Here's a great video from the world team. These guys worked on the incredible game world that you'll recognise now as Paradise City.

Since we're releasing images of our new island location, we thought it would be great to give a little insight into how the Paradise City mainland came together.

Here, one of our leads, JohnL, concentrates on a single, small area - the Fish Market in the South Docks (just off Manners Ave). You'll get to see how each of it's distinct components evolved through development.



We'll show more video on our upcoming new island location soon and start to reveal some of the special new gameplay we're working on just for that area.

In the meantime, here's how it's coming on!












The island is scheduled for release as part of our Eastwood software update.

Big thanks to John and the team for talking us through there. Look out for more soon.

This afternoon we met up with our 3 leading French players - Chaus94, engrobel and lKARIMl. Big thanks to those guys for joining in the fun.

There was a big ranked race session of France vs Burnout team. We'll bring you the results and videos after the weekend, but for now we'll say - we were impressed by the standard of racing from these guys.

And it looks like while all that was going on a Brit player - Ferrari_F69 - sneaked to the top of the PS3 chart. Looks like you can't stay out of the action for long if you want to rule the PS3 leaderboard!

This week's awesome podcast 32 will be on iTunes in just a couple of hours or if you can stream it from our podcast rss feed right now.

It's yet another action-packed hour, which - in the absence of Crash FM stalwart MattW was hosted by hard-drinking, skateboard-loving, stunted welsh design genius - Greg "not Craig" Sullivan.

This week Greg leads another high-brow intellectual gaming debate with the accidental bombshell reveal of a brand new car, thoughts on bikes, international forums and the latest community chatter!

Apologies to anyone who missed their regular breakfast fix of criteriongames.com. The site was down due to technical issues.

Now we're back up and ready for an action-packed day.

we'll be bringing you some detail on the new look front end, an in-depth look at the creation of Paradise City's incredible world, more from our recently unveiled island location, some team racing with our top-ranked French players and of course - this week's Crash FM podcast!