Holy crap the muscle cars in Burnout Paradise are loud."

That's the first thing that popped to mind when Criterion's Alex Ward fired up the E3 build of his team's latest racer for the first time. Ward followed the boot-up with an entertaining and humorous speech about how important it was for his team to build Paradise from the ground up (rather than use an existing engine), but as the engines continued to rev as we waited for our demo, I couldn't shake how realistic and powerful the vehicles sounded.

But when we finally sat down to the play the game for ourselves, it quickly became apparent that there's a whole lot more to Burnout Paradise than its acoustic performance. The game is already a technical champion with highly-impressive displays that show off what the PS3 and Xbox 360 can really do. For proof, smash into something and watch what happens. The deformation of a car when it hits a pole at 100 MPH is highly-impressive; it'll wrap around its unlucky target exactly the way Crash Test Dummy rides do in those popular safety videos. Hit it with enough force, and you may even see the engine go barreling through the rear windshield with shards of glass and metal flying everywhere. Sometimes, cars can even be torn in half. It's awesome!
Even better is how Criterion is handling online play. Unlike most videogames that have lobbies and other middle-man programs to prepare you for the race to come, Burnout Paradise makes everything seamless. Simply locate a traffic light and friend via in-game buddy list, invite him to race, and when he accepts... BOOM! You're online immediately and ready to go. Keep in mind, this entire process happens without any interruptions or menu screens whatsoever. It's easily the most convenient multiplayer feature we've seen and will likely be the standard from its release point forward (and yes, we saw it demoed in real time on the PS3. Supposedly, it'll work the same on 360 as well).

To backtrack a bit and clarify what "Road Rules" are, they're essentially an in-game stat-tracker of all the top times and crashes accomplished on that street. They're updated in real-time via the Internet too, but to keep things in check, will pull its info from friends' lists rather than worldwide leaderboards. Additionally, all of your personal statistics and records are kept on a personal driver's license.

Other details worth mentioning are shops scattered through the city than allow you to power-up your car (boost fills at gas stations, damage fixes at body shops, color switches at paint shops, etc), the ability to visit a junkyard to access all unlocked cars, and PlayStation Eye/ Xbox Vision Camera support that auto-snaps pictures of online opponents when you taken them down for funny reaction shots. You can even sabotage an opponent's boost meter during online play! My favorite addition, though, has to be the inclusion of "Showtime Mode."

Showtime Mode is what the world used to know as "Crash Mode," only now you can do it anywhere