A solid racer but a bit repetitive, Need For Speed gracefully jumps into the PS2 generation with fairly detailed cars, large tracks, and a great sense of speed and weight to everything. The career progression gets a bit repetitive before it's over as you're asked to drive on the same dozen tracks again and again, but the faster cars feel different and you can hop between the regular racing and the Hot Pursuit mode (where you evade the police). It gets a bit brutal with the amount of rubber banding the AI employ, as well as how random some of the elements of the police go. The soundtrack is alright but it's shorter than some of the actual races you have to do by the end. It all looks fairly good though, especially for early PS2. It comes together into a fairly neat package and it definitely is worth a playthrough from this era.
Black Box era starts here (on the PS2 version)
If you are planning to play this game, PLEASE play/emulate the PS2 version, it's objectively the superior version of the game.
For Blackbox's first NFS entry, it's not too shabby! Their signature handling model which got carried over to Underground and onwards is clearly there and boy it still feels good! It's also the first NFS with licensed soundtrack, There's still a song by Rom Di Prisco present. Overall the songs are great but I wish the EATRAX would shuffle them properly...
The map design was very nice and their implementation of shortcuts was something fresh.
Some odd things about is that there's clearly a damage model to a point that smoke would come out of the car but I have not yet encountered a case where the car would get totalled (if it's such a thing in the first place.)
Another thing is that the roadblocks are very weird. Even the SLIGHTEST contact with either the police car or the barriers would completely stall your car for a few seconds.
Also I get the fact that Helicopters can throw explosive barrels but I can't remember them shooting rockets at you? The non-ps2 version would also only drop one barrle with each instance instead of 1.
Also don't bother with the Ultimate Racer, which is pretty much races minus the cops.
The end-game races also tend to get tideously long.
For Blackbox's first NFS entry, it's not too shabby! Their signature handling model which got carried over to Underground and onwards is clearly there and boy it still feels good! It's also the first NFS with licensed soundtrack, There's still a song by Rom Di Prisco present. Overall the songs are great but I wish the EATRAX would shuffle them properly...
The map design was very nice and their implementation of shortcuts was something fresh.
Some odd things about is that there's clearly a damage model to a point that smoke would come out of the car but I have not yet encountered a case where the car would get totalled (if it's such a thing in the first place.)
Another thing is that the roadblocks are very weird. Even the SLIGHTEST contact with either the police car or the barriers would completely stall your car for a few seconds.
Also I get the fact that Helicopters can throw explosive barrels but I can't remember them shooting rockets at you? The non-ps2 version would also only drop one barrle with each instance instead of 1.
Also don't bother with the Ultimate Racer, which is pretty much races minus the cops.
The end-game races also tend to get tideously long.
Soundtrack absurda de boa! Mas algumas corridas ficam repetitivas.
ACAB