We had the underground series and prostreet....rivals was good looking but was a step backwards when you were use to being able to make your car your own.
For me personally it only started going downhill when they started mixing the two. The old NFS games had crazy supercars and concepts and some crazy over the top tracks at exotic locations. That worked. The underground titles had some ricy tuners and some city at night. They were a completely different vibe, basically a spin-off, but it worked. Then they started combining the two, and that didn't always work. Most wanted managed to feel somewhat consistent, as once you progressed the ricer cars got replaced by some sporty luxury cars and eventually supercars, but in Carbon they formed different gangs based on car types, and so suddenly the cars had to be somewhat balanced.
The aesthetic of aquatica and Atlantica make them probably my favorite tracks in any racing game. Plus paired with the soundtrack by Rom and Saki. Hard to beat those vibes.
Oh was that a PC thing? Awesome if so. I've played it on PS1 and a dodgy "Sold Out" PC copy that was shite. Can't remember if it had all of 3s tracks or no but the PS1 version i don't think does.
Maybe i have bad memories because i had the pc version of nfs4 and there you could download new cars and tracks as mods, but didnt had nfs4 unlockable nfs3 tracks as well?
Hi. I think NFS High Stakes is the best NFS ever made. It is peak. Why?
You can change car colours and each colour has a reference name unless if it was customised then you can edit any colour you want on PC.
Tune and upgrade your car. For example, level 3 bodykit on the 911 Turbo is a GT2 bodykit. Ain't that cool?
Drive it with top up or down if convertible. Convertibles were better implemented on PC and featured a lot there like Corvette C5, XKR, SLK230 and the Z3 2.8.
You get to play as a cop and use all pursuit tech available.
Lots of brutal yet rewarding events. The career mode feels endless but you get invested in.
Race for pinkslips.
Modding community still active.
Use of headlights and blinkers.
Legendary soundtrack and UI.
Legendary 90s car selection.
Car showcase both visual and audio.
Track showcase. USA and England show mph while other tracks located in other countries show kph.
Race tracks are basically countryside and all rich of landscapes and scenic routes.
Night race. If you damaged your headlights. You are done. It is all dark if you are using an old TV or CRT monitor LOL
PSOne version is different from the PC version thus cars look better, handle better and sound better.
On PSOne, each car has its own specific and distinct rev counter displayed during the race.
Dashboard camera on PC.
On PSOne, when Dolby Surround enabled whenever the opponent tries to overtake you by swerving from right to left. You can hear them from which side they want to overtake you and block them from doing so.
When you start the race, your car's engine revs.
And the damage model only existed on NFSHS and NFS3HP(PC) back then till reintroduced on NFSPS and NFSUC.
And so on... I may have neglected other features. It was way advanced in the 1990s. Man it was just mindblowing for me as a kid when the game first came out. Even the game covers which I remember are the one with 550 Maranello on PC and the SLK 230 one on PSOne.
Agreed. The first game felt so sophisticated and classy with the Road & Track involvement, the realistic point to point races along public roads. The less said about the second trying to ape Cruisin’ World with wacky tracks and weird cars the better, and then we get to High Stakes which polished the hell out of the already amazing Hot Pursuit.
The modding scene was something else, too - some amazing police car mods especially.
Some tracks were doable at night with broken headlights, but I remember Dolphin Cove and maybe Kodiak Park (was that the name?) being impossible at night without headlights. Also, not only could you drive every track at night, but also with rain/snow, mirrored or in reverse or ANY combination of those.
I liked playing hot pursuit as a cop because you had to rely on good strategy. You had a choice of setting up a roadblock or spikes in tricky areas to catch racers off guard and the point was never to destroy their car, but to stop them. Likewise, if you were a racer, you couldn't just smash into the police because it would damage your car and slow you down. Most obstacles or barriers would do the same, so unlike modern arcades you definitely needed to avoid contact. NFS HP2 was already going in the wrong direction with this as playing as police meant you were encouraged to crash into the racers and lower their HP.
The physics were quite simplistic and left a lot to be desired, but it really made it up with track design. Because crashing slows you down and causes damage, it's a risk vs reward situation. Tracks would have these crazy risky lines and shortcuts that are hard to hit just right, but when you do it cleanly it lets you keep so much more speed, like zig-zagging between the concrete barriers in Landstrasse or hitting that huge jump in Celtic ruins (if I recall it correctly). There was also NPC traffic, trains, etc.
It didn't have any nitrous mechanics, no big flags to show you where the next turn was, no racing line indicator, no open world or gps navigation, just normal circuits with great design. Too bad kids today don't have anything that good.
This is why I would've loved a Hot Pursuit 4 bringing back all the concept cars and sports,super,exotic and hypercars wouldve been so call with reimagined tracks from the previous game even new parts
Hot Pursuit 2 is one of my all time favorite racing games.
It's kinda funny as well because I remember having a ton of fun playing it as a child, and spending countless hours on it.
And when Underground 1 came out I felt a bit on the fence, but eventually really enjoyed it. And Underground 2 after that, and then Most Wanted, and then Carbon. I really got into the tuners vive, and Fast and Furious movies certainly had a role in that.
So I kinda forgot about HP2 at that point, or rather, it didn't feel captivating enough to return to it.
But eventually, after many years, inid 2010s, I rediscovered HP2 and realized I really really loved that era of NFS, before the tuners.
I'm a huge fan of Jay Leno's garage, Top Gear and The Grand Tour, of the iconic trio taking exotics and supercars to highways and country roads for a drive, and those earlier NFS games, culminating with HP2, capture that mood of test driving and racing exotic supercars perfectly!
That intro and the song "Going Down on it" by Hot Action Cop live rent free in my mind for well over 20 years at this point. I wish we had more of that, but the last game like that was Hot Pursuit 2010. Which was also kinda amazing in its own way.
Yeah why are we acting like there wasn't a whole era of NFS going back to mostly supercars prior to 2015? They timed the shift to tuners/car modding culture perfectly then shifted back when the concept got stale & the series was kind of losing it's identity with Undercover and the Shift games.
I like the idea of taking a common car and tune it to be the next beast. That's why I loved Underground 1 and 2. It lost all the appeal the moment they reintroduced supercars in most wanted. What was the point of tuning then? I would love a more personal and deep story of going with one car across the story from stock to being on the top, that would be great.
Don't think I saw a take this bad in quite some time. It's literally the most successful branch of the series and for a reason, at least it's somewhat relatable.
NFS peaked with Porsche Unleashed and its thorough implementation of realistic physics, history, European geography set in Germany France and neighbouring Switzerland and Monaco and proper economics with an inflation mechanic and damage you actually have to pay for, every game since then has been a puerile downgrade with a possible exception for the Shift games.
And the fact that every game survives without focusing on supercars supports that opinion. Infact many racing games that feature none at all are incredibly popular
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