Need For Speed - The Run
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Anyone playing? Pre-ordered it, and it came out last week, but I didnt get to pick it up till a couple days ago. Absolutely loving it so far. Love the fact that its back to street racing, and it is much less sim-like like previous Need for speeds (pro street). You actually feel the speed again. The cops are a complete pain my ass though.
Oh, and the fact that it has your closest friends time in the top right, telling you how far ahead or behind you are, updating in real time, is awesome! I love when I hit a wall, and I think my friends time is gonna jump away from me, but I actually make up more time. Cause it means they messed up even more than I did. haha.
Playing on xbox. Gamer tag is Anim8TheWeak if anyone wants to add me.
Oh, and the fact that it has your closest friends time in the top right, telling you how far ahead or behind you are, updating in real time, is awesome! I love when I hit a wall, and I think my friends time is gonna jump away from me, but I actually make up more time. Cause it means they messed up even more than I did. haha.
Playing on xbox. Gamer tag is Anim8TheWeak if anyone wants to add me.
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The different stages are awesome and different. Racing through the desert to get to vegas, sand storms blowing in and making it hard to see. amazingly accurate lens flare when it comes to the sun. If you`re driving into the sun in real life, its hard to see anything. same with this.
I'd suggest this to anyone that loves racing games, but is looking for something a little less simulation than GT5. It reminds me alot of underground 2.
-rant-I was also really annoyed at first that I had to sign into Orgin to play a demo on my ps3. Doing so allows you to unlock a special car in the retail version which actually isn't terrible but they should tell you first.-end rant-
Criterion's making it, which is good, because they're the only EA company that kicks ass all the time. Now, the closer they make it to the original HP2, the better. None of this EMP, no story, no character nonsense. Just a handful of supercars, a bunch of cop cars, and some arcade racing and scenery that makes most artists weep tears of joy.
hot pursuit? thats pretty much what this game is... yes, there is a bit of story, but all you drive are some high end cars, racing down a set street with cops chasing you.
I for one would love to see a need for speed underground 3..... Loved that series
And I wish everyone would get over the whole open world thing, it ruined Underground 2, it didn't help Burnout Paradise. It's like the two-gun-only FPS shooter games. Nobody can tell you why they do it other than pointing at other games. Except Valve doesn't do racing games, so there nobody to walk in with a top hat and school everyone.
That's so true. I've been waiting for a proper Burnout sequel. I did like Paradise (mainly because the stunt mode was awesome) but open world pretty much destroyed the flow of the game, forcing you to pause every few second to check if you're still going in the right direction. I hope Criterion will make a comeback with a proper sequel; at this point, I couldn't care less for the NFS series.
(Frankly said, I'm not a car-guy and Burnout is one of the few racers I like because of how arcade it is)
left me wanting more.. but neh.. boycotting nfs games to a bit, since they refuse to add split screen..
strongly disagree, and Stefan knows whats up !
personally my favorites of the need for speed series are:
NFS: Hot Pursuit 2 (2002) - got me into the series
NFS: Underground 2 (2004) - loved the freedom and customization abilities
NFS: Most Wanted (2005) - actually posed a challenge with the cops and mixed everything nicely together
NFS: Hot Pursuit (2010) - went back to the roots
The problem though is the whole 'racing' bit of the 'racing game'. Underground 2, Hot Pursuit (remake) and Burnout Paradise all had the weakest tracks and racing of the series because they were semi-open world. Sure you could cruise around not racing, but when it came time to actually do the whole racing thing, it cost them.
Liberties can be taken when cars only race through one small part of a city - corners can be tailored and perfected, because you know they're only going through them the way you (the designer) want. If suddenly a sequence has to work with cars taking 10 times as many routes, then it's simply not going to be as good.
Think of the mountainous top bits of Carbon and Underground 2, they're nothing compared to the Island Paradise track in Hot Pursuit 2.
The series was at its height with part 5, Porsche Unleashed and things have been declining steadily until this year's Hot Pursuit, where Criterion managed to resuscitate the series that had become a ghost of what it once was, fueled by pop-culture like the Fast & Furious.
I'm not too convinced by the Run, Blackbox' silly influence of wanting a story and all that crap just isn't what it's about for me. Really, since EA canada turned into Blackbox, they have never created a half decent NFS, even creating such turds as NFS Undercover and NFS Carbon, games in my opinion not even worth 5/10.
I guess I'm just old or something, prefering unmodified supercars with mostly performance customization, and driving on point to point tracks in rural, outdoor locations. Test Drive Unlimited would totally be my thing if it wasn't for the open world making the game terribly boring after a few hours.
I personally didnt like the older NFS. Well, i did, at the time, but now I much prefer the customize the look of your car and cruise around streets. Yes, the tracks may not be PERFECT, like Brendan mentioned. But, to me, they are better. They actually feel real. I do agree that if you are going to have an open world racing game, there shouldnt be directional markers that make it so you cant take different streets to get to where you need to go. You should be able to go through side streets and all that. Though, I do remember once of those games letting you do that? Not sure if it was underground, or most wanted or what, but I remember being able to do that. maybe not ALL the races were like that, but some said, hey, get here and get here fast.
With all that being said, in the run, its not open world. its point to point, and the levels and awesome. 10 sections in the game, about 5 races per section, and each section has a completely different feel to it. I just ignored the story, though, for a racing game, it really wasnt THAT bad. i felt almost completely satisfied at the end of the game. few minor things i didnt like, but not enough to ruin the game for me.
When it's a street that just sorta looks like you could race on it, then it's not as good.
Xoliul, you're correct. Porsche Unleashed actually got better with time, whenever some part/s gets 100% damage, the game crashes to desktop (running it on Win7 maybe an bug - I mean feature?).
Another thing the newer racing games don't get is that you NEVER start people off in a bad car.
NFS High Stakes, BMW or Mercedes roadster
NFS Porsche, start in a 1950 Porsche 356A Coupe or Roadster.
NFS HP2, start in a Lotus Elise or Opel Speedster (same thing basically)
NFS Underground, Dodge Neon
Now it shouldn't be too hard to find where the drop-off point is.
You know it's not just the stupid customizing that gets taken to the absolute depths of tastelessness (it's gone so far that you can still see the influence those games and movies had, on the street, when some boy racer with his ridiculous car drives past), but it's just the entire concept of good taste getting thrown out of the window. Like with their ridiculous "Badittude" cutscenes in some of the previous ones. I remember NFS MW winning an award for "most baddittude" on IGN or something (you know, the whole "yo dawg, your ride is whack, Ima take it from you, while insulting yo momma as well, AND I'm stealing your girl as well!!").
Such a stark difference with the Porsche Unleashed game. It was all so much more honest and down to earth. The driving is still the best i've ever experienced, cars all felt different, and the really fast ones were exciting not because of more motion blur and FOV change, but because they were damn hard to control, I lost it with my first 930 Turbo so many times, and it never got easy to take that car around the challenging tracks. And physical contact with opponents actually had results, either one of you could skid out instead of them feeling like bricks running on preset paths. You owned and customized cars (throughout time!!) with official factory parts, actually saving up for that Superlight flywheel or the Big bore throttlebody, none of that "lvl 1-2-3 performance" crap.
You drove on courses that each had so much character and were so diverse: no other game ever had such nice fictional tracks as Normandy, Cote D'Azur, Auvergne, Schwarzwald, Monaco, Pyrenees... I'd really go out and drive a track solo, for fun, to experience the car and scenery.
They even had a second sort of career mode with a slight story, where you work your way up as a Porsche Factory driver, simply presented through no bullshit dialogs.
Everything in the game affirmed it was about the true experience driving, you could even browse through historical Porsche posters, video's and leaflets..
whatever, I'm just old and grumpy when it comes to the NFS games. Sales probably tell me I'm wrong anyway...
Just a FYI... adding split screen isnt as easy as you would think. To keep graphics high, and quality overall up. xbox or ps3 simply cant push double everything at 1 time. So its either drop quality by half, and split screen or full rez with just 1 person at a time.
It sucks, i know. but that's how the math works. You will notice more games going with the 2 player option over xbox live ect ect b/c each box or ps3 can push its own clients data.
there are plenty of 2-4(!!!) player splitscreen games out there.
gran turismo 5, warhawk (4 player ONLINE huge maps tps..fuck LOD if all 4 are on different parts of the map! impressive as fuck!), blur
what kind of huge massive eyeball-popping crazy fuck-all graphics do NFS games have that those 3 do not (and tons others that I didn't mention, Uncharted3 comes to mind..)?
sure, NFS games might have a TAD better (not only The Run, which has a bit more than a tad..) graphics than Blur or GT5 (?)..
fuck me, the game doesn't run at a stable 30fps in 1p mode, a slight downgrade in graphics (to get to those horrible Blur or GT5 or Uncharted3 graphics, that handle 2-4p splitscreen) would hardly be noticeable enough to whine about..
2-4player splitscreen having fun throwing popcorn and cursewords at eachother > 1000 snow particles instead of 500
It's a fickle thing. You're using more cameras, but still rendering the same amount of pixels. You can ease off the anti-aliasing just a bit because both will be smaller, but you're still rendering a bunch of things twice. motion blur can go, too, and so can a bit of texture filtering. Use a much less aggressive LOD.
One of the biggest hits for racing games is the physics. GT5's physics are calculated hundreds and hundreds of times per second, it's insane. Now that has to be done twice with two inputs. Of course NFS would only have to go for (say) 120 or so. Shift I think only went for 50 or 60, but that caused cars to spezz out through Eau Rouge.
like I said, there is no excuse for NFS games not to have splitscreen, at least not a graphical or hardware related excuse, as other games pull off sweet graphics in splitscreen on current hardware. let's not even think of The Run, which might be the best looking game ever (it has to be, why would it not run splitscreen otherwise?), but what about earlier NFS games that didn't have splitscreen either?
clearly an executive decision, "fuck splitscreen" had to be said sometime(s) in the development of these games.
but sure, call out for mipmaps a meter earlier or whatever, who cares when me and 1-3 friends are blasting down the mountain in our ferraris?
I bought Blur JUST for the 4player splitscreen.. a feature that got the game sold at least to one customer
I will not buy NFS because it REFUSES to have 2-4player splitscreen.. a missing feature that lost a sale
you win some you loose some I guess
Not really been interested in any other NFS games but The Run's been looking like something I'd want to play.
Although reading the comments in here perhaps I'll wait and grab it on OnLive or something...
People buy games and review them on gameplay, looks, and story. Its a fine balance to hit those 3 at a high mark and dumping 1 to boost another is kind of a bad business move for most games. Especially when the online ability is there and they dont have to sacrafice much to go that route.
Skate 3, for instance. They collected data from skate 2, and it came back that MAYBE 10% of ppl played the hot seat multiplayer. But that was only people connected to xbox live at the time. Yet, everyone i know who played that game, played the hotseat multi. It was perfect for gathers and parties and stuff. So with those stats, they ditched hotseat, only to find an abundance of unhappy customers after release, so they added a shittier version of the hotseat back to the game as DLC.
Personally... couch play is one of those things i look for in a racing game, and almost never buy one without it. But it seems now adays, more and more are coming out without it. it sucks....
but shit, Id buy NFS The Run and Hot Pursuit in a jiffy if they had that option.
1p out of the box, sucks as shit, but with a dlc (which would just add something that should have been there from the get go..), Id buy it! lol