Actually Hot pursiut 2 was the last playable, and half-decent game of the nfs series.
Underground couldve been a nice try, but they shouldve gotten back to the roots.
And make cars in their own class, as in, when you would have a golf II, you will not be able to pull away from a 911 when you have a so called 'tier I' turbo.
I think need for speed is fun games. I know its not realistic etc.. but they are fun to play as a game on console I think, have had lots of fun with friends trying to break 5.000.000 score in drift at carbon :P
(great to play when drunk :yipee
Rather than shutting down NFS, apparently EA want's to cut back on EA Black Box, in spite of the fact that Black Box games have sold 55 million copies, starting with NFS6 - Hot Pursuit 2, and one non NFS title, Skate, and hand development over to Criterion.
I'm not so sure about this. EA is complaing about sales during a recession? EA stated sales of ProStreet were dissappointing, but it sold over 5.5 million copies, the #6 top selling game and #1 selling racing game during the period from March 2007 to March 2008 (5.4 million copies during this time). I think EA got spoiled with 9+ million sales of Underground 2 and Most Wanted.
EA Black Box took over the NFS series back with NFS6 - Hot Pursuit 2. Prior to that different developers made the NFS games. The original NFS was made by the same guys that made the older still game called Stunts. I don't know about NFS2 or NFS2SE. NFS3 - Hot Pursuit (1) and NFS4 - High Stakes were made by the same group. NFS5 - Porsche Unleashed was made by another group, but EA bought the game and put a NFS label on it.
The current release, Undercover was getting panned by the critics for a weak storyline, but it's no worse than some popular movies. In racing games, conflicts are settled with cars instead of guns, given that, the storylines of the last 3 NFS games are OK.
One trend in the last two NFS games, is that the cars are getting too far over the top in terms of performance, more like driving Star Wars swoop racers than cars, example video from Undercover. This particular track is mostly open turns and only has two braking zones, but you'll get the idea. The pause at about 47 seconds to the video is due to using fraps to capture live video:
This simply isn't true an any of the NFS games. There are usually one or two dominant cars for each tier level (if there are multiple tiers). For NFS1 - It's the Lamborghini Diablo (ignoring the bonus Warrior PTO). For NFS2 - The McLaren was the fastest car, except for Mystic Peaks where the Lotus GT1 was faster (ignorning the bonus FZR2000). For Hot Pursuit, it was the Mercedes CLK GTR (no Mclaren in this game). For High Stakes and Hot Pursuit 2, the McLaren F1 GTR or the Mercedes CLK GTR are the fastest cars, depending on the track. For Porsche Unleashed, it was the GT1 for all but Corsica where the 1995 911 Turbo was fastest. For Underground 1, it was a mix, but the RX7 was generally best overall. For Underground 2, the Corolla (of all things) was in a class by itself. For Most Wanted, it's the Carerra GT. For Carbon, a trade off between Z06 and Audi Lemans Prototype. For Undercover, the tier 1 cars are a good mix. The Z06 best overall, with the Zonda better at some tighter tracks, and the Veyron at a few high speed tracks.
One issue now facing EA, is the fans of the exotics versus fans of the tuners, and EA switching back and forth, following the fads. Take a look at this intro video made from High Stakes, 3 versions before the Underground 1 tuner oriented game:
Obviously no one will confuse NFS as a racing sim, but Underground 2 had the most realistic physics of the series, that included throttle induced oversteer. It was mostly a one car game (the Corolla), but it made up for it with huge free roam area, great background views, and a large number of tracks and multiple modes that used both street and track courses.
What most are now asking for is something similar to Underground 2, free roam with a purpose (driving to events), and pursuits with the cops. My guess is this will probably happen in the next NFS game.
One thing mentioned in the Marc DeVillis video interview at the official web site is that Undercover has 400 tunable parameters for each car. With this kind of capability, EA Black Box has the ablity to make a very good sim racer, but it will never happen. Another thing mentioned is Black Box spent a lot of time on maintaing a stable camera view (if using chase view which I don't use, mostly a console thing) while the player peformed stunts like 360's or 180's going into reverse, but the actual game play in Undercover doesn't include any events that focus on these stunts. This only existed with Porsche Unleahsed, where there a was a factory driver mode that included peforming stunts like 360s and 180's on a course layed out with cones.
I've been playing the NFS series since NFS2 (except motor city online), and recently got NFS1-SE earlier this year to check it out. My first racing sim was Grand Prix Legends, and my experience with the arcade physics of the Mercedes CLK GTR in High Stakes actually helped a bit, in that both cars had a high working slip angle and had to be steered a bit early to allow time for the cars to yaw inwards and start turning. I wasn't great, but I did manage a negative GPL rank in about 6 months of actual play. I've since bought most of the sim oriented games, F1 Challenge 99-02, Live For Speed, rFactor, and the GTR series, although now I'm more of a casual racer, player of many games, but master of none.
I have a collection of videos of various racing games, to give non-owners an idea of what these games are like:
He was mentioning how realistic handling was compared to other NFS games.
As in closer to reality than other NFS games. Not how it is the most realistic game (but the ricing in that game sure is realistic).
There is definitely no fail in that.
I meant that the Toyota Corolla was the dominant grip car in the game. There are plenty of cars, but they aren't competitive in grip mode in Underground 1. The 240SX was the best drag racing car, and various cars could be used for drift mode, so "one car" game was referring to the fact that the dominant grip car was significantly faster than the 2nd fastest grip car.
Nothing compares to extreme ricing as done in the Pacific Rim:
However some guys in Romania did a pretty good spoof of ProStreet. Apparently Romanian chicks dig guys in their modified 1.3 liter econoboxes. Nothing compared to the ricers above, but still pretty good. Click on the first picture to see the video:
I really hope this is true... I would love a NFS with amazing crash models (not the hideous NFS Pro Street ones).
My favorite NFS was NFS Hot Pursuit 2... believe it or not, there are still many servers and people playing it online today
Even I played it online many times this year...
If only they'd done something like Hot Pursuit 2, it would've been perfect... I still think Hot Pursuit 2 has A LOT BETTER graphics than NFS Pro Shit...
I have the whole NFS series (every of them original) since the "Road&Track" version (the first NFS), except for NFS Pro Shit and NFS Undercover, because I really won't waste hard drive space with this...
I just loved Hot Pursuit 2's soundtrack, sometimes I opened the game just for listening to the songs... I tried taking them from the game but I couldn't :cry: . I think it had the best intro video too
In 2004 I made a website about NFS, with a lot of people that loved NFS and posting actively on the forums (24,000+ registered users)...
Then I made a website for NFS MW in 2005 as well (NFSMW Brazil), and from the 24,000 users on the previous website (which had to be shut down since it was a paid host and I didn't want to spend money on it anymore), 860+ of them registered on the new one (yet almost everyone were posting actively... on December 2005 the forum had already 19,000+ posts, and we only talked about NFS... ONLY. No off topics or such things (I've implemented a off topic about 8 months after creating the new forum, thought)), and there were NEVER Spam, flood, flaming or trolling of any kind, it was NOT allowed at all, and I spent almost this whole year of my life visiting and updating the website and the forums everyday, cleaning EVERYTHING not related to NFS on the forums lol .
Then after NFSMW, on 2006, I made another paid website/forum, thinking NFS Carbon would be good with autocrap(sculpt) and so on... what a deception. Although everyone from the last website and much more people registered on it (25,000+), there was a lot of trolling, spamming, flooding , even with my politics of deleting inutile posts/threads... the off topic had to be implemented since the forum creation... and after some months I had to give the website to another person (so he would pay for the hosting and I would only take care of the website and forum).
In 2007, still believing the series would get better, I made another host paid website for Pro Street.... the person that was paying for the hosting for me felt like editing everything, every single forum and subforums... he added like 70 different forums for almost everything:
"Design section", "cars section", "showroom", "NFS", "GTA", "Burnout", "stalker", "crysis", "off topic>off topic, things you felt like posting, flood section, drunk people, games, etc"
It was a disaster. 30,000+ registered users, NO constructive posts, only flood and so on
I gave up, told him to <censored> and shut down the forum on the hosts.
EA Games ruined my website.
I still speak to everyone (and I mean everyone) who joined my website in 2005
We've made made really good friendship...
In 2006 I found LFS (I really don't remember where/how I found it, but no one told me of it, I found it by myself, don't really remember how), tried it out, LOVED IT (the first thing I loved on it was the steering wheel actually turning correctly ) and then told everyone I knew.. then we started playing it so much, we just loved it. It was incredibly fun and amazing, a game with so much detail in it and so easy to pick up and play, and everybody's computer would run it.. I did put the link for lfs.net on my website, and almost everybody downloaded it. It was the best thing that happened to the website in 2006
That's why I'm still here, and playing LFS
Just on a side note: during the NFS Forum [Brazil] (my website in 2006) I made a website about Pixel Cars. I called it NFS Pixel Brazil and everyone from the other websites joined it too... There were car tuning, people had jobs, there were stores for buying things for the cars, and there were plenty of races and things like that for earning money and customizing their pixel cars... it was pretty cool, we even had a war between my website and another pixel car game, PCA ("Pixel Car Advanced"), in which everyone from my websites were registering on PCA for flooding/spamming as much as they could, with huge flood posts and everything... people on PCA tried to do the same but they just couldn't because my security systems were awesome ( ) and then PCA was infested with flood, spam and that kind of posts, they lost the war and closed their website completely... forever. (actually, PCA was created by a user who thought stealing MY pixel cars files and rules of the game was cool, so nobody on my forum liked it and the users decided by themselves to start the war and I liked it . The war ended in 2 weeks.).
I closed the NFS Pixel Br in 2008.. it was the last website of this kind (NFS/tuning) that I've made. There were 262 registered users, and 27,260 posts on the forum.
I met PCA's admin on LFS demo online sometimes. He sucks at racing . It was cool to see that even he was playing it thought.
[Attached: 1.jpg (signature) | ridiculously big screenshot.jpg (profile)]
My last car on NFS Pixel Br based on FlatOut2's "Road King" car.
After reading this post you will notice that me and a lot of other people liked NFS so much before it started sucking , you'll know a bit more about my past (things that I've done on the Internet, mostly related to NFS because the OP is about NFS being discontinued), and... it'll take you some time for reading it
I've seen so many examples of that. Those ricer cars look like graphics card artifacts and I find that really funny. If a new NFS had that kind of ricing, I would die of laughter.
Anyways, I don't know how NFS is going to get out of the huge hole they put themselves in. They've been sticking to the tuner theme for too long and if they do come back with an exotic, more race oriented theme, I still don't think they could pull themselves out of that hole.
I too have doubts if they will get out of this one. Maybe renaming the series would help. When they started the tuner thing, there was a lot of controversy among the long time players. But because a lots of kiddies did buy the game because they didn't even know what it was about in the first place (What, there were NFS's BEFORE underground??). Now they ran out of tuning ideas, same old cars, same old crap, even the kiddies now know it sucks.
They just... Screwed up. I can't imagine sitting at a big table, brainstorming about the new NFS, and just somebody says: Okay, let's take one of our best selling series, make it worse and sell it again!
Being a PC player, Hot Pursuit 2 was a "low" for me. It was the first NFS to drop both in car views and saveable replays. The post race replays didn't have adjustable cameras, you only saw an exact repeat of the view(s) you used during a race. The engine sounds of the fastest cars McLaren F1, and the Mercedes CLK GTR were awful (on the PC). The PC physics was also bad, apparently a bit too oriented to consoles with digital controllers, fastest lap times were had by pulsing controllers (wheels or joysticks), as if trying to emulate digital controllers with analog controllers. The cars bogged down at the slightest hint of a turn, making even the high powered cars seemed underpowered, unable to maintain speed even in 1st gear in a mild turn. The graphics for the scenery were a step up from previous games, but you needed a relatively fast computer for the time to enjoy them.
The older NFS games had more features, with High Stakes having the most. Day + night + weather options for all tracks. Saveable replays and ghost (shadows), and replays made from ghost runs would show both the current car and the ghost car (previous run).
The later games mostly improved the graphics, with Underground 1 being a huge step up graphically, although the tracks were short. Underground 2 had a large number of tracks and modes, a big improvement, and was the last NFS to have replays of any kind (post race only, but changeable camera view). Most Wanted (sort of a Hot Pursuit 3), brought back the exotics and pursuits. Carbon was good but it's career mode was relatively short. ProStreet used real race tracks, but a lot of players didn't like the change to track racing and no free roam. Undercover stepped up the graphics another notch, although some of the effects are annoying (to me), but at least these can be turned off. The storyline wasn't the greatest, but it was better than a lot of movies.
For me, the most impressive part of Underground 2, Most Wanted, Carbon, and Undercover, is the sheer size of the environments, lots of streets, background objects, basically both good quality and quantity in the scenery.
Hot Pursuit 2 uses GameSpy and last I checked it was still running HP2. The EA servers for Underground and older games were shutdown, but a few players still play High Stakes and Porsche Unleashed via a player created package called IPLounge that includes chat, online races, and stats, utilizing the TCP/IP features of those games. The Undergrounds didn't have TCP/IP play, and as far as I know, no one's made a TCP/IP to Lan emulator for the Underground games.
NFS PC online play reached a peak of 1000 players online during the first week of the Underground 2 demo back in late 2004. Since then it's greatly dwindled, partly because all the different consoles took away the PC player pool.
A bit off topic, but I was sad to see the Nascar Racing Season 2003 servers shut down a few months ago, even though I only tried it online for about 2 or 3 months. Live For Speed online play is still doing very well though.
Only NFS Underground 1 and 2 could be considered tuner games. The NFS games before and after are about exotic and/or high end cars, and although there are still visual upgrades, they're minimal compared to the Underground series.
Honestly that step was long overdue. Everything after Porsche Unleashed was quite crappy, with the sole exception of Pro Street which actually tried to put some driving physics into a need for speed game, despite still being way too chavy for my liking.
Hopefully, Criterion doesn't just slap real world cars onto Burnout, but make a proper Need for Speed, which was originally about driving obscenely expensive cars around in wonderful environments.
I played Hot Pursuit 2 on PC too, and I liked it... even thought, as you said, the replays weren't that good... I didn't notice much about these cars engine sounds, but some engine sounds that really annoyed me were the ones of NFS Most Wanted. I had a terrible headache if I played that game for more than 20 minutes... I had to turn off engine sound to actually play it.
For HP2, I think the best improvement was its graphics (and physics in a general way). It was a huge graphics improvement when compared to the previous game.. I played it on a FX5200 128MB on highest settings, 1024x768, very playable and high fps at all times. I loved this game just when I saw it.. There was a store (CTIS Megastore) with a lan house inside it where everyone could use the lan, their games and the internet completely for free and it was pretty good. I used to play NFS HP2 in that store a lot of times (more than 3 weeks of playing), for many consecutive hours, before actually buying the game (didn't have money to do so before )...
I liked High Stakes so much too... The three NFS games that I think I played for the most time (and was worth it) were Hot Pursuit 2, High Stakes, and Hot Pursuit (when I bought a Stealth III 32mb there was a time limited demo for this game on the CD, I played it a lot). Not necessarily in that order. I like NFS Porsche too, although because of a corrupted savedgame issue I wasn't able to finish this game... It was the first (and only) NFS available in Portuguese . I played high stakes on PC and on PS1 and I thought the PC one was better.
Excellent website by the way.
I'm watching some videos there already.
1. NFS 4 had a better one IMO
2. It's weird to be dumped face forward in sh....ehm... undercover after a glimpse of light in a sewer, which was Pro Street in the series since 2000...
I don't mind having performance parts to add onto a car, as long as they have a realistic effect. Y'know, basic stuff like a spoiler not adding any power and adding weight and drag.
@JeffR
The second link you posted is fairly well-known. And a lot of them are blatant P-Chops and spoofs Watched the Romanian vid (without sound) and it made me smile. NOSSSS up ma 1.3 Lada Riva, yo!
One of my friends ran one as well. It was called Manga Car World. It was like the 3rd populer Pixel Car Game out of all the well known ones.
It had quite alot of active users. But he jsut gave up on it after a few years because it was just so hard to run.
Although earlier this year he reopened it on a new server as phpbb forum instead of invisionfree forums, and he had a bunch of mods so that when people bought things it would acctually come out of virtual money that they had.
Was awesome
And on topic. I think i am perhaps the only person here who liked the Tuning games from nfs :/
I Hated prostreet, havent played undercover.
Thought carbon was a bit short.
And didnt like most wanted much.
But i really loved Need for speed underground, and even more underground 2.
Id like for them to make a new game like underground 2, with decent physics. A nice selection of cars, no shitty catch up feature. And alot of choice in personalisation. And defintly free roam.
, even with my politics of deleting inutile posts/threads... the off topic had to be implemented since the forum creation... and after some months I had to give the website to another person (so he would pay for the hosting and I would only take care of the website and forum).
) and then PCA was infested with flood, spam and that kind of posts, they lost the war and closed their website completely... forever. (actually, PCA was created by a user who thought stealing MY pixel cars files and rules of the game was cool, so nobody on my forum liked it and the users decided by themselves to start the war 
)...