bit high, but it’s a great thrillride that will keep you hooked.

Reviewed by: Ben Latimore

You can have your Reader Review published on Kotaku. Send your review to us at the usual address. Make sure it’s written in the same format as above and in under 300 words – yes, we’ve upped the word limit. We’ll publish the best ones we get and the best of the month will win a Madman DVD prize pack.

Alex Ward, head of Burnout developers Criterion, has said “Suda-51 came here for the day a few weeks ago. He’s a hardcore Burnout fan. I checked the servers – over 700hrs play.”

700 hours? Hey, Suda: get back to work!

[CrashAlex @ Twitter, via VG247]

Tiny versions of the cars based on Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Knight Rider are unlocked by completing various tasks in the new Big Surf Island content. It’s all stuff Burnout junkies would be doing anyway. You’re going to want to hit all 15 Mega Jumps, 45 Billboards, 75 Smashes, and complete all 24 Road Rules, so you might as well be rewarded, right?

Hit up the link below to see exactly which feat nets you which car.

Unlock Legendary cars (for free!) in Burnout Paradise: Big Surf Island [Joystiq]

As the head of EA, John Riccitiello can talk games better than most CEOs, and he can talk finances better than most gamers. Given the myriad tactics EA has been employing to sell its games and keep its games from being stolen lately, I had to talk to him last week at E3 for an update about the economics of playing.

I started with the most dramatic price-change EA may have ever made on a video game, the drop of real-time-card-battle game Battleforge from full-priced PC game when it launched in April of this year down to free in late May, supported by for-pay microtransactions. I asked him how that was working out. “Revenue’s up,” Riccitiello said, before gathering himself for a more thorough answer.

“I feel like you’re sort of asking me how the party’s going, but the party starts at nine and it’s 10 to nine,” he said. “I don’t have enough good data to give you a great answer. I would say that, as a packaged goods product competing with high-end PC games, it’s a highly-polished experience that provides really good core-gamer-satisfying experience. As an intellectual property, it has an exceptionally narrow audience of people willing to pay $US49 for that… It was a product that, if this was a model shop, it’s the group that builds ships in a bottle. It’s a really small audience, and we found them. Not that many of them. As a free to play game, it’s got 25x the production values of anything out there that’s comparable.”

EA’s hope is that games like Battleforge, which got solid reviews can thrive with the support of microtransactions, gamer-purchases for items and add-ons. Riccitiello said that EA’s free-plus-microtransaction games, which also include the Korean version of FIFA, have shown the ability to generate more money per user than they’d get from those users had they been full-priced games. Of course, not every user buys items in those free games. But those who do, spend lots.

Free-to-play games present an economic model for games that Riccitiello said EA can’t miss, despite its challenges: “There’s probably no harder platform to build and deploy for than free-to-play,” he said, noting that there’s far less structure for that market than there is for the full-priced console gaming. “You don’t know what device [gamers are] going to play on and how they’re going to want to participate. If you don’t refresh the community, the pricing, the assets on a daily basis, they’re going to get bored. It’s a complicated process, but it’s good. … I think ultimately we can’t get in the way of what the consumer wants, because the consumer wants different business models.”

On the other side of things, EA has shifted from the pricing experiment of offering downloadable content for the early 2008 racing game Burnout Paradise from free to for-money. The game was launched in a January and, in April, July and September, had free DLC consisting of new multiplayer modes and the ability to race motorcycles, among other things. The game’s next major update, released 13 months after the game’s launch, was the first one that EA charged for: a new Party Mode re-mix of the game,. Subsequent DLC packs, including a new island which was priced just this week, have been for pay.

Riccitiello says EA learned that that roll-out plan for Burnout’s DLC was not ideal. Knowing what the company knows now, he said, “that heavy-duty downloadable content would have been available shortly after launch and would have bridged the original purchase of the game to downloadable content, some free, some pay from the outset. We essentially didn’t do that. We went dark on the consumer and then came back, which is probably not the smartest way of keeping the community together. Going back to that party, we sort of turned the lights off and threw them out and then we started the punch bowl. Some of them came back. And then more of them came back and then a lot of them came back. People who pirated the game came back. I think this is an area where we’re all really learning.”

And speaking of pirates, no matter what EA charges for a game, there will be people who want to make EA’s games free-to-play on their own terms. That’s the nice way of saying what happened to The Sims 3 recently. “We got pirated three weeks before the game launched,” Riccitiello said. “And we were really quite nervous about it. We had a lot of telemetry about what the pirates were doing because the launcher was in the version of the disc [that got out.]… There’s a lot of Chinese and Polish among those consumers. We know what they’re doing. And we finally concluded that we were very happy that almost a million people downloaded the Fight Night demo in the first couple of days we put it out. And in a weird sort of way, the behaviour we’re starting to see based on sell-through and registration [with the Sims 3] is that we really might have just put out a really good demo.”

Riccitiello laughed at his own remark, because he doesn’t quite mean it seriously. I pointed out that he might not want to hold his breath waiting for all those Sims 3 pirates to convert to paying customers. “I don’t think they will, based on their geography,” he said. The point he was making, he said, is that EA’s concern over being pirated gave way to a new, more constructive thought: “We were like, ‘I think they’ve demoed the game.’ That’s probably good. We probably should have posted it on our website.”

What the Sims 3 pirates got — what all consumers of The Sims 3, in fact, are getting — is a game disc that doesn’t include all the game’s features. Only activating the game online gives players access to the game’s second town and most of the community features vital to the franchise’s vibrant community of content creators and sharers. That stuff, Riccitiello said, is the kind of approach he’s happier to take than to load a game up with Digital Rights Management restrictions, as EA had done with Spore. “To quote [Valve founder] Gabe Newell badly, DRM won’t work unless you add value.”

What this all adds up to, according to Riccitiello, is an EA that is changing its fundamental nature and the manner with which its products connect to consumers. “I often described EA as a packaged goods company,” he said. “In Fiscal 10 [EA's financial year, ending March 2010], we’re still a packaged goods company that connects to a lot of online services and features. But it’s still a packaged good at its core. I think while we’ll have big packaged goods sales in Fiscal 11 and 12 — they’ll be larger in this year and continue to grow — we’re going to feel more like an online services company, with a disc as an enabler of service.”

That, he said, is exactly what EA executed with The Sims 3. Get the game and watch it expand. In Riccitiello’s terms — well actually one he got from his daughter, he said, — the game, once launched should feel connected and “alive.”

That’s where all this should lead, however we all pay for it.

It’s not cheap, but it should be worth it, adding a much-needed infusion of new drivable real estate to Burnout Paradise, with a handful of new cars to boot. How much will it set you back? We’re looking at 1,000 Microsoft points on the Xbox 360, which translates to $US12.99 on the PlayStation 3. For those of you in foreign lands, that’s €12.99 or £9.99.

Certainly seems like a fair price to me, though your mileage may of course vary. Too much, or just enough? The comments section is all yours.

Big Surf Island – Pricing Confirmed [Criterion Games]

Tipsters who spotted the price page before it was removed said the game will cost $US12.99 (€12.99 in Europe, £9.99 UK) on PlayStation Network and list for 1000 Microsoft Points on Xbox Live. Couldn’t confirm that this morning, but it sounds reasonable.

The achievements page was dated yesterday, so perhaps it wasn’t a mistake. But it added 10 new Trophies, three silver and seven bronze, bringing the total in Burnout Paradise on the PS3 to 98. They are:

Drive through 20 Island Smash Gates
Smash 15 Island Billboards
Land 5 Island Mega-Jumps
Jump through Deese’s Donut
4.5 seconds of Crash TV Air Time
Complete a 750 yard drift inside the Inspiral Car Park
Complete your first Island Tour
Find all Island Events
Complete all 10 Island Freeburn Challenges
Smash all 45 Island Billboards

Criterion Games brags that the 98 trophies in Burnout Paradise is 32 more than the next closest game on the PS3. For the Xbox 360, Big Surf Island adds five achievements worth 110 Gamerscore, bringing those totals to 60 achievements, 1,250 total Gamerscore. The new achievements are:

Smash n’ Grab – Drive through 20 Island Smash Gates
Surf Boards – Smash 15 Island Billboards
Island Explorer – Find all 15 Island Events
Crash TV Air Time – Get at least 4.5 seconds Air Time from the Ski Jump
People Person – Complete all 10 Island Freeburn Challenges. These can be completed by 2 – 8 players

Big Surf Island: Trophies and Achievements [Criterion, thanks DCJoeDog, Jeremy, anonymous and others]

In the latest episode of Crash TV, Criterion takes us on a guided tour of Big Surf Island, the major chunk of new real estate coming to Burnout Paradise next month.

After a year of driving around Paradise City, the prospect of new places to play is immensely inviting. The 45 new billboards and 75 new Smashes shouldn’t take too long to complete, but the insane jumps and new areas to explore should keep players occupied long after they’ve earned their Island licence.

Burnout Paradise: Big Surf Island DLC is coming to the racer this summer. Here’s a quick peek at what exactly a “Burnout Vacation of a Lifetime” will entail.

Rollercoaster? Yes thank you. Bridge jumps through concrete tubes? I’ll take that. Dune Buggies. Don’t mind if I do. And seven other new cars as well as new events and challenges.

The DLC hits June 11.

Hearkening back to Burnout titles of old, the Cops and Robbers add-on pits two teams of players against each other, both vying for control of a load of stolen gold bars. The goal is to obtain the bars and return them to your team’s base by any means necessary, which in Burnout generally means lots and lots of crashing. To help make the crashing more interesting, Criterion also provides 35 new police vehicles; re-skinned and slightly remodeled versions of 33 of the game’s already existing rides.

Is the Cops and Robbers pack worth your $US10 or 800 Microsoft points, or is Criterion getting away with highway robbery?

Loved
The Paradise City Gold Rush: Cops and Robbers pits two teams against each other as they vie for control of a large pile of gold bricks. The goal is to get the booty to your team’s headquarters and score a point while the opposing team attempts to take you out and grab the loot for themselves. The whole affair plays out like a sporting event, complete with the requisite trash-talk. With the gold carrier slowed by the weight of precious metals, teamwork is essential to winning the day. All in all, an excellent addition to Burnout Paradise’s online game modes.

The International House Of Cop Cars: Cops and Robbers introduces more than 30 police vehicles to Burnout Paradise’s constantly growing stable of vehicles. While each new car is a modified version of an existing vehicle, the modifications are much more than simple re-skinning. Each car gets a unique police car makeover, with custom graphics and light placement that makes sense based on each model. Criterion went as far as to give the cars different sirens based on their real-life inspiration’s country of origin. With fans readily paying $US8 for the four vehicles in the Legendary Cars pack, $US10 for 33 modified vehicles seems like a no-brainer.

Hated
A Distinct Lack Of Variety: The entertainment value of the Cops and Robbers game mode starts to fade quickly after your first few rounds, once you realise that there just aren’t enough variables to the formula. The gold spawns in the same handful of spaces, and the bases for the two teams are always the same. Sure, Burnout Paradise has plenty of ways to get to the same place, but in the end you’re still getting to the same place. It’s one of the limitations of a game play mode that calls out for more maps being added to a game that only really has one.

Of course you aren’t meant to spend your time online in Burnout Paradise only playing the Cops and Robbers mode, so the lack of variety isn’t as much of a problem as it could be. I liken online in Burnout Paradise to a group of kids playing on the playground, and Cops and Robbers is just another game those kids can play when they aren’t just running around aimlessly, bumping into things and falling over.

With a new way to play and 33 new police cars to play with, Burnout Paradise’s Cops and Robbers pack is the right amount of new content for the right price. I’d say it was a steal, but even I have more self-respect than that.

Burnout Paradise Cops and Robbers was developed by Criterion Games. Released on April 30th for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Retails for $US9.99 or 800 Microsoft points. Played multiple rounds across multiple online sessions.

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The Burnout Paradise Cops & Robbers pack introduces a ton of new police-themed makeovers for your favourite Paradise City rides, along with a brand-new online mode that pits criminals and the authorities against each other in a tug-of-war with a load of stolen gold. How much is all of this going to run? $US9.99 or 800 Microsoft points, with Europe paying €9.99 and the UK forking over £7.99.

Seems like a reasonable price to me, though I tend to prefer simply driving around and crashing into things randomly to any sort of organized play. So who plans on picking up the pack?