Burnout Paradise has proven to be a big hit, but its brand of open-world racing and destruction isn't a party that all Xbox 360 owners are invited to. Videogamer.com reports that the game will not allow players access to the multiplayer portion of the game if their console isn't equipped with a hard drive.

EA's email response (obviously not written by an English major) to customers having this problem is: "The hard drive is needed to store temporary data when playing online as the data transferred from one console to another requires storage space greater than what the memory card can contain."

Burnout Paradise isn't the first Xbox 360 game to lock out features for the Core owner; some of Halo 3's more innovative features such as replays need the HDD too, and Final Fantasy XI simply can't work at all without it. This trend does seem to be slowly creeping up on 360 owners more frequently, and we'll probably see more of it in the future.

In the meantime, Microsoft would probably do well to reduce the prices of both the add-on hard drives for the 360. Their prices were silly when they launched; they look ever more obscene now.