Got the demo on Live over the weekend.  In the interest of revealing biases: I enjoyed Burnout Takedown so much that I bought Burnout Revenge and was largely disappointed.  Burnout Paradise seems to add enough open exploration that I am interested, but the demo left me using my imagination.

The demo limited me to one car, a few events, and online play.  The online play was a big hit.  My friends and I were excited about joining up the same virtual world with jump-in/jump-out capability that those of us are XBL are coming to demand.  There seemed to be little to do, because we couldn't figure out if races were disabled in the online mode (we think they were).  Otherwise we just tooled around the city.  I found it boring to simply chase each other down for takedowns (and even a bit frustrating as it served no purpose), but it was nice to try and beat each others records for air time, oncoming, near misses, etc.

Having the ability in the demo to earn just one car would have opened my eyes a little as to how game progression is going to work.  As of now, I was a bit confused as to what that will be like.  The demo stifled that but hey... it was a demo.

In the single player game, I really did come to enjoy the open world setup and the ability to look over a race course before playing it.  In other words, I could see the race was from a start point to the country club, but often at Burnout speeds you can't really plan out the best route.  This offers a chance to go explore a bit, map out a route, and then go back and try the race.

That reminds me a lot of playing Halo 3 (although this was entirely possible in Halo 2 and Halo) of just opening up a multiplayer map in the Forge and flying around it to get a feel for the  layout, weapon placement, and so on, before dropping into matchmaking and having to figure it all out "on the job".

That is a major improvement in my opinion and a feature like that would have likely kept me playing Burnout Revenge.

I saw some Co-op activities in the online play, and I encourage all developers to keep thinking about cooperative play.  My friends and I have 10x more fun in co-op modes than we do in competitive.  Yes, we do compete and it's fun, but from experience cooperative play is more satisfying overall.

Thanks for bringing this demo to my attention N'Gai.  I would have thought nothing of it, and skipped the game.  Now I am intrigued and may keep an eye on it.  Thanks for asking for this personal discussion.  As I said in a previous comment, you may have something here if you decided to start a roundtable/open conversation about games.  Reviews are dicey affairs for me, and I have seen you say you aren't quite into being a "game reviewer" yet.  Don't be... be a "game conversationalist" instead.

I've had an opportunity to play it for a couple hours and I really enjoyed the structure.  The demo as it is leaves a few things to be desired (no replay ability, the lack of a structured mode around crashing into people), but thats to be expected.  Have to leave us wanting more right?    I'm hopeful that the modes are as fun as I found Midtown Madness when there were "teams" and one team had to deliver a package to a certain spot on the map and others were trying to crash into them to get them to drop it.  

Anyway, I also enjoyed the "quickie overview" article on a new title and hope it becomes a staple.  It serves as some enjoyable/topical/lighter fare to your amazing "heavier" pieces ("Who's being naive now Kay?").  Thank you!

I'm liking this new discussion on the games and demos that come out. Are we to expect this as a regular kind of feature now?

RE: SectionZ

There's no loading in the demo, and if you're playing online it would be weird if people vanished while their console loaded a new area. I'm asuming there's none. There's not even one for joining/leaving online players.

Wanted to grab this on Live as soon as possible but I got hit with Microsofts new policy on holding Silver accounts back. Oh well only a few hours until its on the PS Store. Can't wait.

Is it true that there is NO loading while driving around the city?