Far Cry 2 is an exceptional game buried beneath a pile of inconveniences. Burnout Paradise is a decent game condensed down to the purest, most concentrated fun.

Lacking any must-play games this spring (sorry Resident Evil), I’ve popped in a few older titles from the year prior that I missed on the first go-round. It’s a standard practice for the season which usually serves me well; last year I circled back to Call of Duty 4 and Assassin’s Creed, both of which I was glad not to have missed. So for the dry spell of 2009, I selected a couple much talked about titles I’d also neglected: Far Cry 2 and Burnout Paradise.

Aside from the fact that they’re both available at reduced prices now that they’ve been around for a while, you might not think these two games had a whole lot in common. Far Cry is an oppressive first-person shooter that takes place in the shantytowns of a militia-controlled African nation. Burnout is a full-contact arcade driving game that’s all about speed and spectacle, without characters or story to get in the way of fast-paced action. Of the two, you might expect the latter to be the simple, fun fluff that loses its draw after the hundredth amazing crash, and the former to be the deeper experience that really gets its hooks into you.

But in the end, due to seemingly minor design choices and their effects on the flow of each game, the opposite turned out to be true. Far Cry 2 is an exceptional game buried beneath a pile of inconveniences, requiring a lot of patience to actually enjoy. Burnout Paradise is a decent game condensed down to its purest, most concentrated essence — like an uncut brick of fun just begging to fuel a full-on gaming bender. And the way each game succeeds or fails comes from the way they treat the one major conceit they both share: their big, open-world playgrounds.

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There’s no doubt that Far Cry’s premise takes players somewhere they don’t usually go, both geographically and emotionally. The violent African villages surrounded by desert and jungle are not the typical military/industrial setting for a shooter, so the initial promise is of a novel experience. Then you quickly discover that your character is an unquestionably bad person, destroying and killing to prolong an ugly and dangerous conflict; your only good deeds are for the self-serving purpose of getting medicine to treat your malaria. There’s a moral quandary in Far Cry about who you’re really hurting or helping with each violent act, which not enough games that involve mass killings bother to explore. This one forces you to confront being evil head on, and the results are certainly compelling.

However, basic problems detract so heavily from getting fully immersed in that role, much of the impact is lost due to frustration or fatigue. The world is enormous, with save points scattered around the map instead of allowing you to capture your progress at any point. Bands of thugs are much more prevalent, so while driving across the large expanses between missions, gunfights constantly break out, forcing you to stop. If during a mission you fail and die, you not only have to drive or boat or run all the way back to where you left off; you have to fight the roving gunmen all over again on the way.

Essentially, crossing the large map is not a fun thing, and you’re forced to do it far too often to get to the exciting infiltrations or assassinations. That’s a big problem: progressing through the game quickly becomes less about inhabiting your character and more about minimizing annoyances. I even resorted to taking buses whenever possible, because they were the only fast-travel option. Though it might not gel with the game-world’s reality, it meant you couldn’t be attacked en route (whether or not real-world militia fighters have a bus-related truce in effect, I’m not sure).

Other games with huge playing fields get around this problem by making sure you’re never bored or frustrated in transit. GTA never had thugs coming at you for no reason unless you’d provoked them, and it livened up dull long-distance drives with the brilliant in-game radio stations, which featured some of the game’s best humor. Understandably, that game wasn’t meant to be a serious treatment of mercenary opportunists in military insurgencies. In the world Far Cry constructs, even getting from place to place probably is dangerous all on its own. But then even Fallout, which also took place in violent desolation, only ever made you slog long distances once before letting you zip straight from point to point. There is something to be said for making players experience hardship to provide context, but also for letting them move on to the next experience instead of beating them over the head with the ‘Oh, look how dangerous this world is’ club. At a certain point, the open world comes to be seen as a chore, not a source of potential fun.

Add to this the fact that you can succeed in all the game’s missions after your first or second weapon upgrade. All the side missions and exploration — generally the aspect of open-world games that give players a sense of freedom and belonging, and give the game world its richness — quickly become pointless, as they would only involve putting yourself into unnecessary danger to earn cash you no longer need. Once there’s no satisfaction to be gained from wandering the map, the game has missed its mark. It’s not an entertaining platform where the player decides what to do next. The only decision left becomes “How can I get to the next interesting part fastest?”

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Contrast that frustration with Burnout Paradise, which masterfully utilizes its open-world setup to make sure its players are never more than ten seconds away from a different opportunity for fun. Not only are there races of all types at literally every street corner, but there is absolutely no punishment for failing. Lose an event? That’s fine, try another one right near where you ended up. (They even recently patched in the ability to go immediately back to the start of any event at any time). Sick of doing structured events? There are things to find everywhere you go, like ramps to jump, billboards to break, or shortcuts to discover. Plus, every time you find something new, an on-screen exclamation comes on to give you a constant sense of accomplishment. In Burnout, you’re never not progressing toward some goal or reward. You’re never simply ‘in transit’, so there isn’t a single moment of non-fun.

Sure, it’s nowhere near as profound a premise as Far Cry 2. That game admirably attempts to explore man’s inherent greed and selfishness and violence; this one puts you in a fast car in a big city and lets you drive around breaking things. But of the two, only Burnout will suck you in for hours at a time without having realized where the day went. Far Cry, for all its ambitions, will instead have you looking at the clock to see how much time you’ve wasted commuting back to a failed mission for the third time.

Don’t misunderstand: Far Cry 2 is a good game, despite its problems. The situations you face are intense, and the questionable morality of your actions makes for an intriguing plot. Burnout Paradise, no matter how fun, is just a game where you crash a bunch of cars. But in the right application of open-world gameplay, Burnout takes a B-level game into A territory, whereas Far Cry’s shortcomings let a potentially A-level game fall into the B range.

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The principles of player choice and free-roaming gameplay are becoming more and more prevalent in modern games, and with good reason. When done well, they can make it seem as if the world is our oyster, with a hundred unique ways to entertain ourselves. Seeing life go on around us, and interacting with a living system, makes our experience as a part of that system much more meaningful than actions in a void.

But these examples demonstrate that freedom itself is not always a virtue; the reason these games turned out the way they did was their use and misuse of the open-world concept. One presents a large city full of life and possibility, and lets you introduce chaos. The other is a largely barren savannah in which every element is set against you from the start. One constantly rewards exploration, the other penalizes it regularly. The game that’s more meaningful at its core loses that meaning by missing crucial elements of building out its world. The other hooks you instantly despite being essentially meaningless action. If the purpose of an open world is to provide a universe and encourage the player’s agency within it, the surprising winner is the one where he’s not even a person, but a car.