Winning races helps too, of course, but if you think you’ll be allowed to race for too long in anything that you wouldn’t be embarrassed to drive to the shops on a Saturday morning, you’re sadly mistaken. Suitably chastened, you resolve to win them over by painting your respectable-looking family hatchback a lurid colour and sticking a few stripes on it.
One major plot point that I did manage to note (and then only because it’s exactly the same as in virtually every other racing game) is that at the start you’re derided by other characters for your crap car and ugly face. Using nitrous makes everything go all blurry. Frankly, I couldn’t really follow what was going on, except to note that people seem to call you “dude” a lot, while using words like “sick” and “wack” to describe things. As with rival Midnight Club II, the story and cut-scenes are completely incidental as regards your general enjoyment of the game, so you can thankfully ignore most of them safe in the knowledge that you’re missing out on absolutely nothing. If such youth-speak makes you cringe, then be prepared to skip each and every cut-scene in Underground, during which hungry, out-of-work actors deliver stomach-churning lines while shaky, blurry images of poorly rendered youths flash across your monitor as if attempting to induce an epileptic fit. Instead, the kind of gravelly-voiced musclemen that all pasty nerds want to be got their ‘respect’ out on ‘the streets’ with customised Nissans and Mazdas. Thanks to Vin Diesel, though, EA realised that ‘the kids’ no longer wanted to drive shiny, expensive supercars, which were for ageing businessmen and Premiership footballers with too much money. Predictably, the PC got the shit version, a glossy but feature-lite and forgettable affair during which you drove your supercar round and round in circles while police helicopters attempted to put a stop to your antics by dropping exploding barrels in your path. While Porsche 2000 was a worthy game, it sold like proverbial cold cakes, possibly because the kind of people who want to drive a Porsche are balding, middle-aged men who watch Top Gear and only use a computer to look at spreadsheets at work in the hope that they’ll eventually get paid enough money to buy an expensive car – like a Porsche, for example.Īfter a year’s hiatus, EA decided to go back to a formula that had worked before, releasing the confusingly-titled Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, which was, equally confusingly, developed by different teams for different formats. In truth, though, by 2003 the series was in dire need of an overhaul. Ever dreamed of driving a Nissan? Well, now you can.
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