So far I /am/ preferring Paradise to Revenge on the whole, and do feel it's an honest evolution of the Burnout concept. I do like Showtime better, in concept, than the closed-circuit crash mode, but I think the real problem is they didn't go far enough.
For instance, the open world could have taken advantage of Showtime by having special crash opportunities at certain times - say, every 2 hours in game time, a train could pull into a certain station, then at still another time of day, when the train for that time was there, /other/ special events could be happening... basically if you showed up at the right moment, you could ambush a sweet combination of circumstances for a Showtime massacre.
Showtime is great, but there just needs to be more to take advantage of it.
Otherwise, I'm all over Paradise. At most, it could use a couple more kinds of events; spread across 120, there's not that much variety really, though it's still a blast to play. I'm also with other folks in feeling that the stunt mode here is a lot better than attempts at car stunt runs in other games. Somehow, the kinds of stunts and such you do in Paradise fit better and do not feel as contrived, and thus a distraction, from the core gameplay. Honestly most of the stuff you do for stunts is shit any creative player is doing /anyway/ while just screwing around in the game.
It it also remarkably polished and I'm tickled by the fact that such a huge open world game runs slammed at 60fps 99% of the time during gameplay. The stutters and hiccups from section streaming and choke points is so rare, that for my eyes it least, it took me hours of play to realize when it was happening.
