Be Excellent To Each Other

Classics corner top ten : Need For Speed : Underground 2

Prologue.

Hi, I'm Brooke Burke. I play Rachel Teller in Need For Speed : Underground 2.

And as soon as you hear that you know you're in for a treat....

In case you were not aware who Brooke Burke is then please, let me enlighten you. Brooke Burke is a swimwear model and one of the most successful models in recent history. There is, of course, a very valid reason for that. It doesn't really take much to work out but here is a picture of the stunning Ms Burke.



The first thing you will see and hear when loading up NFSU2 is Ms Burke in all of her digital splendour. This is a fine thing indeed, and sets the tone for the game immediately. Brooke Burke doesn't come cheap, and immediately the game springs a leak and the class begins to ooze from its orifices like a punctured cream carton. Here is the opening screen.



Now it would be perfectly understandable after seeing Ms Burke to expect other things to have to give. Not so. The first thing you will hear when you enter the menu screen is Snoop Dogg. Now sure, he might not appeal to everyone and he may not be to your tastes but if you pin your ears back and listen carefully you will immediately notice that you have not heard this song elsewhere, neither before or after this game was released. And the reason for that is incredibly simple, Mr Dogg was hired specifically to come up with a track for the game. The song itself is Riders on the storm which is a cut and shut version of the original The Doors version with Snoop rapping over and alongside Jim Morrison. Very clever stuff indeed and again, not something that comes cheap. This game is an incredibly high budget title and it immediately shows.

Now I had almost shot my load before the game began. Talking of beginnings, let's rewind a little shall we?

For many years the Need For Speed franchise had become quite stale. Title after title had been released and each was no better than the last really. Sure some of you readers out there may have loved the Hot Pursuit series but in all honesty they left me cold. In real life I have a condition that gives me an incredibly heightened state of awareness. This makes gaming a very difficult thing for me indeed because I can smell a rat from a mile off the starboard bow. And the problem is (and I do see it as one, rather than a gift) is that I can seldom play a game and actually enjoy it. There are very very few games that I would play again, and most I will play for two minutes before deleting them. The problem for me with the Hot Pursuit series was the absolutely abysmal police A.I (artificial intelligence, something that is seldom there in a game). No matter how fast you went or how well you managed to keep that brute of a car in control you would find yourself being rammed into by Ford Crown Vics. These are what the police drive in the U.S.A. And trust me, whilst they do carry a very powerful 5.7l V8 'Interceptor' engine they aren't powerful enough to keep up with a hyper car.

This was something that EA had drastically missed the point on and messed up since the very first Need For Speed game that was choreographed alongside Road and Track magazine. The very first game was absolutely spot on with its A.I.

So yes. Things had become rather stale if you knew your onions, and the Need For Speed franchise was beginning to drag its knuckles on the ground in true gorilla like fashion.

And then it happened....

I remember when the original Need For Speed : Underground came out. There was hardly any build up and hardly any fanfare. All of a sudden WHAM ! And people were rushing out to upgrade their computers. If memory serves correct I was using a Radeon 7800 at the time. I had to rush out and get a Radeon 9200 Pro just because of the original NFSU. That's high praise indeed, because Doom III had not released yet and I knew I would have to go and buy another graphics card when it did. But one look at the original Need For Speed : Underground made it all very clear and worthwhile. This was going to be a whole new breed of gaming unleashed on the world.

And it was highly successful. So successful that it led us up to the sequel, which is what I am writing about today.

Need For Speed : Underground 2 was a good time for Electronic Arts. It was back in the days where they actually used to listen to their customers and design games to give them what they wanted, what they needed. Gaming food. Over the years they have sadly transformed into a company that makes games that will sell to millions upon millions of people, without caring one jot for those who actually want a proper game and don't mind spending the time to learn how to play it. Take the recent Command and Conquer as an example, it's a shell of its former self. Very sad indeed. Need for Speed is now back to being a shell of its former self too, and there are a lot of reasons for that.

Going back to what I said about budget from the moment Need for Speed : Underground 2 was completed EA immediately handed the license over to a Canadian team called, if memory serves me correctly, Black Box. And from that moment Need for Speed : Underground 2 was about to have its internal organs slowly removed, bit by bit, until its heart was gone.

Need for Speed : Most Wanted wasn't strictly a bad game. But it put back in those police chases that were just so wrong in Hot Pursuit. They didn't work properly then, and they didn't work properly in Most Wanted either. Again, you could be bombing down an express-way in a hyped up hyper-car (Diablo on steroids) and all of a sudden you would get a police S.U.V come roaring up behind you and begin to ram you into the crash barrier. Erm excuse me, but WTFF??!?! (extra F added to emphasise the F). How on earth can a swerving flunk of a car that resembles a fat girl spread onto all fours on roller-skates possibly compete with a Lamborghini Diablo? And there in lay the problem with games like that, proving once and for all that it was just not humanly possible yet (again I emphasise yet because the future of computing may change that) to make a game like this actually work. And the rotten games just continued to come. Need for Speed : Pro Street was another complete travesty. Welded steering columns and cars that handled like a lump of concrete with some trolley wheels glued on. Great ! And then the next one, Need for Speed : Undercover. To be honest, the more undercover that one stayed the better. AGAIN the police chases did not work and AGAIN you could try and outrun the police for about six bloody hours before being caught. Absolute rubbish.

Part of the reason Need for Speed : Underground 2 worked so well was because it did not try to reinvent the wheel (pardon the obvious puns here) but merely built upon what was not broken (being Need for Speed : Underground). Now the original did have its flaws, but it was so well crafted and so marvellous that even some one like me didn't give a crap.

It was stunning to look at and stunning to play.

So let's move onto some information about the game at hand shall we?

The idea of Need for Speed : Underground 2 is quite simple. You buy a stock pile of crap car from a dealership and then you make it yours. You get all kinds of options to change and a massive variety of things to stick to your car before having it painted in all kinds of glorious colours. But of course that just offers a wide variety of eye candy but nothing to write home about.

That's where the tuning and engine modification really begins to come into song. The possibilities are just enormous and before you realise it your car will be so fast you won't even have time to blink. Nitrous kits can be bought and fitted, purge kits, lowering kits, spoilers.. And there is such a massive variety of it too.

A stock car in the game toward the beginning will look like this.



Terrible isn't it? Well do not fear, because soon you can be driving a slammed growling animal like this one.



It's hard to portray just how stunningly beautiful this game was when it was released, but I clearly remember my jaw hitting the ground and taking absolutely ages to come back into my face. Even by today's standards Need for Speed : Underground 2 is absolutely gorgeous. Better still there are patches released by third party coders to make it into proper widescreen for modern monitors ! Hurrah !

Better still the second incarnation of the underground series showed that EA had actually listened to the gamers who played the original.

Gone was the terrible 'rubber banding'. Gone was the “Oh look, a freak accident right on the LAST BLOODY CORNER sending me from first to last.. How contrived was that?!?!?”

Gone was the lack of freedom and space.

All of these issues were addressed and fixed. No more would you be driving an immensely powerful Audi TT that can easily hit over two hundred miles an hour with a serious injection of laughing gas shoved up its posterior and have crappy VW Golfs coming up your rear. In this game you could hit the pedal, smile and wave as you leave slower inferior cars into a fading rear view mirror. Awesome.

Also, for good driving you would be rewarded with a handsome lead. One that even if you should make a mistake and plough into an oncoming car ever relinquish your advantage for.

And that was a good thing.

The basic principles of the game were as follows.

Street X. I shall begin with my least favourite because this one IMO was the only thing they even so much as got slightly wrong with 2. It consists of a small cramped car park and you bombing around it as fast as you can. Sadly good fast cars are not really suited to this and even with loads of burning asbestos from the brake pads were quite impossible to do in a really fast car. They are better suited to small crappy cars like the Peugeot and Golf. Sadly both the Golf and 'poogo' were not viable cars as the game progressed on account of them being front wheel drive, crap and slow.

Drift. God, every time I think about this I wet my pants. Drift was just absolutely brilliant right from the first game. How do you better it? Well, you take a look around you and notice that some crazy Japanese bastards are drifting their cars down single lane mountains. You then go right on ahead and add that into the game and throw in some oncoming traffic to dodge. The art of drifting is an art, make no mistake. This was something that was removed from Most Wanted and for that Black Box should just be lined up and shot.

Circuit. Simple. Nice closed circuit that has been marked off in the city that you get to drive in. This consists of laps and the amount of laps increases as you progress through the game.

Sprint. Take one long (and usually very open) fast course and get your arse from one end to the other as fast as you can.

Drag. Get your car on a quarter or half mile stretch, the more perilous the better and get down it as fast as you possibly can. This was always lots of people's favourite and one of my least, I just sucked at it. It's also quite an art because timing the revs and getting the shifts right is quite difficult to do. You also need to throw when to use your nitrous into the mix AND keep an eye on the road ahead. This is the only event in the game where you absolutely must use a manual gearbox.

U.R.L. Underground Racing League. Real racing tracks with real circuits. Gone is the traffic.

Small events – 'beeping'. When driving around town you will see other cars that are as lovely and detailed as yours (that are not generic boxes..) you drive up behind, honk your hooter (horn) and then an outrun race begins for cash. Outrun your opponent and you will build a cash stash. Mess it up and lose and you will be down a few hundred bucks.

Star races and magazine covers. Rachel will phone you on your cellphone and make you aware that a magazine or DVD want you to feature on their cover. At which point a star will appear somewhere in the world map and you can either take a leisurely cruise to it or will have a time limit to get there before the photographer buggers off. Set the GPS and get that car howling. Time is of the essence and as the game progresses this gets bloody hard. You will literally roll into position as the last second ticks on the clock.

Bass in your face from the junk in my trunk.

Yes, the music. The music in NFSU2 is just superlative. It defines just how a game soundtrack should be made. Not only does it include some excellent songs of a wide variety but it also includes a completely fresh soundtrack courtesy of EA TRAX. Yes, EA actually went to the bother of hiring artists to come up with specialised music that was made just for the game. The first game had an absolutely brilliant sound track (Chemical Brothers, Rob Zombie) and this game does not fail to disappoint either. You have Black Betty, Lean Back (Terror Squad) and all kinds of other aural loveliness.

Eye candy 1.

Need for Speed : Underground 2 is a graphical masterpiece. I mentioned toward the beginning of my ramblings that it was stunning even by today's standards and trust me readers, I meant it. If I was to be pedantic and compare this to a modern game then I could only find a few things that would need to be bettered. One of them would be that not every car is a highly detailed model like the one in front of you (yours, basically). Most of the traffic are generic boxes with wheels on. Now this is impossible to complain about because we are talking about a game that is six years old. Also, some of the buildings look a bit 'cut out' but again, the power and technology needed were just not there when this game released. But the thing is, that is literally all I can separate from this game and one released a couple of weeks ago. Seriously it is an absolute feast for the eyes. In fact no, I will go one better than that, this game is a trip to the finest restaurant and being give free reign to stuff as much food as you can into your eyes. It's just an immense visual treat. The game can be dark and moody but at the same time it can be a neontastic treat for your eyes as you scream past the local casinos.

Pedal to the metal.

The game-play in Need for Speed : Underground 2 is absolutely spot on. The cars are fast and weighty and believe me, do exactly what they should. I know this because I owned a car that would have blended into this game like a chameleon. The handling is tweaked to be absolutely perfect and the cornering sharp and precise. The more you modify your chariot the better it will suck itself to the asphalt and the faster and more safely you will make it through the course you are racing on. Stomp on the pedal too hard and the arse of your car will lead a merry dance. Over-steer, under-steer, you are going to have all of the problems associated with both.

It's also a good thing that EA removed the annoying car flipping curb clip that was irritating in Need for Speed : Underground. As I have said so many times EVERYTHING was listened to and EVERYTHING was overhauled to make this game as bloody well perfect as it can possibly be.

Big, fat and heavy.

Think you could sit down and complete this game quickly? Forget about it. Just... Forget about it. When I say big I mean 40 stone big. I mean, haven't seen your penis for about twenty years big. Even if you set this game to the easiest possible setting it will take you an absolute age to finish because there are just so many races and so much to do. Not only that but there are a wealth of hidden races that Rachel will call to tell you about. And the foxy minx will not give you the specifics, merely point out which town they are happening in or which area.

The U.R.L races gradually increase in scale. Both in track size and in lap amounts. Toward the end of the game some of the races can last up to twenty minutes and go over many miles. Just be warned, if you want to complete this game fully be prepared to put in the time and effort.

The conclusion.

You may have noticed that this review is pretty long winded. There is a reason for that. This game is one I hold very dear and could spend forever waxing lyrical about. I don't know if it was ever intentional for EA to create such a monster of such magnitude but they achieved just that. I don't know if it was planned or whether it was just sheer fluke and to be honest readers I couldn't give a crap. This game works so well on so many levels that it's just really hard to describe. Everything just seems to flow and work so well that you will never find yourself bored or lacking something to do. Races appear from nowhere just when you seem to be running out and hidden races will cause you to wander off course and end up spending hours just looking for the next one. As the game draws on it becomes fast and very bloody furious. I don't quite understand what went wrong after this game to be completely honest. Maybe EA handed out some gaming crack made from 100% pure Columbian cocaine and then slowly started to cut that crack with lots of bicarbonate of soda? I really don't know the answer to that.

All I can say is that it's a shame. I might be wide of the mark and some of the titles that came after this one (INC NFS Shift and so on) have had the same amount of money and care put into them but I just don't think so. I said a couple of months back that I am still waiting for Need for Speed : Underground 3. Sure, we are no longer caught in the fever of buying stupid little Japanese cars and making them keep up with Ferraris and the whole Vin Diesel buzz has died off. But there is still an enormous amount of people out there who wouldn't care about that.

When this game released it basically made fools of so many people. Many of us (especially us with an ounce of intelligence who can operate a computer beyond the realms of some one lacking in brainpower) absolutely hate and can not stand the imbeciles who spend their life savings on a Vauxhall Corsa. We scoff and we laugh, and we set up websites like Barryboys. There is absolutely no way in hell that we would ever even remotely consider building a stupid car such as those.

Yet when this game released I was taken aback by the type of people who were playing it. I know lawyers, barristers and even civil servants who were gleefully playing this game and posting photos of their ridiculous cars. Every one fell in love with this game because most of all it was just FUN. And it was fun because it was right. It was easy to get into and bloody hard to put down. The options given to you to pour perfume onto that pig of yours were so vast that you could literally spend hours adding wheels and making your car change colours when viewed from a different angle. It was the child in every single one of us and it gave us a blank canvas on which to paint. And the funniest part of all was it managed to get people who would normally laugh at it joining in and rushing out to buy PC systems that could allow them to crank it to its full glory and add the anti alias.

In fact, so good was this game that it even got people who had never driven a car in their life building a spazzed up Golf.

The marvel of this game is very hard to put into words. And sadly many people will not see this game for what it really is. The ones that do will know and understand that this game managed to raise the bar so high that you would have to go to space and be void of gravity to try and beat it.

The eye wateringly sad part about this game is that it gave us all a taste for pure crack that we have not been able to sample since. And that is just an absolutely heart breaking thing.

I very much doubt EA are reading this but a part of me wants them to. A part of me wants them to wake up and realise that what they are doing now is wrong. Sure they might be making trillions of pounds throwing out crap like The Sims but they are embarrassing themselves. They really ought to sit down and think of whether their company name should carry the word 'Arts' and maybe replace it with farts.

I rate this game in my top ten of all time. As a racing game I rate this as the best god damned racing game ever made. And that is a very high accolade indeed. If you have never played this then get out and get it. It can be had for a song these days and will throw rocks at even the latest racing games.

The moment you opened up the review by telling me the game was good because it had celebrities in it, I mainly lost interest.

Celebrities are not what I look for in a game.

Celebrities are a bonus. If a game is good and THEN you pour cream on it it gets better.

I think it's a sign that we may have different prioroties. The same is repeated throughout.

Also: Saying that it made you rush out to buy new parts for your computer and this marked it out as special made me laugh given the way that you seem to be on a constant mission to upgrade your computer.

I thought I could hear typing.

Impressive effort on the review, John. I think Chinny might want a word about your definition of 'classics', though

Some things do not age that well. As much as (at my age) I would like to sit down and play twenty year old games and think they are as great now as they were then I simply can't.

For a game to be a classic to me it needs to be done and then either not bettered, or, simply made to look different but still be the same game.

For example Mario could be hailed as a classic game. And it is in a few senses. But pitted against say, Mario 64 (or even SMW on SNES) it soon becomes apparent that it's simply an old game. Mario 64 for me was the best platformer (no matter how old) ever. Right up until they released Mario Galaxy which finally retained everything Mario 64 had and made it better.




The same is repeated throughout? You've lost me. You mean the part where I explain how deep the game is, how well the game drives and handles and the sheer scale of it?

Have you ever played the NFS series? In particular this one? They're all full of celebrities glitz and glamour. The reason I knew NFSU2 was going to be what it was (before I had even seen Brooke Burke) was because the first was already an absolute masterpiece. It had a couple of tiny flaws (pointed out in the review) but for the most part it was nothing short of spectacular. The second one bettered it (on a low level) and then added all kinds of bling to make it even better.

There are very few single games that have made me yearn for a better graphics card. Infact, there are only about three. Normally I will buy an upgrade/s when I need to to keep games going fast. However, at the time NFSU came out I was perfectly happy with my Radeon 7800 that cost me $70 that I had had for ages. I was waiting for Doom 3 as I expected it to be special, it wasn't.

So in hindsight I am quite glad I made the upgrade when I did. NFSU and the sequel were well worth the $99 for my Radeon 9200. Wet roads at night, reflections, neon signs. None of which had been done in the way that the first two NFSU games did them, ever. Even proper headlights that actually lit things up and allowed you a better view of where you were going.

No, that the review shows we have different priorities is repeated throughout the review - I find that kind of interesting. I'm making no comment about the game itself.


I'm with you there. It was ok, but it did seem to be over long and the idea of replaying it isn't at all tempting. And the engine, on period hardware, didn't really seem to be up to the task of creating particulary great gameplay, plenty of per pixel lighting though. It'd be interesting to see how well it'd have done without the doom name. I'd bet the answer would be "not great"

Citation needed. And definitions. One of the 100000 most successful? Intaweb wank material = model?

She was a model, but is more successful as a 'celebrity' than she ever was as a model. See also: Jordan.

Can we possibly do something about the very large NSFW picture in this post. At least spoiler it.

How dare you even mention Brooke Burke in the same sentence as that HUSSY.

Take it back or I'll hit you with my handbag !

Joking aside BB was huge in the States. And I mean huge. Every advert wanted her and she was on the cover of every magazine for the right reasons.

Not because she had been rushed out of a night club for choking on spunk.

NSFW? what do you mean? The bikini pic?

I think JC should stick that up on the website. It'd be a shame not to.

Reads well enough to me.

I did like NFSU2, for a few hours at least.

NFSU 1 and 2 are stingy with the performance upgrades, and they're all I care about. (It's stingy with the visual upgrades, too.)

My car had stock visual everything (I remember that you don't need the star rating to do most races, and you can just take all the stuff off) and just make it TOTALLY ABSOLUTELY BLACK.

I had to give up after I'd unlocked the industrial place at the bottom of the map (the last place you get) because of the crazy cheaty opponent cars. There's some absolutely ridiculous rubber banding on the point-to-point races, meaning that you can tootle around at 100mph and the rest of the racers will oblige and stay around 40ft in front of you for the entire race. WHAT FUN.

I looked on the youtubes for a video of the ending of NFSU2 and found a video of the last race. It went on for something like 45 minutes, if I recall. Good gawd.

The ending of Carbon is worse. After that stupid, luck-based canyon race, you have to race Cheaty McDick and his crazy cheating bastard car that screams into the distance as soon as the race starts.

Clearly.

Must admit, if I were at work and I scrolled down to reveal that, I'd shit myself and close the thread, never to return. If bossman walks past and you're looking at picture of a car racing game, you're probably in frown territory, big-titted swimsuit model on a beach, I dread to think. Some bosses are easier than others, but my last boss would probably have me in the office for that.

edit: Also, just generally I'm not a fan of the pin-up girls thing on forums. I don't understand the people on NeoGAF who have animated gifs of bouncing tits and stuff either. Even if I'm sat reading at home I'm worried my girlfriend might think I'm some sort of pervy loser, constantly refreshing a page with animated tits on it and bikini babes. SEE ALSO: Those horrible ads in the back of gaming magazines. Try reading that on the bus and not feeling a cunt.

Also also, Bobby, your avatar is aces. Stone Cold Stunner?

Rubber banding in an arcade driving game makes sense though. I've never quite got the hate for it. It was there in NFSU 1 (which I really liked, despite its million flaws) but the idea was to not make a mistake. You aren't racing other cars, you are racing yourself. The idea that these games are any kind of simulation of driving is a bit daft - the driving model is more akin to SuperCars 2. Actually, the game isn't that far off it, either.

Didn't bother too much with the sequel. Mainly because in Brooke whatserface, Snoop thingy and PC upgrades, I couldn't be arsed. I'm not 14 years old.

Oh yeah, I remember now, you can unlock custom RPM gauges, including a cartoon cat one. THAT was good. I like custom game interfaces. (More than custom cars? Sure, why not.)


That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard ever.

Hmm. Maybe playing through NFSU 1 made 2 seem easier? I mean, 1 was hard. Fucking hard. And yes, for the final ten races it cheated its rotten ass off.

Was worth it for Rob Zombie's skyline though

Apologies if the pic isn't deemed safe for work. I didn't think that something that would appear in every woman's magazine (all over the front covers too) would be a problem.

And speakers and subwoofers and nitrous bottles and different coloured purge kits.

I mean sure it was all bolt on tat and (as I said in my review) something you would be quite clearly to entertain IRL but it was fucking fun to have a go haha.

I went through Carbon in a Lexus that was silver. Lowered, large wheels but no vinyls ETC. I may have had a spaz car for the rest but the Lexus made a lovely low down raspy noise that all the others didn't.

It was hilarious when people started posting pics of their cars from NFSU2. Really funny because you would just not expect certain people to have built certain cars. I mean, a civil servant with a pink car with black wheels and windows? hahaha.

It is a problem, at work.

Pic changed. If you want me to put a mask on, or a fake nose or moustache just holler.

Could you put a pair of spectacles on top of your pecker and make it look like a face?

edit: You could've just put the original images in spoiler tags, far less effort and people get the choice.

Sadly no. But if you like I can get my wiener out of my flies, pop out my pockets and do 'the elephant'.

It's not as good, but I'll take it!

That first screenshot looks odd - the car doesn't look like it's part of the surroundings at all.

It's actually a screenshot of Mercenaries 3; the car is being airlifted into the city.

Fuck quoted the wrong one..

First pic the car is flying. I'd just taken off of a bump in the road

I take this as even more proof that JC and I want completely different things from gaming (which is all good and that) so I find it fascinating when our gaming tastes overlap. The Venn Diagram of games that both of us like.

Fallout is one.
And NFSU could almost be one too. I mean I loathe the setting, look, ethos, artistic feel, soulless corporate money twist feel of it all, but enjoyed the handling a great deal when I played it on my friends PC.

And suprisingly, to date, NFSU on iOS is the best racer I've played in terms or feel and control and fun. Setting excluded of course.

It also makes me realise how feasible, controllable and wonderful an iPhone version of Outrun 2 would be.

I'm not a huge fan of racers but NFSU was a big guilty pleasure of mine. Very addictive. The rubber-banding was gash but isn't it always? Killing Joke on the soundtrack also. Neato.

NFSU was wicked fun on the PS2.

Bollocks. Just think about it for half a second.

If you are pootling around the track at 10mph for five minutes and the other cars are five seconds ahead of you, and then you start doing 1000 mph for five minutes and the other cars are only five seconds behind you, guess what, you aren't racing them. A race is where the oppositions actions are independent of your own. With AI rubber banding, the oppositions actions are almost entirely dependant on what you do. You aren't racing them, you are racing yourself and a clock.

Enough about the racing or lack of it, what can be mined in this game? And can I build a giant penis?

I disliked the Underground games. I liked Most Wanted, though.

I just like my games to be exciting. Well, I used to.. I don't mind slower paced quieter games now that require thought but that's only been a recent pleasure of mine. Usually I would opt for the arcadey style fast paced games.

Underground was just fun. Pure fun. And Blucey illustrates my points made during the review really well. People who hated racing games, hated chavvy chariots and hated this type of game were really drawn in by it. Honestly, I knew *I* would like it (because I liked afternoons out at Best Buy) but it was the types of people who were playing it. Just madness !

Grim... does have a point because Most Wanted was good. For about 3/4 of the game and then the police chases just became fucking stupid. Some of them needed about an hour or more just to get out of the chase. And it was because of AI. Sometimes the cops would go right past you but the meter would still go down and others they would just sit there. And it was annoying because y ou would get within a millimeter of the gauge running out (and deeming you a free man) and then all of a fucking sudden it would fill up again even though you were plainly out of sight.

Now the rest? Oh heck yeah, that was a perfectly awesome progression of NFSU2 (if the shitty police chases were left out). But from there they just gradually got worse, and worse, and worse.

NFSU 2 has always been a good seller. Most Wanted seems the most sought after though.

Hmm fuck it, that's made my mind up. Investigator Coffey must install that and play it through.

I did get into it but my divorce happened right as I was in the flow (well, the initial stomp out after a row) and a week later she fucked off with the PS2 and my save games with it. I wouldn't even have fucking minded but it was MY PS2.

i have it on PC (carbon, same thing IIRC?) so I shall install it real soon and maybe even write a review on it

NFSU2 is a game I played quite a bit on the XBOX1. I hated the fact that you had to chav up your perfectly good car to proceed. I'm all for engine upgrades and steering improvements and the like, but making me stick spinners on and decals on my doors? Fuck off.

Where are the other nine?