Gaming Week Continues with Burnout and Hot Pursuit

I happened to catch SpeedMonger on IM tonight, so we decided to test some of our connectivity issues.  

We have previously had problems with Split/Second and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit.  Earlier in the week, when we had our problems with Hot Pursuit, one of my computers was able to connect, so I checked my router settings to see if I'd maybe been forwarding some ports to that computer for another game that might be interfering with ports Hot Pursuit uses.

I found that I'd been forwarding Titan Quest ports to that machine, so I assume it was the cause of our dilemma the other night.  I turned the port forwarding off for that game, and we commenced testing out Burnout Paradise first.

We connected fine and spent an hour free roaming and taking each other down, as well as trying out some of the events in the game.  It was a good time.  Some of the most memorable moments of the night were us trying to get the biggest drift in free mode inside a stunt quarry.  We were constantly attempting to take each other down to stop the drift, and SpeedMonger was successful in stopping me several times.

He helped me figure out the correct jump to take to get a hard to reach billboard in the quarry, and despite doubts that my piece-of-crap car (third one you earn) could make the length of the jump to reach the billboard, we were able to barely crash through it (and epic wreck afterward.)

SpeedMonger is only missing 8 billboards before he has them all, and one of the events we played brought us to the parking garage that has the launch ramp necessary to reach the billboard. After we figured out which ramp we had to take, we both started trying to make the jump onto a building's roof across the road, required to launch through the billboard in question.

Below is the the screenshot of the scene where the billboard is.  I was first to break it, so I pulled my car next to the fragments (bottom-right of the screenshot.)  The billboard was on the edge of the canopy roof you see on the building to the right of my car.  In the distance is SpeedMonger (JCA69 on EA games) attempting to make the jump to the roof.

SpeedMonger jumping for the roof to take out the same billboard
you see lying broken in front of me.

We tried Hot Pursuit next and were successful in connecting to each other!  Since there were only 2 of us, we ran 3 Interceptor courses: SpeedMonger racer and myself as cop first, then 2 more vice-versa.  We had a blast (literally - EMP anyone?!) and I look forward to getting SpeedMonger in on some games with more players in the future, hopefully.

If only I could transform into Bumble Bee and take out the cop car chasing me...