Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
Digg
Tell us what you think!Send a letter to the editor about this or any other article in The Maine Campus.
Perhaps one of the most recognized racing franchises of all time is the Need for Speed. It is truly a series that has stood the test of time and several generations of console platforms. Over the course of the last several games – “Underground” and “Underground 2″ – the series has made several successful changes to the game play in the career mode. The most significant is that the new career mode enables you to customize and outfit your car with anything imaginable. Another welcome addition is a free roaming mode, where the player can drive around town and look for races and challenges. Adding a whole new depth of game play, “Need for Speed Most Wanted” adds an entirely new twist to the series.
Set in a fictional city of Rockport, and suburbs Rosewood and Camden – I swear I’m not making this up – the player is a street racer with the hottest car in town, a BMW M3 GTR, which is lost in the very beginning when Razor, a member of the Blacklist – a sort of racing club that is wanted by the police – races you for slips, which are the title and registration of your car. The trouble begins when Razor cheats to win: He has his buddies slice the oil line in your car, causing your engine to blow midway through the race, making Razor the automatic victor and owner of your car.
You learn through a series of cutscenes that Razor has used your car to make a name for himself and move up the Blacklist to the No. 1 spot. You start out with enough money to buy one of four basic cars, and there are numerous others you can unlock by beating members of the Blacklist. You can start by playing with a Lexus IS 300, a Fiat Punto, a Chevy Cobalt or the Volkswagen Golf. These can be upgraded and tricked out with various parts as you outrace members of the Blacklist.
To earn the right to race against Blacklist members, you need to win races, complete milestone events and earn bounty. Winning races is pretty obvious – the race types are circuits, or laps; sprints, or racing from point A to point B; speed trap, where racers go around the course as fast as possible, hitting speed cameras that clock in how fast they are going, whoever has the highest mile per hour total at the end of the race is the winner; lap knockout, which is a circuit in which the person to cross the finish line last at the end of each lap is eliminated; drag racing; and tollbooth, where you go along the highway and try to get to all tollbooths before time runs out. These events run from pretty easy to super challenging, depending on what sort of vehicle you have. The good news though is that you usually have a good selection of races to choose from.
Milestone events and bounty go hand in hand, since most milestone events usually involve outrunning the police – yes, there will be high speed pursuits in this game – and bounty is your score after successfully evading the police. Some examples of milestone events are to immobilize police cars, dodge police roadblocks or spike strips, have a high cost to state, which is how much it actually costs the police to chase you, or just have a pursuit last for a certain period of time. It should be of note that the longer you outrun the police, the more your wanted level goes up, and the more your wanted level goes up, the more things the police throw at you. For example, the local police start out in regular patrol cars, then upgrade to undercover patrol cars, then state police comes after you in corvettes, then undercover corvettes and police helicopters. Finally, if you are lucky enough to get to a wanted level of five or more, the FBI gets involved and comes at you with SUVs. Once you get busted, you have to pay your fines. If you are arrested three times in the same car, the police impound the car. If you don’t have a backup car, you lose, and it’s game over.
The graphics of the Xbox 360 version are absolutely gorgeous. Everything looks very lifelike and realistic, right down to the sunlight reflecting off the windshield of the car. However, where the graphics really stand out is during the cutscenes. You’ll literally do a double take when you realize that those cutscenes are CGI and not full motion video. In terms of gameplay, not much has really been changed from previous incarnations of the Need for Speed series. If you are a fan of the “Need for Speed Underground” games, “Need for Speed Most Wanted” is definitely one that you’ll enjoy.
Bangor Daily News