Be warned – this isn’t a comprehensive review of the game – I’ve only had it for one evening so far. I’ve been a massive fan of the NFS games since NFS III in 1998 playing them all on the various PCs over the years. For the most part they have been great, getting better and better with each new release…. until Pro Street. Up until this release the NFS games had had a great formula: great tracks and courses to drive on, collect or earn great cars and a fairly simple plot that didn’t get in the way of the racing too much.
With Pro Street they have gone down a different path – back to single race events which would have been good apart from a few things:
- The driving was aweful because the physics engine was crap
- It crashed all the time
- There was too much hip hop, neon cars and other crap that wasn’t needed
This was the first release that put me off as soon as I started playing it. It’s also the first release that wouldn’t run on which ever computer I had at the time – whether it was a mid spec desktop or fairly high end laptop, all the rest ran fine on very high settings. Pro Street just about ran on minimum settings on a high spec Sony Vaio for maybe a race and a half before crashing every two minutes. During the short time I’d had to play it had put me off completely I never did anything to try and get a PC that would run it. Onto the next release.
Need for Speed: Undercover looked much more promising so when this was released I bought myself another mid-spec PC to play it on – something that met the minimum specs and should have been able to play it – surely that’s what the minimum spec is for. However, when the game turned up and I installed it, it just crashed Vista whenever I tried to play it. Many a night was spent trying to find out the cause and fix it with no success. Eventually it just went on eBay.
So, back to the present – a new NFS game and a new laptop to try it on. This game kind of snuck up on me – I hadn’t even heard it was being made and then suddenly it was being recommended to me on Amazon. Luckily EA had decided to release a demo with this one so I downloaded it, installed it on my laptop and fired it up. After ignoring the recommended “low” graphics settings and putting them up to “medium” I managed to crash it a few times – it is a laptop with laptop graphics after all, but after putting them back down to low, it ran fine and enticed me enough to lift the EA boycott (Red Alert 3 annoyed me as well but that’s another story).
This did present me with a problem though – I didn’t want to play the entire game on “low” settings so what was I going to do about something to play it on. Getting a decent PC to play this on that would last me a few years to make it worth it could end up costing me over £2000 and apart from the huge cost to play a handfull of games, me and the missus already have laptops so wouldn’t use it for other computing activities, we don’t have anywhere to put it and with the way things are moving in the PC games industry – it might not work on next years games.
So, alternatives? PS3, Wii or Xbox 360. We already have a Wii and while I love the innovative controllers and gameplay this opens up, the graphics aren’t brilliant and the controller for racing games is similar to what you use on a PS3 or Xbox 360. I could have had a look at the PS3 but since I’ve also had my eye on Project Gotham Racing for a while, I decided to take a look at the Xbox instead. I was tempted to save some money and stick with the Wii (there is a credit crunch on) but then I came across the Xbox 360 Arcade edition and as I’m not a hardcore gamer who will be playing on it all night the limitations of the Arcade edition didn’t make much difference to me and the cost was low enough that I just went ahead and ordered one.
So, this got me thinking – does my change from long term PC gamer to having two consoles (my previous console before the Wii and Xbox was a Sega Master System!) mean that things have changed so much that PC games could be on their way out? I think: Yes. With cheap plasma TVs, cheap laptops, wireless networks, cheap networks etc – the hardcore PC gamer who has a top end system that does everything must be becoming something of a varity.
Maybe the PC game is an endangered species….