Live for Speed Forum - Need for Speed: Underground Preview

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Need for Speed: Underground preview
Gone are the Ferraris, Porsches and Vipers. Say hello to the underground world of racing, where small sports cars are tuned to their max.

The Need for Speed series is loved by many gamers, who want high-speed action with the top sports cars in the world without too much simulation coupled with great graphics and sounds. The games typically had one thing in common: The cars. Nearly all features cars from makers such as Ferrari, Porsche, and Mercedes, but the next instalment in the series will depart from that tradition.

Need for Speed: Underground is about the urban street racing, that you can see in movies like The Fast and the Furious. People buy tuner-friendly cars from makers like Toyota and Subaru and customize them to their liking and at the same time add enough horsepower to turn a red Ferrari green of envy.
It’s all about being unique

While your choice of cars is very different compared to earlier NfS games, the way you can customize them is totally new. You can take the twenty cars in the came and change both their appearance and their technology to your exact liking. During the demonstration I was shown how to take a standard car and turn it into something completely by visually changing 20 areas on the car including the application of vinyl decals. The results are quite impressive and should be even more fun on the PC and the PS2, where you can play online against your friends and thus show off your beauty on four wheels.

The customisation also applies to the cars internals, and you can buy hundreds of licensed aftermarket parts from makers like AEM, Nitrous Express, and StreetGlow. Naturally you’ll also be able to take a look under the hood, where you’ll see the engine in all its glory (with lots of chrome naturally).

It’s difficult to judge from the presentation whether all the customisation really has an impact on gameplay, but I feel pretty confident that it’s great enough to add a good amount of durability to the game. I guess you could compare the customisation part with the planning part in the Rainbow Six games, since your car suddenly becomes much more personal than the cars in the previous games.
Gentlemen, start you terrifying engines

So after you’ve spend hours tuning your car to perfection, you want to take your car to the track and prove your skills. For that Underground provides you with two racing modes: Drag Racing and Street Racing. Drag Racing is the one you saw in The Fast and the Furious. Here you drive in a straight line (naturally with a nice girl starting the race) from start to finish, while Street Racing takes you around the cities. This means you'll also have to navigate through trafic, which becomes very scary as the tracks are windy and twisted.

The racing naturally takes place during nighttime and many tracks are also wet, so this is the setting for some great visuals. Black Box have certainly yanked up the graphics very much compared to NfS: Hot Pursuit 2, and the overall impression during the demonstration was excellent. There were light signs, reflections, commercials and water effects all over the place adding realism and beauty to the highly detailed cars.
So what about the gameplay?

There’s also one new idea that have been implemented in the game – new in the essence that it looks like something from The Fast and the Furious. Sometimes during acceleration the graphics blur for a short amount of time. I am not really sure that it gives you a better sensation of speed, but it looked quite cool anyway.

I am pretty sure that car customisation and the graphics are the basis for a very good NfS game, but a verdict about the gameplay itself cannot be made at this point. Sadly it looked like there was no damage modelling in the game, which I think is quite essential. However, I am very pleased by the fact that Black Box will produce all versions of the game. They were the ones who created the PS2 version of Hot Pursuit 2, which was superior to all other versions of the game.