Be Excellent To Each Other

*SPLUFFS GOBS OF SALTY ROPE*

*fixed link, lucky it was just the toad to be honest

I'm no expert on Burnout, but I don't think that's the right link.

I concur with TheVision's assessment.

Fixed!

A slightly more open Hot Pursuit? No thanks, after the horrific business that was the last NFS game...

Hot Pursuit was a pretty good game, the racer side of the campaign was excellent, the cop side of the campaign was quite broken, the multiplayer was a blast.

Overall I think I gave it 8/10 at the time. And I later found out that the PC version fixed a fair few of the problems I had with the 360 version. (Hot Pursuit was the last full price day one 360 game purchase for me, fact fans.)

Most Wanted is probably not a day one purchase for me, even on PC, but certainly one to go on the 'when it costs less than £20' list.

ALSO, isn't there already a NFS:Most Wanted game? Why couldn't they think of a new name?

There was already a Hot Pursuit game!

The lazy fuckers!

I'm interested in this, by the way.

Yeah me too, I got some decent mileage out of multiplayer on the PC version, 'twas a lot of fun. The 1 vs 1 matches could get incredibly tense and exciting.

As for the main game, the cop campaign dragged the rest of the game down IMO, it was just too flawed, but the racer campaign was pretty fucking good.

I haven't properly enjoyed a brum brum racer since Burnout 3.

And before that the first Colin McRae.

Don't worry, it'll be shit. The magic 8-ball has spoken.

Are there challenges? There need to be challenges.

Are there tollbooths? Getting in tollbooths was always a challenge.

Edge: 9/10

8/10 at Eurogamer, and I can't help but feel it's a 'generous' 8/10, reading the words more than the number at the end.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012- ... ted-review

I can see me waiting for this one to turn up in an Origin sale for a tenner.

If you've an iThing, I'd say it's a good purchase with the caveats that it's a very different game from the console versions. There's no roaming—it's a straight racer, with the odd branch (think Asphalt 7). It is, however, playable, fast and good-looking in that overdone moody industrial kind of way. To my mind, Hot Pursuit's probably more fun on the iThing, but the latest effort's still a decent one, despite some really oddball quirks (not least that the cars appear to be driven by ghosts).

John Walker says it's Burnout Paradise 2. Reads like an 8 or 9 out of 10.

Opinions from an acquaintance on True Achievements:

When am I going to learn, if it has Need for Speed on the box you're better off rubbing dog shit in your eyes and having dogshit blindness.

I'd rather stick a fork in my eye than continue.

THE RUN WAS BETTER THAN THIS AND THAT WAS A DOG SHIT KEBAB.

Dogshit blindness! Is that legit, then? I remember being told as a kid not to eat dogshit because I'd go blind, assumed it was a myth.

Because, clearly, otherwise you'd be tucking into it.

I enjoyed Hot Pursuit Thought it was a fun and decent arcade racer.

The rubber banding got on my tits.

Reviews on this are definitely mixed. Glad I held off to be honest - Forza Horizon is still acebest fun.

It was a game of two halves I think.

RACER MODE - Excellent

COP MODE - One of the most broken things ever

And the third half was:

MULTIPLAYER - Great fun, recommended

No FMVs = GRRRRRR. Oh well, it's not the 2000s any more. BUT STILL GRR.

No cop chase music = GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. The music is basically GRRRR all over.

Crash cam = GRRRRR JUST LET ME RACE. One thing I usually do in NFS games is handbrake skid into walls edge on to do a 90 degree turn so I can instantly get moving, but on Burnout rules that's a CRASHED. BUT there are instant rolling restarts on crashes, so if you like to simply Get Going rather than treat crashes as a race-ending event, then good for you.

No screen filling filter that makes the entire world beige = About God Damned Time! Play this next to Ridge Racer Unbounded, I dare you.

No dramatic music for racing the MWs = COME ON SERIOUSLY?

Shutdown enemy MWs at the end of a MW race = stupid. At the end of any MW race, your car's always toast and their car's always in perfect condition. Zooom. Cue driving around for ten minutes trying to find the guy until the black arrow reappears on your mini map (why don't they highlight the shutdown target with an overhead arrow?).

But the driving is Need for Speedy and Most Wantedy enough for this to be a Most Wanted game. It's more fun to drive in that Driver SF was.

There's more to do in NFS MW ACG than The Run, but that's because The Run was Pretty Looking Hang-On In Cars With Rewind And Cool Music.

NFS MW ACG > Midnight Club 3 Dub Edition Remix > That Shitty Death Rally Thing I Played On Steam For Ten Minutes > Ridge Racer Unbounded.

NFS Most Wanted is a splendid game, albeit it's a fairly short journey to get all the Most Wanted cars themselves. (I reckon if you focus on nothing except the Most Wanted cars, you'll easily be done in under ten hours.)

However, it's very much a Burnout Paradisey sort of game, so there's far more content available in terms of getting all the billboards, smashing through all the fences, finding all the car locations (jackspots as they're called here), and they've introduced speed cameras now too (I've found 64/66, the last two are eluding me).

One thing I don't like so much is that each car only has five events for it, and each event unlocks a couple of customisations, but this means that when you've got all the customisations you want for a car (i.e. you've got it set up just how you want it), there's nothing left to actually do with it in terms of events. You can continue to do specific things in that car to unlock PRO versions of each of its customisations, but there's no real point in doing that.

All the cars are real but a lot of them are too exotic to have much resonance, I had more fun driving around in BMW M3s and Impreza Cosworths than I did in Pagani Zondas, although the Countach was a blast.

The cars do have very different handling models which is a big plus, the M3 for example is a big, heavy, drifty sort of barge that can withstand all manner of collisions and is great for performing takedowns, whereas some of the lightweight exoticas are extremely fast and twitchy, and suffer a crash/takedown on contact with so much as a hedgehog in the road.

It's a great game to fire up and play for 30-60 minutes at a time, chipping away at the completion, and I'm working my way through the entire car roster to get golds in each car's five events. The Range Rover Evoque is in there, for some reason.

Special mention must go out to the graphics, as this is hands down the most sumptuous driving game I have ever played, breathtakingly gorgeous in places.

Highly recommended I would say.

The future of gaming, right here folks.

1) I fire up Origin to have a quick blast on NFS:Most Wanted. It decides to apply a 5GB patch/upgrade instead.

2) It offers me a hundred dollars worth of DLC (which is what it's busily downloading, so it pre-downloads it, on the off-chance I might actually want to buy it).

3) Later on I might get to play the game.

Brilliant!

The 'Movie Legends Pack' in particular looks like awesomely good value, ten dollars for five cars.

I also must say that this is the most aggressive game I've ever played in terms of ramming DLC down my throat.

The 'Ultimate Speed Pack' is Day One DLC, it's built into the game from the start (five cars that aren't available in the game unless you pay for them), and you can't even completely ignore it. Literally within TEN MINUTES of my first play of the game I came across one of the jackpspots, I'd already found a couple and it's basically a case of drive close to the car, the message 'PRESS Y TO SWITCH TO CAR' comes up on screen, and you've got yourself a new car to drive.

No problem I thought, I've found another car, I'm getting used to this, I'll add it to my collection. As I approached 'getting into new car range' the message came up on my screen 'PRESS Y TO GO TO THE ORIGIN STORE'.

And this happens time and time again, as you come across jackspots for cars that aren't available in the base game, but have jackspots for them liberally dotted around the main base game map. There's only five cars but they have at least three jackspots each, just to make sure you're aware of them.

So it's DLC that you haven't bought and can't use, but the game insists on saying LOOK HERE'S SOME DLC YOU HAVEN'T BOUGHT AND YOU'RE GOING TO KEEP THINKING YOU'VE FOUND A NEW CAR TO DRIVE UNTIL YOU FUCKING PAY ME AND I LET YOU DRIVE THIS CAR HERE HA HA HA.

The future of gaming.

I've put 20 hours into this now, so it must be doing something right.

The way it handles DLC is absolutely diabolical, as despite buying the full game and the ULTIMATE DELUXE DLC PACK (which combines three DLC packs into one), I'm still routinely coming across cars in the gameworld that I can't drive until I buy them, and the loading splash screen occasionally points out, quite explicitly, that if I buy some more DLC, I'll be able to drive the cars I'm missing.

It even encourages me to buy more DLC to show off to my friends with the stuff they haven't got. (Unless they've bought the same DLC, presumably.)

On top of that I've got a big grey bar with a cross through it in-game when I bring up the MOST WANTED CARS list, and if I try to do anything with the car that void represents, it tells me to buy some DLC to get to do anything with it.

BUT - it's an incredibly fun game, totally ridiculous of course, far more Burnout than Need For Speed, and I'm cool with that, I don't really like po-faced racing games.

I downloaded a demo for this, once, on Xbox 360, I think. The control lag was absolutely abysmal. Unplayable.

..........................................

So any PSN+ers playing this? I can only see Zio at the moment.

Thing is, although the controls still annoy me it isn't as bad when you get up to high speeds due to having to make smaller adjustments (or something, I don't know). So I've kind of managed to adapt.

The cynical in-game purchase options that are shoved in your face every 30 seconds are aggravating.

The rubber banding is beyond ridiculous.

And yet I seem to have become horribly, horribly addicted. I don't know why. The racing through the open world just works really well somehow. I've only played the first couple of hours, mind you.

Anyone?

I will probably give it a go at some point, but I've got so many games to play first!

I've just got this over the weekend for the Wii u. Again, only played a couple of hours, I'm not very good but having fun. Haven't been able to win the first most wanted race yet. Not sure if it is my sort of game.
Extra bonus in that it doesn't nag you into buying dlc because they haven't released any on the Wii u.

I honestly didn't have a problem with the controls at all. Wired 360 pad playing the PC version. Framerate is halved on the consoles (best case scenario) so you will have more input lag. I certainly noticed it when playing the 360 version of Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed, gets quite irritating in a twitchy arcade style racer.



Yeah I think this game goes far too far in pushing the DLC, even after buying the (allegedly) 'Ultimate DLC Pack' it was still nagging me about stuff I was missing.

It did sour it for me but it didn't break the game. But whoever decided they'd put DLC-only cars in the starting area so you're coming across them after only a few minutes of play, seriously needs shooting in the face. Especially when the Ultimate DLC Pack DOESN'T include those cars so you're still fucking left with jackspots that you can't knock off the map.



It felt like fairly standard-issue Criterion to me Harks back to the Burnout 3/Revenge days I think, they eased off with it a bit in Paradise.

It works both ways though, you can win a race from last place on the last lap if you put an absolute stormer in, but by the same token a single crash at the end of an otherwise faultless race can see you drop from 1st to 4th - comes down to whether or not you like that dynamic I suppose.



I absolutely played the arse out of it, finished it all off, and then dropped it completely, it burned very brightly whilst it lasted though, and I'm quite content I got my money's worth out of it, even with the DLC which didn't add a massive amount of content, truth be told. (The airport area wasn't as good as the extra island you got in Paradise.)

Great game and I can only assume it's getting a bit cheaper now, definitely one to check out IMO.

Dear Lord, a couple more hours in and the game has turned into an utter turd of random unavoidable crashes losing me the race AGAIN AND FUCKING AGAIN.

I have never played a NFS that wasn't shit. How silly of me to think that this one would be different.

Deleted.

I didn't think it was that bad TBH, it certainly didn't get me as close to a CONSOLE DESTROYING RAGE as Hot Pursuit did.

It's always come with the territory on Criterion games, it's easy to get the old rose-tinteds on but I recall all the Burnouts were capable of chucking out random crashes when the mood took them, certainly from No.3 onwards.

I've had a couple of hours on this and it's pretty good. Thing is, I can't tell the difference between this and Burny P apart from a different map, some UI stuff and game types it's pretty much the same. Even the mountains look the same.

I couldn't get into Burny P though and I'll probably hit a barrier on this as well since I've little interest driving to the next course. I just want race, after race, after race. I want to learn the courses and drive better than the next person but when I get to the race now I've been faffing about for five minutes milling about town and my interest starts to wane. Thank god for the quick retry on the races though. Glad they kept that from Burnout 3; one big smash and you might as well not bother.

It's very pretty though and always makes me sit up and pay attention when you're blasting down the road into incoming traffic making minute adjustments to your racing line. It utterly demands your attention and is as exciting as racing games go - i just wish it'd give me a list of races to get going on though and let me roam about if I ask politely in the menu.

Shame Lasermink's retired though as I just blasted through a speed camera shaving seconds off his time! Stupid but it made me smile!

The correct way to get into Burny P is to attempt to fit onto Dimrill's plank.

Oh, you'll see the difference soon enough. It's when the police starts to get involved less casually, and police cruisers just veer in front of you out of nowhere to lay down a spike strip mere millimetres in front of your car, puncturing your tyres and halving your max speed. Then another cruiser will ram you from behind - instant death, and THEN when you return to the race, your tyres are STILL flat, your speed is STILL halved and there's no service station in sight. Then you retry and the same thing happens again. And again. And again. That's when this game can get to fuck.

Ford GT up yo' ass!

I had a Colin McRae on the PS1 moment there. Y'know, when you're playing a racing game and you think "Fuck Yeah! Brum Brum BRUM!" I was busting around the airfield like a man possessed. Awesome.

Also, the music ain't loud enough over the sound effects. I'll sort that out.

Wheeeee! It actually is Burnout! This should keep me distracted until GTAV, I hope. I like how the entire soundtrack is Avril Lavigne too.

You've just persuaded me not to download it.

He was a boy, she was a car
Can I make it anymore obvious?
He was a twat, she did braking
What more can I say?

He wanted her, she'd never crash
Secretly she most wanted him as well
But all of her mechanics, stuck up their exhaust
They had a problem with his baggy. erm. tyres

He was a skater boy, she said, "Brrrrrum brum brum brum"
He wasn't good enough for her, she had a pretty grill
But her superjump was up in space
She needed to come back down to earth

There's an airfield! With hanging fuselage sections!

I had a wicked race round there in my Ford GT. Brum, Brum, Brum ... errrrrrrrrk ... Brum.

I said as much 5 posts up. FACT.

SNORK! FML insurance... awesome.

This game is fun fun fun with extra fun, grilled. With cheese.

Except for the police.

I reinstalled this last night as I remembered it being fun and I like to have a racing game 'on the go' that I can just dip into if I fancy some arcade racery japes and highjinks.

Reinstalling through Origin was swift and painless, and when I launched the game it helpfully brought down my old cloud save and I basically started playing exactly where I left off nearly two years ago.

Except this wasn't helpful, because what I was presented with was a game that was already completed (I didn't 100% it but anything of any significance in both the base game and DLC, I'd done). Imagine firing up GTAIV for a nostalgic playthrough and right from the off Niko's standing on top of the world in a game where there's basically nothing to do.

No problem, I thought, I shall simply press the NEW GAME button and start over.

Except this game doesn't have a NEW GAME button.

Having looked around for a bit, thinking I must surely be missing it, as a NEW GAME button is so basic and fundamental, I resorted to the Google-o-Tron and it turns out that, guess what, there really isn't a NEW GAME button in Need For Speed Most Wanted.

What you have to do is:

1) Quit out of the game
2) Delete all locally saved game data at - C:\Users\Fannyface\Documents\Criterion Games\Need For Speed(TM) Most Wanted
3) Turn off cloud saves for the game in Origin
4) Launch the game and play for long enough for it to generate a local autosave/save folder at the above path
5) Quit out of the game
6) Turn on cloud saves for the game in Origin
7) Launch the game and when it presents you with an error about save game conflicts, choose to force the local save over the cloud save
8 ) Quit the game, and congratulations, you have now pressed what in the past would have simply been called a NEW GAME button

So basically, if you leave Origin to its default behaviour, you can only ever play NFS Most Wanted once.

Incompetency or a SINISTER way to direct you to buy a new game? Either way, annoying.

By strange coincidence with my thread resurrection a few days ago, this game is now free to download and keep forever on Origin.

If you've got a PC/laptop that can run it, well worth checking out IMO.

The price is certainly right.