Several years ago, I recall seeing a box appear at the retail
shelves, with a huge Road & Track logo on it. It intrigued me - after
all, I've been reading R&T for quite some time, and it piqued my
interest: what could they have possibly to do with a computer
game? Of course, the next thought I had was, "Cars" - but I was
unprepared for what it really was. In my view, the original
Need for Speed was absolutely groundbreaking, with licensed
"dream" vehicles, amazing car physics (aside from crashes and
flips) and sheer loads of fun. There was no other game, at the
time, that offered anything similar - everybody seems to have been
mostly centered around Formula 1, NASCAR and IndyCar. Sure,
there was Test Drive, but that was getting old.
Fast forward to the future, circa Need for Speed 2. I had high
hopes for that, since I liked the original NFS a lot. I popped the CD
into the drive, fired the game up, clicked Race…. and <censored
by editors>. This was the most horrible car racing game I have
ever played (or so I thought at the time, until I tried Test Drive 5/6).
The cars reminded me of those arcade games, back in maybe the
mid 80s, when you'd have a car attached to a moving plank, and
the road would scroll by as you "maneuver" the car to stay on the
track. Wow. To only think that I needed the full power of my PC to
play something like that.
Fast forward again. It's a year or so later, and out comes NFS 3.
Wow, thought I. Another NFS - will the glory of the original return?
So I tried it. It was better. But it still sucked. It was very pretty,
though. But it didn't suck right away - it just grew really, really,
really old, really, really soon. There was still no car damage. The
cars still flipped back on their wheels, obeying completely
non-Newtonian physics. They still felt like paper vehicles driving
on a paper road (though, admittedly, less so than in 2). Anyway, I
could go on for a while. NFS 3 was soon followed by High Stakes,
commonly referred to as NFS 4 - but I never played that, since it
was a revamped 3.
Now, (we finally get to the present here), EA dropped the licenses
from all those "dream" cars and went for one manufacturer:
Porsche. Controversial, in a way, since there are many people that
don't like Porsches (in my view, more than there are that don't like
Ferraris, for example). One reason behind that might be that
Porsche has grown to be a consumer car much more so than an
elite car, like Ferrari, if only because of the release of the
ultra-lame Boxster, which, I believe, alienated most of the true
fans of Porsche - and then they took the legendary 911, and
strapped Boxster parts onto it. That was "the straw that broke the
camel's back" for me. Either way, NFS: Porsche Unleashed has
nothing but Porsches in it, though it does have virtually every
single model made from the early 50s to today, with one notable
and glaring exception: the 959. More precisely, it's in the MENU,
but if you try to use it, the game notifies you, in this sarcastic tone,
that you "must download it" - but nowhere does it tell you where
from! I had a friend of mine call EA, and, according to what they
told him, the car "isn't available yet". Well, I'm sorry, but that's the
only Porsche I really *dream* of driving - all the others are just
"normal", sort of.
So which cars does the game have? "Over 80 models," claims EA.
Perhaps - but only if you consider the Porsche 911 Turbo 3.0 to be
drastically different from the Porsche 811 Turbo 3.3, and if you
consider a half-dozen Carreras to be all uniquely different (even
though they're made in the same year). No flames in regards of
handling styles, engine power and differences in car stereos,
please - after all, this isn't a sim, no matter how EA might want to
try to convince you of it. Of course, it obviously has the expected
911s, 911 Carreras, 911 Carrera 4s, 911 Turbos and the like; it has
the horrible Boxster in two models, the 1997 and the 2000; it has
the 356, 356A, 356B; the 914 and the 944, to name a few. Notable is
the 1978 935/78 "Moby Dick" and the 911GT1 - those are two really,
really nice, and really, really fast cars. They also handle like
Carmageddon cars with the Gravity from Jupiter power-up.
Something new got added to this release of NFS. Something
radically new, something I haven't seen in "brand-name" games
with "brand-name" cars in quite some time. Ever, in fact. Hats off
to Porsche for allowing this one - it's, of course, car damage. Don't
get me wrong: it doesn't have the loving, hand-modeled accuracy
of Papyrus games, or the visually overdone
"whoops-my-wheel-is-on-my-roof-again" flair of Viper Racing, but
it's a step in the right direction, and I have to give EA props for that
one. At the moment, I don't think there's much more than texturing
the model in a "broken" texture (it doesn't appear that the model is
actually deformed, or if it is, then by a very tiny amount). Let's
hope NFS 6 has some real car damage.
Hand in hand with car damage go car physics: and here, I have to
say, EA has outdone itself. They call it "a new 4-point" physics
model - I am at a loss as to what the four points model, but it
definitely works - cars *do* have a distinct feel, and more, they
actually feel like cars and not paper vehicles. If you have force
feedback, it becomes even more interesting - as you drive, the
joystick will sometimes lose resistance when you're losing traction,
bounce back if you hit a sidewalk, bounce back harshly if you hit a
signpost, and otherwise reflect the terrain.
The realism of the cars goes a step further. You can turn on the
headlights (no, that's not the "further" part, that's fairly normal) -
but, inexplicably, you can use your blinkers and even turn on the
hazard lights (both blinkers at the same time)! Now that's what I
call attention to detail. I would even be happy about that - but oh,
it just occurred to me, that so much time went into developing
those that the developers forgot to make proper models of the cars'
dashboards. So you have these beautiful blinking yellow lights
(which, incidentally, don't blink on the dashboard like in a real car
- neither does the dashboard light up when you turn on the lights),
but you can't read what the dashboard says. And it isn't those
four-vertex rectangular sticks that are your hands - no, they don't
obscure the view - it's the fact that the dashboard is apparently
rendered at 320x200 and stretched to your screen's resolution. No,
make that 100x80. Or even less. I can't even tell where the tach is,
much less what speed I'm going at!
There are a few other annoyances with the game. One pertains to
multiplayer: whenever I raced against other people, I had to
always avoid their cars - every single time I would so much as
touch one, I would spin. The interesting part is, my opponents
never, ever, ever spun - I have no idea why, and I have no
explanation for it, but it has nothing to do with skill (or lack of), as
I'm sure some would think of suggesting - I still won, I was just very
annoyed at the end of the race.
In addition to that (and this might be something only I ran into, so
this doesn't necessarily imply a problem with the game - though I
do feel I should mention it), I ran into occasional crashes, where
the game would crash my kernel32.dll, as well as occasional
lockups and framerate slowdowns - to something of the order of
1fps or below. After that, my joystick would get forced into one
corner, too - regardless of whether I would hold it or not.
Clarification: the Sidewinder Force joystick has an optical sensor
to check if your hand is on the stick or not, and only enables force
feedback when you're holding it, so as to not damage the joystick -
but in my case, all by itself, it would force itself into a corner and
stay there as I watched, astounded. Only a full power off of the PC
fixed it. As well, occasional multiplayer glitches surfaced: people
getting dropped, characters not appearing when typed and such.
However, I would like to reemphasize, that I may well be one of
the rarer people to have experienced at least some of these, so I
won't blame EA for everything just yet.
The soundtrack, I must say, is pretty catchy. I even liked it for quite
a bit, especially the electronic tracks. But then my Xitel Storm
Platinum PCI came in (an Aureal Vortex2-based card, and yes, I
know Aureal has all but gone under), so I quickly killed that music
and put a few Oakenfold mixes in the queue, and that was just
way, way better. That also helped me mute the ambient sounds,
like sheep bleating and birds chirping, that are just everywhere,
everywhere, no matter where you go, there are birds, sheep, and
other annoying sounds.
The graphics are also quite good, though sprites are used again
(won't sprites ever die?). You'll see some cool effects in different
places of the map, though, as you drive through - volumetric
lighting, water vapours, and other little neat things. Unfortunately,
overall, I think the tracks are fairly bland, especially Auvergne -
just an endless flow of nondescript buildings with occasional
nondescript vehicles parked outside. And by the way, what's up
with traffic consisting of exactly three different models of cars? (In
the Modern Club race that I'm doing right now, make that exactly
one model - a red 4-door hatchback of an unknown brand). The
headlights are useless, too: on the other hand, you see their
beams (at least in the lame in-car and outside views - not the
bumper view), but on the other, if you turn them off, suddenly
EVERYTHING becomes dark, sort of as if you switched the sun off.
Go figure. Also (unrelated, really), why is it that computer
opponents never screw up? That is, if there is traffic, they'll drive
into the occasional Sunday driver. But if there's no traffic, they
never, ever err - so should you spin out or flip and are on the
hardest difficulty setting, getting to #1 is next to impossible.
And on a last note (yes, this is sort of "stuck in" here, out of place,
out of time, out of context), you can modify your cars very
extensively. Well… actually, let me clarify that. You can tune the
normal things like brake balance, gear ratios, etc. and you can
also buy parts for your Porsches. The parts you can buy are all
from the Authorized Porsche Catalog (I can hear the cheering and
the excitement, now stop that). Curiously, I really don't see what
they mean by "work with over 700 parts from the official Porsche
catalog" (quote from the website): it appears to me that everything
is called "Professional Brakes" or "Superlight Flywheel", and the
only time you would actually see a difference is for engines - you
will actually see "3.6L Turbo" or "3.0L", and that seems to be the
only difference. Aside from that, how do they get to 700 parts? (I
suppose the answer is pretty obvious, but I was rather hoping for
some good reason).
So how does NFS:PU measure up overall? It, surprisingly, is what I
would call a "not bad" game. It has its defects (some really, really
bad ones: where the HELL is the Porsche 959?! Who cares about
these wussy Boxsters and other trash??) but, in general, is very
entertaining to play. Multiplayer is a blast, and is virtually lagless,
too (the reason for that is that the game doesn't sync with the
server - you race locally, and the server just transmits you the
coordinates of all players at a time, so you see the player cars
jerking around, but your driving is smooth as always - ingenious
idea, don't know why nobody thought of it before - too bad the cars
are almost -always- jerky, and it's really, really hard to plan attacks
on other players). But aside from that, the main decision you have
to make boils down to this: are you a Porsche fan? (Yes/No): if
that's a Yes, second question: are you willing to drive Porsches,
nothing but Porsches, never deviating from Porsches and being
stuck with Porsches for many, many hours unend? (Yes/No). If you
answered Yes to both of them, the game is for you. In any contrary
case, you might want to try the demo first and see if it persuades
you to play or not. Final verdict? Good game… for Porsche lovers.
(Hey, that's better than that Viper Racing game, at least).
By: 
