Welcome to Paradise City, where forcing foes off the road is as important as crossing the finish line first. It's the setting of Burnout Paradise, due in January, and rendering its 250 miles of streets is taxing even for hot rods like the PS3 and Xbox 360. Like many games with huge environments, Burnout's cityscape is broken into discrete zones, and at any given time only data for sectors adjacent to the player is streamed from the disc to the console. "But making sure the area around the player is loaded when it needs to be isn't easy when they're driving at 200 mph," says Richard Parr, a technical director for the game's developer, Criterion. To erect the city fast enough to keep pace with the reckless driving and to take advantage of the latest hardware, Criterion's team constructed all 368 zones from heavily compressed, reusable building blocks that each have to be retrieved from the disc just once and can then be redeployed by the console in different configurations. "We dedicate half of one of the system's processors to rendering the city, a significant chunk of the hardware," Parr says. Nerd-to-English translation: You can drive like Steve McQueen in hi-def.
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