Tag: racing games

An Homage to My PS2 Library

TiberiusLeave a comment

The humble beginning

I call this one a humble brag of sorts as I look back to the games I had available on my old PS2. From the day I got it (c. 2003) to the day I canned it (March 2013), I had a large library of games. Not exactly enough to fill a whole bookcase, but large enough to dedicate one of the shelves of the bookcase to them for storage. My ever reliable memory may fail me here, but I’ll go ahead with the ones that I remember dedicating the most time to, starting with this.

3D Mortal Kombat Games (2002-06): Starting with a classic series, you might be surprised to learn how I got into Mortal Kombat. My mother actually was a fan during the 90s’ 2D era Mortal Kombat games.

Considering the steps the franchise has taken since and now with a new game debuting in the middle of September, it’s nostalgic to look back at these 2D sprites of digitized martial artist-actors and think that this was the first of a phenomenal and influential video game series. The blood, the characters, the story, the moves, and best of all the fatalities; something this popular and this controversial — so much so that it helped birth the ESRB — was not lacking in graphic content, nor even imitators for that matter.

There were always fighting games before, during, and after MK’s big debut, but I’m not sure if any other fighting franchise can boast about having as many imitators as MK did at the time, and probably still does. Then again, a few come to mind…

https://www.cbr.com/mortal-kombat-rip-offs-good-bad/

MK’s transition to 3D in 1997 wasn’t without its missteps however. It tried its best, but Ed Boon even admitted that Mortal Kombat 4’s quality wasn’t up to snuff, and this isn’t even mentioning the media getting in on the then-hyper realistic graphics and their supposed influence on the impressionable and possible contribution to real-world violence–an accusation that video games couldn’t seem to shake off for years. But nevertheless, Midway trudged on and met the 2000s swinging at the fences.

Although Deadly Alliance came first in 2002, the first MK game I had was 2004’s Deception. The simple numbering system for sequels isn’t concrete giving way to creativity most of the time, but an average consumer without even a bit of knowledge in what they’re buying may not notice until after they buy the game. Fortunately for us, Blockbuster Video was a popular rental store for those who wanted to test an entertainment medium before committing or just didn’t see themselves owning it for good.

This was how I found out about Deadly Alliance. Being a bit older than Deception, most of the features in Deception aren’t in Deadly Alliance. It did have the 3D animations, fighting styles, and arenas that followed it into Armageddon and MK vs DC Universe (I personally don’t count this as an MK game), but what it was lacking in is what makes Deception look like an upgrade by comparison. This doesn’t mean Deadly Alliance was barebones, far from it. It’s Konquest mode was a great big tutorial for how to move and maneuver the characters and their combos, the endings were all unique with some connecting to others, the krypt had loads of secrets and collectibles to find, and the soundtrack stands as one of my favorites in video gaming.

On the later end of the 3D era, Armageddon had the same fighting mechanics of the last two games with several more added features, several mini-games and an in-depth plot about the fate of existence like that of Deception, and has possibly featured nearly every character ever introduced in Mortal Kombat since its inception 14 years earlier, but seems more than a little bit barebones compared to its predecessors. The previous two games gave the characters two fighting styles and a weapon, an arsenal of special moves, one fatality in Deadly Alliance and two in Deception including a Hara-Kiri/suicide move. Deception and Armageddon fixed the error that Deadly Alliance committed by omitting the stage fatalities, but committed some of its own cardinal sins.

Technically, it’s possible to have mastery over two or more martial arts styles. I was never the biggest fan of the old style-branching combos with so many of them being so difficult to pull off in rapid succession, but for the most part, the variety they added to a fight by chaining multiple combos between styles and sometimes ending with a strong weapon attack was the definition of a power move, or dare I say, a pro gamer move.

So while they might be gone from Armageddon, at least the characters feel and play differently: males apart from females apart from creature-types like Motaro or Baraka apart from the literal beasts like Goro, Onaga or even Blaze himself after the glow up from his addition as a secret character from MK Deadly Alliance.

The other cardinal sin committed, one that’s less forgivable or defendable is that of the fatalities. If you’ve played these older games, you’ll know that the window of opportunity was notoriously unforgiving and the combos so precise that one slip-up could turn a head ripper into a slap in the face which some would say added to the reward. I actually discovered Armageddon’s fatality system by accident after trying to finish a character off by way of special move only to unintentionally dismember them and squeeze his head. Yeah, Armageddon got lazy with the fatalities.

No room for practicing something difficult anymore, everyone regardless of physicality is capable of committing many of the same fatalities and input combos, with different tiers depending on what’s done to the victim. Single moves aren’t anything special where as a full-on prolonged dismemberment and maiming before the big finish creates what the game calls an “Ultimate Fatality.”

I can call this a lot of things, but part of me used to believe the titling of Armageddon was a glimpse into what was going on behind the scenes. Just now, a Google search revealed that there was more going on under the hood that resulted in Midway shutting down in 2009, not the least of which was an overdependence on Mortal Kombat along with financial mishandling, so while I wasn’t off the mark, I wasn’t entirely accurate either.

3D Grand Theft Auto Games (2001-2006): This brings me back to an arguable bygone era of RockStar Games, a time when the next game was literally a few years or even months away than a full-on decade and change. Think about it: the last GTA game will turn ten years old in less than a month as of writing this. Also, the most recent release was an ambitious project that lived up to its purported hype if not beyond and RockStar is seeking to abandon it.

But we’re getting off track. The most iconic games of the GTA era were released seemingly back to back between October 2001 and October 2004 and have set the precedent for 3D gaming ever since, finding the solution to a complex problem. For GTA III, full 3D graphics have been realized and helped struggling developers hit the ground running when they eventually tried it in their own IPs (though I argue this was also perfected in another game published that year, Max Payne). For 2002’s Vice City, while admittedly an asset flip that has helped with the influence of future methods of lazy rip-offs and asset flips (arguable again, I can’t put fault for all of that on one game), it added more to the GTA franchise and gaming in general with the setting, plot, characters, star studded voice actors and features. Finally, for 2004’s San Andreas, the features present in that game got an even bigger boost across a much larger open-world game. It incorporated several RPG-like elements regarding character customization, had expanded on bonuses featured in prior entries, expanded on the ownership of assets from Vice City and many more features that are too numerous to name.

Additionally, there were spin-offs set in between these games like Vice City Stories and Liberty City Stories, both of which I’ve covered on this blog earlier this year. From GTA III to 2006’s VCS, the 3D era games show the most innovation and imagination to me. GTA III walked so the succeeding games could sprint, to the point that in lists describing games that have aged poorly, GTA III consistently places in the middle for what the succeeding games have that it didn’t.

It’s hard to say when silent protagonists lost their favor with developers with them becoming more rare as personable protagonists became more commonplace, but Claude having no voiced lines would make him forgettable if it wasn’t for his attire. Green cargos, a leather jacket, and what looks like navy blue Nikes or Vans; at least he’s recognizable. But without a voice, players are left with his actions to characterize him. The Professional makes a case for him being a textbook psychopath. Although the game is majority player-driven, Claude not even second guessing his own actions before nodding and blasting sounds like a worry spot for criminal profilers to watch out for.

His successor, Tommy Vercetti, was much more animated and well-acted, which may have something to do with his voice actor.

An ambitious move on RockStar’s part, hiring A-list actors for main roles was an ingenious move that continued well into the 2010s to help shape the numerous protagonists going forward. Tommy Vercetti is an embittered ex-mobster who was given all the freedom to screw over a boss who wronged him ages ago. To this end, he’s mostly stuck working with a hapless, cocaine-addled lawyer whose voice lines whenever you get busted by the cops are some of the most humorous in the game.

He was initially supposed to go down to Vice City, Florida to make money for the mob and send the earnings back to the Forelli family, but with all that’s happening in VC thus far, coupled with a complicated past of betrayal, Tommy’s choices are clearer than they were. Forget the mob, Vercetti’s the big boss of this neon-lit city, and the ownership of assets from a cab company to a print shop to a cocaine distributor masquerading as an ice cream factory reflects this. It all comes to a head when the news and not the money reaches the mob’s ears and thus comes the final mission paying homage to the 1983 remake of Scarface.

I’m not kidding, this is a remake of a 1930s movie.

Anyway, GTA: San Andreas’s use of RPG elements was peak customization. VC allowed you to change your clothing, but SA gives you way more freedom. Whole outfits can be created by changing a simple article of clothing, the player can ink themselves up, and get any haircut they desire. There’s also a sort of leveling system based on how often you perform such an action. From my own experience, I’ve employed what some could consider a Call of Duty method to shooting. What I mean is, most of the time, my accuracy in shooting got a boost each time I crouched down and took aim. So I started on the AK firing at the hip and ended the game firing it from the shoulder as God intended.

Relationships also got an upgrade. The protagonists of the last games had more business partners than personal friendships, but CJ sets this apart since he’s a native San Andrean coming back to settle debts with friends and old gang members, especially when corrupt LSPD officers Frank Tenpenny and Eddie Pulaski (voiced by legends Samuel L. Jackson and Chris Penn respectively) instruct (read: coerce) them to do their dirty work. Interestingly, the inspiration for much of SA’s plot comes from the 1992 L.A. Rodney King riots and the Rampart scandal in the LAPD. There’s a chance an Angeleno who witnessed either or even both of these personally got an ugly reminder of these events while playing the game.

Of all the games from the 3D era, due to them being released before the internet and multiplayer games caught up with each other, these were the ones that got remastered more than the other games between their respective ten-year anniversaries and GTA III’s 20th anniversary culminating in the largely reviled Grove Street Games definitive edition.

Take my opinion for what it’s worth as this section of this week’s entry as well as opinions made earlier this year have made it quite clear where I stand on games this old, but not only was this a black eye to the image of a company that might be doing too much with one franchise while neglecting another and moving too slowly to get a long-awaited sequel out, it was also somewhat unnecessary. In the lead up to the Definitive Edition’s release, the originals were all delisted on Steam. Fortunately for me, I managed to blaze through the originals on PC. I bought and beat VC on Steam before that happened, I pirated and beat GTA III and I managed to snag San Andreas for free from the RockStar Games Launcher. So, have at it RockStar.

Naruto: Ultimate Ninja and Uzumaki Chronicles Games (2002-07): The influence and spread of the Naruto franchise at the outset is not to be understated. It did not take long for cartoon distributors to air it soon after getting the green light. Naturally, this lead to widespread marketing across the western world, even with western toymakers like Mattel, some of which I owned myself. The video games themselves each centered around different arcs from the series. 1-3 covered the whole of Part 1, 4 and 5 covered about a fifth or so of Shippuden, though only Japan and Europe got a hold of the fifth installment of the Ultimate Ninja series before it got another chance as the Storm series, finishing all of Naruto and adapting the Boruto movie in the game.

As for the rest of the game, with the entirety of the main arc being relatively easy to clear, there were game exclusive arcs that could be boiled down to an OVA. In UN2, after Tsunade returns to the village to become the Fifth Hokage, Orochimaru returns to again coerce her into healing his arms after getting his sealed during his fight with the Third, even going as far as using forbidden jutsu like the the Gedo Mark and Reanimation to destroy the Leaf Village until she capitulates. Interesting from a plot perspective but ignorant of established lore with its own set of plot holes.

Ultimate Ninja 3 had its exclusive arc adapted into an OVA to promote the game. In it, Tsunade hosts a battle royale featuring Leaf and Sand shinobi with the promise that the winner can put up a regulation of their own choosing for a week. You don’t know what everyone’s is, but the biggest one is the one that eventually becomes canon and sits in the background while Naruto’s son does the plot things. Rather than precede or even succeed any of the adapted arcs, it’s its own separate thing altogether.

Ultimate Ninja 4, has its OVA-like arc before Naruto and Jiraiya returns to the village. Arguably, one of my favorites, Naruto and Jiraiya are wrapping up their training with a final lesson. Naruto wears weighted beads on his wrists and ankles for an extended period of time. They change color as he goes on. Meanwhile, he and Jiraiya stumble on a village that made use of its mining industry at the expense of safety. An ancient spirit from within dwells within and takes regular sacrifices, one of them being a little girl that Naruto tries to Talk no Jutsu into coming back to her village. As he learns more about her and her motives, he eventually comes through to her, aids in her predicament and makes a new friend. However, due to her being non-canon and this being Naruto, he got used to not being able to keep her as a friend. Then the rest of Shippuden happens all the way up until Gaara is taken back to the Akatsuki hideout.

The fifth game includes that and the Tenchi Bridge arc but North America wouldn’t be able to witness that through conventional means, culminating in this:

For the gameplay, it was on a pair of 2D planes with one acting as the background and the other the fore ground allowing players to transition between them whenever they desired. As for move sets, unlike Mortal Kombat, the same buttons do the same things across the games: there’s one attack, one charge, one ultimate move button, a jump, and a throwables button. This sounds like the games are one note, but most of the move sets are unique to the characters and true to their depictions in the series.

It was a working formula for the games, but according to the Naruto Wiki they were pumped out at a breakneck pace which may explain the issues with continuing it past Number 5 and getting it to the rest of the world. Fortunately, Ultimate Ninja Storm fixed what was broken and gets to a proper, more complete adaptation instead of simply cutting corners.

I think it was for the best that Ultimate Ninja got the boot. Rapid adaptations before the series is even finished is good for marketing, but if the game catches up to the series, it tends to force the devs to get creative. Unlike original IPs like GTA or MK or even Mario for that matter, adapting something that exists isn’t always easy. In the case of Naruto, it allegedly made things easy by way of all the fillers it has separating the canon from the actual plot, but for something that was still in serialization, Bandai Namco seemed to have struggled in some areas.

Earlier when I mentioned the UN2 exclusive arc about reanimation and forbidden jutsu, if you don’t know, powerful jutsu often demand large chakra reserves and a critically crippled Orochimaru trying this even through Kabuto shows his desperation but there’s a fine line between desperation and suicide. According to the lore, it should’ve killed him. Then again, Kishimoto’s method of storytelling was by way of drip feed then downpour, so are the devs still at fault for that arc? Well, I don’t think so. It’s all fiction anyway.

Racing Games (2000-07): I’ll close off with the racing games I played with. Back in April (time surely flies), I made a post about my top 3 racing games from best to worst and in that order mine were Midnight Club 3, Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 and L.A. Rush. Thanks to a video by the YouTuber BlueTag, I was reminded of how much I hated the last of those three. But just because those three were the most memorable doesn’t mean those were the only games I engaged in regarding racing. I vaguely remember the Gran Turismo series though I don’t remember engaging that much with it. L.A. Rush definitely turned me off of that game for reasons expressed many moons before.

Midnight Club however motivated me to check out the earlier entries and while they weren’t bad, they reminded me of what I wrote about GTA in this post. The succeeding games got better and better and better and as a result the older games aged so badly that you have to get used to a whole new set of rules, like transitioning from horses to cars but backwards in this case. Also, a feature that is underappreciated is the freedom to cruise around a given city. I remember Midnight Club 2 incessantly reminding you to race other racers, whereas in MC3, you could do what you want in the world. The racers and races and tournaments were there, but there was almost no pressure to knock them all off the streets as fast as possible. Above all, the series always harped praise and reward on you the player to be the best racer ever and get 1st place all the time. MC3 to me was the easiest game to 100% complete.

On the other end of the spectrum, skill and learning have almost always been a cornerstone of EA games as I found out playing Battlefield 1. It takes some getting used to but once you get the hang of an EA game, you’ll feel like a master in no time. NFS: Hot Pursuit 2 had a noticeable difficulty curve and didn’t always drive you (get it?) to be number 1 all the time. By working on a points system, it carries over from race to race, so there’s no pressure to be 1st all the time, but it does help. Tournaments and knockouts also make a difference regarding the rules of the race, so few races played the same.

The downside though was that the customization wasn’t as extensive as MC3. If you’re a creative or artsy type of person, the cosmetics in Midnight Club make it feel as though you’ve walked into God’s personal workshop ready to design your greatest fleet of dream cars. As part of an experiment, I played MC3 last winter on PCSX2 without a controller. Thanks to my abnormally long fingers I was able to 100% the game and unlock all the collectibles on the keyboard. But it was so tedious that I resorted to using a program that tricks Windows into thinking my PS3 controller was an Xbox controller and haven’t really looked back since. Even now that I got Flight Simulator working I used the controller for that among others. So the game and whichever program I’m running will depend on what control scheme I need.

As far as my library goes, I mentioned all these games on this nostalgia trip but it’s not an exhaustive list. I didn’t even mention the Dragon Ball Z games, Ribbit King, Max Payne, other anime-esque games and puzzle games that my mom really liked, some of the arcade collections; as I said, my memory is unreliable and bound to fail me once again. I might do this for other game systems I had, though I’ve gotta reach deep. Some are iconic, others are weird and obscure.

Looking at this now reminds me of most of the anime from the early 2000s just by the art style. Oh, how the times change before our giant anime eyes.

The last recommendation for the month of August is DashieGames a.k.a. DashieXP.

https://www.youtube.com/@DashieGames/about

This is a throwback for me. I was introduced to DashieXP through a friend while we were looking for gameplay of the new Tomb Raider reboot and after pushing me to check out the rest of his content, I was momentarily obsessed with catching everything he put out, truth be told. I don’t watch everything he puts out and occasionally go back to select videos and gameplays for old time’s sake. DashieXP actually has his start as a rapper and skit actor of sorts online. His skit channel DashieXP was where he started with a bunch of different parodies and whatnot. After a year on that channel, he started DashieGames in 2011 and gradually turned that channel into his main one with all the time it steals from him.

The comedy style is a bit of an acquired taste. When I was in high school, his schtick would glue me to the computer but as I got older, I found other channels and my tastes have matured a bit. I do still have a soft spot for the guy, but thankfully he’s not the only YouTuber I watch anymore. If you’re interested, give him a watch.

Racing Games

TiberiusLeave a comment

“On Speed” by Lightning McQueen

This topic has been in my notes for a few weeks, and up until recently I thought about first talking about what I love most about the racing game genre before listing off my personal best through worst. I should admit, though, that the games chosen for this were chosen partly for nostalgic reasons but also to see how well they hold up. My appreciation for racing games goes back to an old collection of Hot Wheels toys, funny enough.

There was almost no escaping these little cars. While the cars could be found in most pharmacies and dollar stores and in the bargain bin at select department stores, toy stores held the associated sets and tracks and all of them were awesome. Most often, these were battery-powered loops that propel the cars on assembled tracks that go in multiple different directions. I don’t care what anyone says; no matter your opinions on the 2008 Speed Racer movie, toy manufacturers nailed it when they gave us toys and cars based on the movie. Still got nothing on the LEGO sets, though.

I didn’t own the above set, by the way. These things were huge.

To connect the toy cars to the digital cars I raced around in on the TV, these two ran concurrent with each other. I used to collect loads of toy cars and spend a lot of time with racing games, though not to the same extent as the fighting and adventure games. Still, I spent a lot of time with racing games and so for my best through worst:

Best: Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition Remix (2005)

Mid: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 (2002)

Worst: L.A. Rush (2005)

I think this post will get quite a bit long for each of these three, and before I expand on why I put these games where I put them in lieu of probably better options, this is a personal list that I know won’t walk the same stride as others’ personal lists, I have better memories with these games (emulated or otherwise), and for the game in the Worst category, there are objectively worse games like Crazy Bus or Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, but those were glorified tech demos that could be written off as a joke like Hong Kong 97. You’d have to put them on the same pedestal as actual games we celebrate or despise and that’s too much for those piles of crap. I don’t like to go for low-hanging fruit. Now for the list.

Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition Remix

This version of the game specifically is what I remember best as the game I finished 100% many times over, and as a personal achievement, I managed to do it on the PS2 emulator with just the keyboard. Thank god for long fingers!

The third in the Midnight Club series it follows up from its predecessors with longer races, more challenges, bigger cities, secrets and easter eggs and more. Customization options and an open world to explore let the player get creative during a race. More than once while driving through the cities, I came across these routes to find secrets or prepare to the best of my ability for a race that would most likely take a certain route.

The Dub Edition tagline for the regular and remix versions for the game stem from the game’s partnership with the car magazine Dub, who spruce up a prize car from a tournament in their style to include the Dodge Magnum, the 2006 Dodge Charger, the Chrysler 300C, the Cadillac Escalade EXT and others. The game has three scaled-down, fictionalized versions of the U.S. cities of San Diego, Atlanta, and Detroit, and the remix version includes the Tokyo Challenge. All three cities are headed by a mechanic and his auto parts garage:

San Diego’s mechanic, Oscar, heads the Six-One-Nine Customs;

Atlanta’s garage is Apone Team Racing run by the garage’s namesake,

And Vince’s garage is in Detroit. No fancy name unfortunately.

For Tokyo, Speedway is the garage there.

As you progress through the career mode, you’re told over a type of transceiver or cell phone that a new racer is in the city ready to challenge you. Racers driving a certain type of car denote a car club they belong to and upon their defeat, they send word of you to the club who invites you to partake in their races for a prize across the three cities. Additionally, tournaments can be entered for prize cars, customized by Dub or open for customization at the garage.

The customization options are quite extensive. Most likely riding the wave of the Fast and Furious franchise, nearly every car can have extensive body work done to it, essentially turning a station wagon into a supercar and earning you even more speeding tickets because none of the cars you have are street legal anymore. Imagine explaining that to the traffic cops…

The car classes and types matter mainly to the car clubs stateside, but in the remix version with Tokyo included, there are class and car type specific tournaments, and the kicker is that you don’t necessarily have to finish the American races first before flying to Japan. The first tournament you’re offered will require a vehicle class not available until you’re 4/5 done with Detroit, but the way you unlock tournaments in Tokyo is that instead of challenging individual racers, street races which are represented by red dots in the States are represented by purple diamonds, three of which unlock the next tournament. So theoretically, you can complete some races in the US, head to Japan and complete a tournament there, then come back to the US with the prize car, rinse and repeat.

Then, there’s the soundtrack, which couldn’t be anymore mid-2000s. Hip hop artists, post-grunge bands, techno bands, electro-pop; as I recall, select genres went hand-in-hand with the underground racing scene as depicted in media. I have no idea if this was representative of the lifestyle back then, but if so then that’s pretty cool. It makes the replays all the more enjoyable to watch.

The car clubs have an extra feature for certain cars. Specific types can gain one of three abilities: Zone, Agro, and Roar. Zone is a type of Max Payne-like slow motion ability that allows the Tuner cars, Exotic cars, Sports Bikes and select Luxury Sedans to weave through traffic in slow mo. This ability is earned by driving as clean as possible through the city. Agro is applicable to the rest of the Sedans and SUVs and is a type of boost that allows the driver to slam through traffic at a breakneck pace, breaking necks with all the wreckage caused by ramming other cars off the streets. Driving into other cars and causing general damage is how you earn this ability. Roar is exclusive to Muscle Cars and Choppers and it sends a blast of wind to scatter heavy traffic out of the way. Drifting and power sliding unlocks this ability. All three can be used a total of five times, and going by my playthrough of each ability, they’re not meant to be a one-size-fits-all solution when a race goes sideways. Zone helps you get through traffic, but it builds up as slow as its ability performs and a single crash can set the bar down as it accumulates. The draw of Agro ability is that you can send offending vehicles to the moon and the impact is literally diminished if you activate it on a free road. The same goes for Roar, but the consequences are doubly so if the vehicles don’t spread out how you hope. You have to think a bit more strategically before activating either of these three.

Lastly, there’s the secrets. The three U.S. cities have RockStar logos that net you extra customization options in the garage from more riders on bikes, to license plates to decals and more.

Above all, not only do I recommend it, I highly recommend you set up your controller if you go the emulation route. Contorting your fingers like miniature twister is better as a party trick than to play games. I write from experience.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2

My next words on this game specifically will surely sound a bit contradictory depending on how you see racing games. The customization options giving me a range of choices heavily influenced my rating of Midnight Club 3 despite me spending less time with it. Need for Speed has little in the way of customization, there’s no overarching plot to become a legendary racer in the underground street racing scene, and the options for cars and tracks is so limited that it’s nonexistent.

That being said, I’m still playing this game and the game modes on display do a lot to make up for what I thought was so perfect about MC3. Granted, NFS HP2 came out in Q4 2002 while MC3 was released around Spring 2005, so older racing games will feel like clean-picked skeletons compared to what would succeed them all, but judging games of this era by their own merits reveals that they’re less about style and more about substance. Midnight Club drips style, but Need for Speed before the EA corruption of the 2010s leaks substance.

Multiple game modes and challenges can be completed and the departure from other games is that there isn’t always an emphasis on getting perfect scores. Some challenges will still let you advance even if you finish in second place. As another divergent example from what’s expected of Midnight Club, transmission systems can be adjusted to suit the player depending on the car: automatic, manual, and semiautomatic transmission. The game is also designed more around skills than simply picking up and playing.

You know how Midnight Club has precise locations based on real-world cities, just scaled down massively from what residents of each would recognize of them (especially for 2005)? Well, the maps in Need for Speed are less precise and more like general amalgamations of a city in a given location. The Mediterranean coastline, the Pacific coast, Australia, the American Southwest, etc. The game also feels less like a smorgasbord of real-life cars and car concepts that with the benefit of hindsight didn’t always pan out.

This concept H3T, for instance, is different from what was sold in 2005 and ‘6, by the way. As a matter of fact, the car brands in NFS were less luxurious and well known and more specific to certain regions if not known to the wider car aficionado demographic. Opel, the now-defunct HSV, one of Ford’s foreign manufacturers, all feature in the game. The cars that you start off with tend to have a top speed of around 125 MPH with an average 0-60 acceleration rate of 5.3 seconds. The further down the line you advance, the top speed rounds to around 200 MPH with a shorter rate of acceleration. With the speeding cars comes new ways to maneuver around the tracks.

Speaking of the tracks, going back to a comment I made about the cars in MC3 losing street legality, they’d all be suited for a race track like how they’re all designed in this game. The tracks within NFS Hot Pursuit all have secret pathways and shortcuts to take but depending on the version you have it may be somewhat different. I emulated the PS2 version and pirated the PC version and the menu selection screens are all different; the PS2 version seemed to be the snazziest of all the available versions, whereas the PC, Xbox, and GameCube layouts are all the same.

Skills play a role in more than just driving and handling. The Hot Pursuit game modes where cops are placed at different points along the track can add an extra layer of difficulty to the challenge and you’ll normally only have that split-second to decide how to avoid them. NFS has a reset button for when you screw up during the race, but in my experience it there are less opportunities to use it during Hot Pursuit mode because the police will catch up to you and ticket you. So best to save those for when you’re out of sight of the police or outside Hot Pursuit mode.

The cops in this game are also aggressive. They’re not GTA-aggressive, but as I recall, in the PC version they’ll deploy helicopters the longer you resist. I know they also do that in the PS2 version though I rarely keep them around for that long to find out. This mode isn’t one sided though — there’s a mode to play as the cop and nab speeding racers as well.

I don’t know if this is true of all EA games from before or even now but their design philosophy, considering Medal of Honor, Need for Speed here, and Battlefield seemed to be based partly or wholly on gaining and refining skills than button-mashing throughout the whole play session. This isn’t a philosophy that’ll resonate with everyone and EA has since divorced themselves from this for darker desires in recent memory, but as I said with Midnight Club 3, find a way to play it and see the game for yourself. It might be too your taste if Midnight Club proves too flashy.

L.A. Rush:

This game is why this blog topic exists. It’s because I hate this game so much that I decided to write this week’s topic. Thing is, for years, I’d never had the words to illustrate my gripes with this game until recently. The YouTube channel BlueTag did the digging and the review on what this game has to offer because I knew damn well I wasn’t gonna put this tripe in my emulator, so here’s the corresponding video.

To spoil the video a bit, this game was developed by Midway Games’ British branch in Newcastle, the same Midway Games that flooded arcades from the 1980s until their 2010 bankruptcy, gave us Mortal Kombat and the subsequent ESRB rating system, and surprise sleepers like SpyHunter and Stranglehold. According to BlueTag, the finer details surrounding development are lost to history, but the game’s inner workings hint at a severe lack of communication between internal departments.

The physics engine is incredibly flimsy for a racing game let alone driving. Slip a finger on the accelerator and the car will hit the nearest wall at Mach 4, with reciprocal results. Forget tanks for cars that could take a beating; this game cinematically emphasizes the damage that comes with totaling the car when this happens.

Funny enough, the main protagonist is supposed to have a fleet of cars, but there’s only one that features prominently in the game at the beginning. L.A. Rush is another game sponsored by a major car promoter, this time MTV’s Pimp My Ride with Xzibit and Lil Jon in tow, but unlike Dub, Pimp My Ride doesn’t have much to offer. Or rather, the Dub team will let you win cars done by them where as PMR often upgrades your ride without you seeing the bodywork or messing around with it until it’s finished. You also stand to lose half your cash to a ride whose paintjob is a surprise until the end.

Speaking of money, you have to pay an entry fee to compete in a race and if you mess up and want to start over and do better, you can’t restart the race from the menu. You have to back out and come back in and pay the entry fee again. Like the other games, cops also play a role in this game but considering the consequences in the other games, this is simultaneously a worse and lax punishment at the same time: it’s lax because you bribe the cops to get them to back off, but it’s worse because you lose money on entry fees anyway so this is another way to lose your money.

Cutscenes meanwhile show the protagonist, whose name I never registered, I think his name was T or something, having already achieved street racer heaven. Then the bad guy shows up, promising to take your stuff which he does. After a few weeks, your cars are all confiscated including the jet black Hummer you rock up to the mansion in, leaving you with a suburban sedan that you have to use to get your cars back, often while under pursuit, and with the crappy physics and whatnot, this is more of a chore than anything.

As for the map, I’m not a native Angeleno, but I’ve heard from the Wikipedia article, that a section of L.A., namely the Valley was absent. Seems weird to put in, but in a racing game a map and layout can make or break a race if not the whole game and what I presume to be a notable location within the L.A. region was done a disservice by its omission. If this is the case, then whatever could’ve been done with the Valley may have killed further interest.

All things considered, if eight year old me was smart enough to see the problems with this back then it should be a warning to how unplayable a game could be, especially the PC port which I learned was worse off than the console version. If you have that Tibetan Buddhist level of patience, give it a go. If not, watch the gameplay and prepare yourself for outdated, cringey dialog, even for a game from the mid-2000s.

Before I move on to the YouTube recommendations, I want to mention a last minute game I also played on the PS2 back in the day, but have fewer moments with: Gran Turismo 4.

My memories with this are hazy as of now, but if I get the chance to emulate and play it, I’ll surely put my thoughts in, no questions asked.

Now for the channel recommendation: Rev says desu. This channel is a commentary channel on mostly anime and anime news and often features the wrong opinions to laugh at and lambast from some of the worst people to speak on a given matter on Twitter. Originally shortform in length, Rev has gotten around to longer videos for more to discuss. Wherever you start, if you like his content be sure to subscribe to him, he makes videos regularly.

https://www.youtube.com/@Revsaysdesu