Bumper view all up in your grill.
At a certain point in time, EA Games decided to turn the NFS series into a 2 Fast 2 Furious-inspired clusterfuck focused on the import ricers, the glorification of illegal ghetto culture and the desire for the New American Dream (it involves bling now, ya hear?). Great market research, basditos. Before that, Porsche Unleashed was made. This game exemplifies the history, class, and integrity of the Porsche series, which I guess is too vanilla for kids these days.
First off, you have to get a Windows 2000/XP patch to emulate Windows 95/98 memory management since its code causes the user interface to run at 5FPS without. I have no clue if if this works in Vista but I’m putting my money in bloody unlikely. *make obscene hand gestures*
The nice part about these early games in the series are the car controls not feeling like you’re floating on ice. Making turns, you can feel the weight of all points in the vehicle in its response to your directional input, mostly in the tilting caused by momentum. Like all Need For Speed games, the base gameplay mode pits you against computerized or networked opponents with the goal of getting from one point to another in a rural or urban area. In this release, all locales are European. Given that this game was released in 2000, its graphics show their age, but truthfully I didn’t find much difference from 2002′s Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2. The only real visual issues relate to repeating textures on large terrain and areas where the skymap is exposed by renderer clipping on the forests bordering the artificial environment.
The game uses a factory/tournament mode to unlock tracks and Porsche models along the way. The first two rounds of tournaments are hella easy, but after that I couldn’t even get third place in any race, even though my model and horsepower were the same the AI was using. It may be related to me only choosing automatic, so maybe using the stick would allow better acceleration. But that’s very unsmiley face. I was never a fan of manual transmission in video games as I like my diet entertainment. So after this point, I uninstalled the game and went back to twiddling my thumbs.
This post is less a review and more a recollection of my incompetence. Blog.
Cool to see someone still remembers this game. For me it’s been the only really good game in the need for speed series.I just found my original cd and was wondering if i’d try it again.
As for the game getting harder soon after the start I remember i had similar problems moving to the golden era the first time. One reason for this is that the cars get suddenly really powerful and since they are tailhappy porsches you really need to drive a while to get used to them. Other big thing is adjusting your car setup. You can make the car much faster and more stable by tuning the settings for suspension and brakes(and you don’t need to buy more expensive parts for this). After finishing the games for some 3 times the AI races really got too easy for me and I started to drive them with lot worse cars than the AI.
The best part of the game for me was the original cars. The cars seemed really well finished in the game and you could find special properties in each one of them. However I think they made too many ancient cars and left some of the newer ones undone. They later released some of the less popular new porsches as updates, but those cars seemed far less finished than the original ones.
The multiplayer would have had great potential, but it had some crucial issues because the race options were limited (as was the player amount). It was impossible to allow fine tuning the cars without allowing custom cars from the player account. This meant that it was impossible to tell what kind of parts the opponents had in their cars so it was pretty much useless to play like that.