Need for Speed Undercover - The latest entry in EA's long-running racing series looks to the past while throwing in some interesting new features.

Only in the context of video games will you hear people clamor on about how they wish they were being chased by the cops, but that's just what many Need for Speed fans have been doing since 2005's Most Wanted. Well, the boys in blue are back for Need for Speed Undercover, and so is the open-world setting that last year's ProStreet sacrificed in favor of quartered-off racing courses. But it's not as though developer EA Black Box has gone into full-on time-travel mode for the latest entry in this long-running series. For every nod to the series' past, you'll find something new like Hollywood-style driving techniques designed to help you elude the police, new events and skill-building systems, and a step toward more mature, less hammy storytelling.


Need for Speed Undercover is swapping the professional racing circuits and nighttime neon lights of the past two games in favor of an open-world Gulf Coast locale. Known as Tri-City Bay, this collection of floating-bridge freeways, dirt roads, and industrial shipping yards is set in the postsunrise, presunset time of day when the sun sits low in the sky and covers everything in a golden light. There seems to be a lot of diversity, and the race events take good advantage of that. One of the Sprint Race events we took part in--a supercar showdown featuring the likes of the Carerra GT and Pagani Zonda--took us from the highway to a high school football field to a millionaire's marble driveway before arriving at the finish line in a freeway tunnel. It's definitely a big world, too. We're told you can drive the fastest car in the game and it would take you a solid eight minutes to circumnavigate the entire world at top speed.

One of the ways Black Box is looking to expand your driving abilities without necessarily changing the way cars handle is through what it's calling the Heroic Driving Engine, a system that allows you to achieve a new level of agility on the road. One of the ways it's done this is by removing the persistent relationship between a car's direction and the perspective of the camera. If you're flying down the road, you can jam on the brakes while jerking the control stick to the side and watch as your car does a 180 at speed while the camera remains firmly in place. It's not just for show; if you've thrown your car into reverse like this, you can double-tap the gas and your driver will come to a screeching halt and take off in the opposite direction. This entails the opposite scenario as before--your car will remain facing the same way while the camera turns around, saving you a good bit of time compared to the old-fashioned three-point turn. When you successfully engage in these types of moves, you'll be rewarded with RPG-style experience points that will upgrade your driving abilities.

As a way of maintaining balance with your newfound driving skills, EA Black Box is bringing back the police to keep you challenged as you wreak havoc on the roads of Tri-City Bay. Driver AI has been enhanced so that if you do something particularly stupid like nudge someone off the road at 90 miles per hour, you'll have the cops called on you. In other situations, you'll have them on your tail at the start of a mission, like in the Driver Job event we tried that had us stealing a police cruiser (a Nissan GT-R squad car, of all things) and bring it to a shop to sell it off. No matter the origins, getting rid of the cops is the same: You need to put some distance between you and the police cars, and if there's a helicopter, you need to find a tunnel or bridge to hide under.

As you progress through the game's story--a tale about a police officer so deep undercover that only a few people know who he is--the narration will unfold in the traditional cutscene format of the Need for Speed series. This time around, there's a new focus on taking these video sequences out of the stone age and into the modern era, where games don't need to remain stuck in the trappings of the mid-'90s. What this means is cutscenes shot on a live set rather than a green screen, real actors (well, at least the main characters--we're not sure if Jessica Alba's brother playing a side role counts as a real actor), and a director pulled from the show 24. Based on the three cutscenes we saw, these ingredients have come together to form a more mature look for the series. You'll have the chance to see how well the whole package comes together when Need for Speed Undercover is released on November 17.

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Ferrari Challenge Trofeo Pirelli - Exciting for Ferrari fans

A racing game focused entirely on one car manufacturer seems like a bit of an anachronism nowadays, and System 3's Ferrari Challenge Trofeo Pirelli certainly feels like a throwback to another era. While most other recent racers feature a large roster of car licenses, Ferrari Challenge is content to bask in its adoration of the Prancing Pony, something made clear right from the game's opening cinematic (featuring slow-motion close-ups of a Ferrari F430, which are practically erotic in nature). It'll certainly appeal to Ferrari fans, but it doesn't do enough to hold the interest of those whose automotive inclinations run beyond the famed Italian carmaker's stable.


Not that Ferrari Challenge is a bad simulator. The game features some impressive race physics and a decent number of tracks, but its sharp focus on Ferraris is simultaneously its biggest strength and most apparent weakness. The result is a game which strives for the level of realism and depth of a Gran Turismo or a Forza but has much less variety. And because it doesn't quite reach the same technical level as its well-received peers, that lack of variety in both vehicles and race types becomes a much-magnified negative.

Take the F430 Challenge, the game's main single-player mode. This mode replicates real-life meets in North America, Italy, and Europe, where well-heeled Ferrari owners come together to race their really, really expensive cars. Each meet consists of one qualifier and two races, with the winner over a season determined by who gets the most points from all the previous meets. An entire season of racing will probably take you four hours or so to complete, resulting in well over 12 hours if you go through the three different seasons available. So for that entire time, you'll be driving one type of car, the F430, which might leave even diehard Ferrari fans wanting a change.

If you want to see all of the cars the game has to offer you'll have to go through the F430 Challenge. If you haven't already guessed, you'll find only Ferraris in Ferrari Challenge, with the game featuring more than 50 models ranging from modern ones such as the 575-GTC to classics such as the 250 GTO. Most of these cars are unlocked as you progress through the F430 Challenge, with the credits you earn from racing used to purchase them from the in-game store. These cars are used in other single-player events such as the stock-standard quick race, time trial, and arcade modes. More than 20 of these cars also get their own minitournament in Ferrari Challenge's Trophy mode, where you have to drive the vehicles in a series of three races. And while the game doesn't feature the biggest roster of vehicles, it does sport a decent number of tracks from around the world. There are more than a dozen available, including Ferrari's own home track, Fiorano, as well as other well-known locations such as Monza, Silverstone, Infineon, Paul Ricard, and more.

While Ferrari Challenge is certainly no arcade racer, it doesn't reach quite the same heights of finicky realism as the most recent Polyphony Digital offering on the PlayStation 3, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. Those new to the racing sim genre are well accommodated, as the game can be quite forgiving even when you drive off the track, and you'll find most instances of lost car control are moderately easy to correct. With assists such as traction control, stability control, and ABS turned off or ramped down, the game can be quite taxing, forcing you to pay careful attention to racing lines, brake efficiently, and accelerate smoothly if you want to stay competitive (or even just stay on the track). For the most part, the game's single-player modes feature races in which all cars are of the same type, which should theoretically mean you'll have to rely on driving skill rather than incremental horsepower advantages to win races. We say "theoretically" because while the racing here is challenging for the most part, it's sometimes ruined by decidedly blockheaded AI opponents who will doggedly stick to preset racing lines without consideration of other cars on the track. This results in opponents who will sometimes sideswipe, ram, and even try to run your car off the track if you're in the way. This gets frustrating if you're forced into making mistakes, particularly as having cars of equal power in races means you'll find it difficult to catch up to leaders if you fall too far behind, no matter how well you drive.

Ferrari Challenge does offer some customisation should you want to tweak vehicle performance, but it's limited to small adjustments you can make to ride height, springs, damper strength, anti-roll bars, or alignment. It's certainly not to the level of other recent racers, and while there's probably less scope to swap or personalise components in super cars like the Ferrari, a bit more depth would have been welcome. More interesting is the game's vinyl editor, which lets you tweak your Ferrari's livery to whatever suits you (and at first glance bears a striking resemblance to the same feature found in Forza Motorsport 2). You can apply vinyls to practically any surface on the car, and even stack several layers on top of one another. There are hundreds of vinyls available, but there's no option to import your own images or logos to give your car that extra personalised look.

You can take your pimped-out Ferrari online in the game's multiplayer mode, which can accommodate up to 16 racers at once either online or via LAN (there's no split-screen mode). Options here are once again limited--you can select car types, track, duration, conditions, racing lines on/off, or collisions on/off. Our testing resulted in smooth races with little lag, although we were never able to find a completely full game with all 16 players to compete with.

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MotoGP 08 Updated - two-wheeled racing series, including a peek at the Career mode.

Though we saw the game last week at the 2008 Games Convention in Leipzig, Capcom is still eager to show off more of its latest entry in the MotoGP series, MotoGP 08. Reps from the company came by earlier this week to show off the game and give us a glimpse at the game's Career mode. It won't be winning any awards for innovation, but MotoGP 08's Career mode looks to be another fun way to get into two-wheeled racing in this sim-style game.

Career mode joins a number of other modes in MotoGP 08, including Quick Race, Time Trial, Championship (where you play a single season run-through of the MotoGP calendar), Challenges, and online play, which will support up to 12 players. Your MotoGP 08 career will last five years, and during that time, you'll sign with a team, as well as build up your bike's attributes. You'll also do your best to win the championships in the different bike classes in which you'll run (125cc, 250cc, and MotoGP).

Scoring points in race events will let you spend points to upgrade your bikes in four different categories: maximum speed, acceleration, braking, and traction. You'll also unlock new teams in your specific class, and you can choose to sign with those new teams. By unlocking teams, you'll eventually be able to work your way up to the pinnacle of the sport--MotoGP class--where you will be racing with the top two-wheel riders in the world.

As with the rest of the game, MotoGP's Career mode is very flexible in terms of setup. Difficulty comes across in a number of different ways--both in the strength of your AI opponents (for which there are four settings) and the handling of your bike (easy, advanced, simulation). We tried all three handling settings during our time with the game, and as you might expect, simulation riding is a much different experience from riding on an easy level. Feeling particularly masochistic, we took on a wet race at Laguna Seca in the full rain on sim settings, and, well, we fell. Multiple times. But, then again, we were asking for it.

Still, even on the slightly tamer advanced handling style, it was very easy to feel the bike slipping and sliding underneath our fingers, calling for delicate throttle and brake controls. Powersliding--that staple of advanced MotoGP video game fans--was in place in this game, letting you rip around quick corners by giving just enough throttle in deep corners, slipping the wheel out from under you, and leaving a trail of black rubber behind.

Capcom reps were quick to point out that the developers behind the game have worked to make this a more accessible MotoGP experience, at least more so than the company's promising but very difficult debut on the PlayStation 2. It's difficult to say if easier settings will attract non-MotoGP fans to the game, but those who are playing the game for the first time will probably have an easier time of it.

Naturally, MotoGP 08 will have the full MotoGP license, with real riders, such as Casey Stoner and Valentino Rossi, as well as well as the full schedule of locales that make up the MotoGP tour. This includes old standbys, such as Philip Island, Mugello, and Jerez (all of which we tried during our time with the game). More-recent additions to the sport will also be included, such as Laguna Seca and new-for-this-year Indianapolis, which looks a lot like the old Formula One track at Indy--only run counterclockwise--and with a few more turns. Also, true to real life, the race in Qatar is run at night in the game, which makes for a slightly different experience.

In all, MotoGP 08 looks to strike a balance between veterans who have been playing MotoGP games since they were published by THQ and series newbs who've never played raced on anything with fewer than four wheels. We like what we've seen of this approach and look forward to playing more of the game in the coming weeks. MotoGP 08 is due for release in October on multiple platforms.

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Burnout Paradise - Burnout Paradise includes all the fast-driving, hard-wrecking action you'd expect from a Burnout game............

Is there any developer buzz term more meaningless these days than "open-world gameplay"? Let's face it, it's kind of been done to death at this point, so you have to look on with a bit of skepticism when a developer touts the concept as the next big thing for its franchise. It's understandable, then, if Burnout Paradise's concept freaks you out a little bit. Burnout has, by tradition, been a fairly structured arcade racing game up to this point, and one would have to wonder exactly how well an open environment would serve the series' crash-happy gameplay methodology. Evidently, the answer is quite well. Developer Criterion has invented a world wonderfully suited to Burnout's nature, a city built exclusively to cater to your destructive whims. And while a few design hitches here and there get in the way now and again, by and large Burnout Paradise delivers an experience that is both true to the Burnout name and wonderfully fresh-feeling all at once.

The star of the show is Paradise City itself. Coming complete with the titular Guns 'N Roses song (because Burnout: Night Train or Burnout: Mr. Brownstone probably wouldn't have been as catchy), Paradise City is, at first blush, a pretty standard racing game city, complete with all the usual landmark locations and boring background traffic. But it quickly becomes evident that Paradise City is meant for a greater purpose than just being a simple city to race around in. In effect, the city is a blank slate, a pristine canvas on which to paint your own obliterative masterpiece. The simple act of driving aimlessly around the city constantly presents new roads, shortcuts, and destructible objects for you to experience and, often, destroy. Nearly every intersection of road hosts a new event of some kind, and even after you've worked your way through the game's progression of driver's licenses (the only specifically linear portion of the game design), you'll still be finding new things you didn't even know were there.

That might sound a little overwhelming, especially if you've grown accustomed to the rather specific brand of racing that Burnout has always subscribed to. And at first, it most definitely is. Though the in-game tutorials do a decent job of explaining the event types and basic mechanics, you're initially left to your own devices and only have the small minimap to guide you through the many twists and turns of the city as you race--unless of course you want to hit the pause button regularly and use the larger map, which is a bit annoying to do. Those well accustomed to Burnout's previously track-based racing model might find having to explore to find the best route to the finish a bit frightening, but the good news is that it doesn't take a great deal of time to get a feel for the city's various ins and outs.

Until that time, you will experience some trial and error (with a heavier focus on the error), but the funny thing about that is that while you may initially find yourself failing races, it's not often you have to just go back and keep doing that same race again and again. The focus of Burnout Paradise isn't on doing specific events so much as it is about doing whatever you feel like. If you fail a race, odds are that there are roughly a dozen starting points for other races near the finish line of that previous race, and unless you've done them all, you can just hit up any one of them to get another notch on your license. Toward the very end of the game, when you've bested the bulk of the game's events, you may find yourself lamenting the lack of a quick return feature to get back to a race's starting point. But for the majority of the game, it's not really an issue.

It's a strange design to get used to initially, but once you do, it becomes incredibly rewarding. You can spend hours at a time just dawdling around the city and still make forward progress within the game. Don't feel like racing? Just go break through shortcut gates or bust up billboards, which are tallied up as you break each one. Or, track down one of the cars you unlocked on the road and take it down to add it to your collection. Or, you can opt to pick a road and attempt to "own" it. There are two types of events associated with each of the major roads in the game. Time trials are as you'd expect--you simply start at one end of the road and start driving down it, attempting to get the fastest time you can. Secondly, there are showtime events, which are the game's effective replacement for the crash mode found in previous installments of the series. Whereas crash mode was sort of like a puzzle mode in the way it made you create elaborate car crashes out of painstakingly built traffic designs, showtime is the polar opposite. These are elaborate car crashes born from little more than a bunch of nearby cars and your ability to control what is, in essence, a sentient car wreck.

In a word, showtime mode is absurd. The goal is similar to crash mode in that you're aiming to create as much damage as humanly possible, with various types of cars offering up different cash bonuses that feed into your final score. All the while, you can move your busted husk of a car around by pressing the boost button, which causes you to bounce around like a rubber ball. Again, totally absurd, but also totally awesome. It might lack the puzzling nature of the crash mode, but for pure visceral thrill and laughs-a-minute wrecking, showtime mode delivers in spades. It would have been nice if Criterion had found a way to have both the crash mode and showtime mode coexisting, as neither would make a particularly good replacement for the other; but on its own, showtime is a great deal of fun.

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RACE 07 - The WTCC Game - SimBin's racer returns for a new season, adding brand new vehicle classes to the already excellent touring car series

Swedish development studio SimBin may be a small independent developer, but it has enjoyed a prolific rise to the top of the PC racing simulation market. To build on the success of its first outing, GTR, the studio enlisted the support of the World Touring Car Championship and created RACE: The WTCC Game, winning over critics and customers in the process. The sequel, RACE 07, expands the game even further, with new racing classes, such as Formula 3000, Radical sports cars, and even Minis. While the game is fundamentally similar to the previous game, particularly in the dated graphics engine, these new racing classes add considerably more depth to an already impressive package.


Despite the addition of new racing classes and vehicles, RACE 07 still maintains its WTCC branding and subtitle. As a result, the focus is definitely on the touring car leagues, if only because the majority of tracks in the game are taken from current and previous WTC championships. Fans of WTCC will probably want to upgrade just to get the updated 2007 season information, but newcomers to the series should be pleased to see that the 2006 series is still included. This means that tracks that were dropped between seasons, such as Magny-Cours, Puebla, and Istanbul, are still in as part of the 2006 season, while replacements such as Zandvoort, Anderstorp, and Pau make it as part of the 2007 lineup. You can play the full championship from both seasons, which includes practice, qualifying, warm-up, and two races for each of the 10-11 meets. This means that getting through a full season is no mean feat; although, you can skip the prerace buildup if you like. As with real touring cars, drivers who consistently finish in the top rankings have weight added to their vehicles to balance things out.

RACE 07 is a serious racing game, but it's one that feels authentic without being stuffy. The game can be tailored to create the experience you want, with numerous driving assists that can be disabled to make the game more difficult. Antilock brakes, traction control, and stability assists can be turned off at any time during the race, but disabling them makes cornering all the more difficult. You can also make the game harder by choosing from the preset racing levels at the beginning of each race. On the novice setting, the damage level of each crash is limited to 30 percent of the real-world effect, while mechanical failure is turned off to prevent your car from ever breaking completely. On the pro level, damage affects your car more both technically and aesthetically, meaning that each bump has a noticeable effect on performance.

As if wrestling with your own car wasn't enough of a challenge, RACE 07 also provides some of the most convincing artificial intelligence that we've seen in a driving game. The AI does a convincing job of driving competitively, steering into your path to stop you from passing and even giving you the odd nudge, something which also happens between computer-controlled opponents. At the beginning of a race, you'll frequently see AI drivers tussling to the point where one car will end up going off the track or spinning out completely. Given the short nature of touring car races (most tend to stay below 15 laps, although this can be decreased if you like), there's relatively little thinning out of the pack, leading to some incredibly exciting races as a result. Even on the novice setting, it's difficult to gain a lot of time on your opposition, which means that you have to concentrate all the way to the finish line.

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Midnight Club: Los Angeles - Rockstar San Diego returns with its long-awaited open-world racer

It's a summer afternoon, and as we arrive at Rockstar's London offices, we can sense the post-GTAIV relief in the air. Having already released what is likely to be 2008's biggest selling game, Rockstar is in understandably high spirits. But video gaming doesn't stand still, and all eyes are now on the publisher's next game. Midnight Club is the company's second most successful franchise, and the development team in San Diego is currently putting on the final touches to the series' Los Angeles debut. With the game set for release later in the year, Rockstar invited us down to sample the City of Angels for an extensive two-hour hands-on session.

As you'd hope from a true next-gen racing game, Midnight Club: Los Angeles is set in a completely open-world environment. You can drive around the city as much as you want, and when you feel like racing, all you have to do is flash your lights at passing racers. LA itself has been re-created with some artistic license by the game's designers because the real-life grid structure of the city would have been detrimental to the actual racing. This means that some of your favourite landmarks might be missing, but we thankfully saw the 20th Century Fox building, which Die Hard fans will recognise as the Nakatomi plaza and was the scene of the denouement in Fight Club.

Running on Rockstar San Diego's own RAGE engine--the same one that powered GTAIV--Midnight Club looks superb. The environments are immaculately detailed, even down to the obnoxious level of advertising in the city. Such brands as American Apparel and Rustlers have made it onto billboards, while all the car parts are from real-world manufacturers. Product placement aside though, the game itself moves at a blistering pace. While Rockstar says the game is more likely to run at 30 rather than 60 frames per second, we encountered absolutely no slowdown as we cruised through the city. In fact, the game is looking very polished at this stage, and it looks like most of the major features are already in place.

When you get behind the wheel, you'll soon see that the new Midnight Club is very true to previous games in the series. Although handling changes subtly between vehicles, the cars feel light and responsive, meaning you can twitch your way through competitors, traffic, or roadside obstacles. We got to drive the Mercedes S600, as well as 1967 Mustang Boss cars, and we even got to take the latter to a garage for a series of upgrades. To say Midnight Club's customisation options are extensive is a massive understatement--we were able to customise every conceivable part of the vehicle, as well as design its appearance with paint jobs, logos, and lighting. You could conceivably spend hours in this mode alone, changing everything from the engine components to the stitching on the interiors.

We got to see three different racing styles during our time with the game. The most prominent was the standard race, where you compete against four other racers through a series of checkpoints. We also played through a couple of red light races--one-on-one point-to-point races where the idea is to find the quickest route to the finish line. The final racing style we saw was the dynamic freeway race, where you compete against one other racer at speed on the motorways surrounding LA. The traffic on the freeway means that you have to weave much more than in the city centre, but some stretches do allow you to open up the throttle and get up a decent amount of speed.

For the first time in the series, Rockstar is set to incorporate a storyline Midnight Club: Los Angeles. We didn't get to see any of it during our play, but short cutscenes will show you as a young driver who gets involved with street racing in order to win money and respect. The reward system is based on these two features, so you'll earn more money and respect for coming in first in races and driving better vehicles. There are also races where you can lay wagers, play missions to deliver packages, and take part in pink slip races where you can bet your car against someone else's car. Finally, tying in with the story are revenge missions, which will trigger cutscenes before and after each race as you take on special characters from around the city.

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Need For Speed Prostreet, EA Games

ProStreet is a solid racing game, but it has some performance issues and is missing most of what made the previous games in the series interesting.

It can't be easy to be a game developer in charge of releasing a new game in a series every year. People don't want the same game over and over, yet they're unhappy if the game strays too far from the established formula. EA deserves credit for trying something different with Need for Speed ProStreet, but the new direction of the series fails to live up to the level of the previous games. There's still a solid racing experience here, and the online component of the PC version is quite good. But the game's premise is uninteresting, the in-game advertising is over the top, and it doesn't run particularly well. In the end, ProStreet is just another decent but uninspired racing game.

Unlike the last two Need for Speed games, which told the story of an underground street racer through campy yet entertaining cutscenes, ProStreet follows the legal street racing career of Ryan Cooper. The game still uses cutscenes to try to instill some story into the proceedings--something about Ryan getting dissed by a big-time street racer--but it's uninteresting thanks to terrible voice acting and unlikable characters. Ignoring the story, it's your goal to head to different events, dominate them, challenge the best of the best, and then take on Ryo, the man who disrespected you after your first race.

Thanks to the sheer number of race days you'll need to win, it will take a long time to get to Ryo. Each race day consists of a number of different events. Most of these will be familiar to anyone who's played previous Need for Speed games. Grip races are standard races with eight cars on the track, and your goal is to finish first. Other events have you trying to get the fastest time or highest speed through checkpoints, or the best time out of your class of cars. Drift racing is back, but has been revamped and is actually fun this time around since you don't lose all your points for going off the track. You'll also be doing a lot of drag racing. It's fun for a bit, but gets old quickly thanks in no small part to the preceding minigame in which you have to heat up your tires; it's lame, and you have to do it before each of the three rounds. While there's no shortage of events, there isn't a whole lot of variety. Many of them feel the same--you just want to go fast. This makes the game grow old quickly, a problem when there are so many events to slog through before you reach the end.

The game also grows tiresome because the action on the track just isn't that exciting. Some of the later cars you unlock, like the Lamborghini and Zonda, are superfast, but for the first 50 races you'll be racing some rather pedestrian vehicles. Since you're on a track there are no shortcuts, so many of the courses end up feeling the same, especially since a "new" course is just an old one with a few different turns. Most importantly, there are no cops. Getting chased by the five-0 was easily the best part of the last few games, so its omission here is huge. Damage plays a more pronounced role this time around; you'll have to repair damaged cars, but you always have enough damage-repair markers to take care of things. We encountered a fair amount of lag when we used a controller with the game, which made car damage a more significant factor with the PC version.

While you always want to win a race day, that's not your only goal. You'll need to dominate as many race days as possible to unlock new events. After each race you're awarded points based on where you placed, how fast you finished, and how much damage you took. If your combined score for all the events breaks the old record, you've dominated the race day and you're awarded with a prize like cash or parts for your ride. You don't always have to race perfectly, but you'll have to win most of the events to dominate. This is made difficult because you can bring only a few cars into each race day--one for each event--so if your car can't hang with the other rides, you're in trouble. All is not lost, though. Like in other NFS games, you can purchase new cars or upgrade your ride to improve performance. And like in the last game, you can sculpt certain aspects of your cars' bodies to make them more aerodynamic. This time you even get to use a wind tunnel. It looks cool, but it's not that useful. Nor are all the visual customization options, because it seems that you can't use your rides online. The tool for putting on decals and vinyls is similar to what is found in Forza 2, but not quite as deep.

On the PC you can create your own race day by picking a location, race types, and even what cars can participate. You can then play these race days online in ranked and unranked matches. There was some lag, the racing was a bit choppy, and we had difficulty finding opponents, but it was still fun--you can really build up some good rivalries by racing the same people in multiple events during an online race day.

Every platform gets a piece of the avalanche of advertising that permeates the game. Sure, races in real life are heavily sponsored, but ProStreet takes it too far--there's nary a stretch of track where there's not some sort of advertisement for motor oil or car insurance. It doesn't seem possible, but 360 and PC owners get to enjoy even more advertising thanks to dynamic ads that will be downloaded when you start the game up for the first time. Even better, some of the achievements are sponsored by a car insurance company. It's too bad that the cost of the game and the ridiculous amount of advertising isn't making EA enough money--on the Xbox 360 (and according to EA, soon on the PS3) you can use real cash to unlock cars and upgrades. Every single time you go to buy a car, you're asked if you want to use in-game cash or real money. You don't even need to have unlocked a car to be able to purchase it with real cash, which is really unfair since you can use that unlocked car to zoom right to the top of the leaderboards on the early courses.

If you've got a rig that can handle it, the PC version of Need For Speed looks just as good as the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. With all of the visual options enabled the game looks very nice--particularly its cars, which look fantastic. They look great when they're shiny and new, but they look even better when they're all smashed up. It hurts your wallet when you total a car, but it sure is entertaining to watch the windshield shatter, the bumper fall to the ground, and the hood peel away like a sardine can lid. Unfortunately, enabling smoke effects, car damage, and bumping up the detail causes the game to run poorly. As mentioned earlier, the game doesn't give off a tremendous sense of speed, even with all of the bells and whistles turned off. This is partially because you'll spend a lot of time driving slower cars, but also because the frame rate isn't very fast and is frequently choppy. Everyone gets in on the terrible career menu, which is ugly and difficult to navigate. We also experienced numerous crashes, regardless of the visual settings.

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