Need For Speed Underground Rivals - 1/10
A warning to fellow pspmeet members - Do yourself a favour, don't get this game, but rather try your hand at the other superior racing titles out there. Eg. Ridge Racer or Midnight Club 3.
Anyways
I played this game for exactly 1 week. I completed 94% of the game. I have just a few races left to complete, simple Car Spec races where everybody has the same car. I have most of the cars, I just haven't bought the Corvette yet. My rank is NFS Champion. At least the game thinks I'm great.
Too bad the feeling isn't mutual.
Why would I play this game for so long when I'm not enjoying a single moment? It's simple, I was blinded by hope. Hope that the game, which starts off slow (most racing games do), would grow better, faster, funner. Hope that the super-1337 cars would be excellent to drive and the sense of speed would be awesome. Hope that this game would be simply more than a cheap assembly-line project, born of focus groups and marketing executives, designed to appeal to Joe PlayStation.
You can guess how that turned out. I'm shipping this back to Gamefly.
But you want to play a shiny racing game on your shiny new PSP. "Take this!" you show your Pokemon-toting friends. "It's like the PS2 is in my hands!" Indeed, the game is shiny. Very shiny. It's always night and there's lots of reflective lighting. The good ol' motion blur effect kicks in when you press that nitro button. The graphics, at least, pass the initial test. That's until you realize the frame rate hiccups more than, well, somebody with hiccups, and the cars are so shiny and graphical that a mere four of them can only be racing at once, not to mention that you have to slowly and tediously scroll around your garage because the game chooses to load one small section of it at one time, again displaying only four cars at once.
Oh, did I mention the loading? No, not yet? In the time it's taken for you to read up to this paragraph the game is probably still loading the race. Dum di dum. Doop da doo. Loading...please wait. Here we go! Finally the race happens. And when it's done, you'll get to see the game load to tell you that YOU WON and that computer cars Sandra D., Snoopy the G, and Dumbazz came in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, respectively. Load some more and tell them what they've won! Upgrade points! Driver points! Shiny new visual parts! Oh boy!!! Load some more to get back to the menu screen. Wanna check out your garage now and pimp your ride or whatever the kids say these days? Load that their garage, little PSP. Load me that upgrade screen so I can apply each of these bland, forgettable upgrades to my car because, well, because I need all of them to beat the computer's rubberband A.I. Load me that visual upgrade section so I can apply these new headlights to my car. Hey, why not that load me that "Buy New Car" screen (don't forget to slowly and tediously scroll to an empty space in my garage first) so I can buy yet another car. No, I don't need to know its attributes beforehand! It's going to eventually get all the upgrades anyway! Oh god, the excitement is too much!
You probably saw in there that I said rubberband A.I. Yep, the same ol' routines that developers are happy to fall back on instead of making actual smart opponents. Did you crash a couple times? No problem, the computer will hang around and let you catch up. Are you running a perfect race? Vroom vroom, I'm right behind you, player! Don't hit that randomly-generated cross traffic that you can't react to in time!
So, you'll lose plenty of races in the last minute, through probably no fault of your own. Race the course again, you'll say (after it loads). Only now you realize that you've raced this course probably fifty times now. Are you really that bad? No, it's just the game pads its length out to over 300 races on probably seven or eight courses. So even if you do really well or get realllllly lucky and progress quickly, you'll still get to see the same levels over and over and over and over and over again. Your car might be a little faster, but it's not going to help you escape the computer cars any better. Especially since the controls aren't there to help you. You'll have to use the D-pad as the analog stick, uh, nub has the largest dead zone in the history of racing games. Hey, look! It's ten years ago! Thanks EA!
What else is there to say? To expand just a little on that whole marketing-executive-focus-group thing, the soundtrack is another thing that tries to appeal to everybody. It's got plenty of mainstream or second-tier rap and rock songs. You know, to appeal to that 16-year-old MTV kid who thinks this game is "da bomb". I think it all sucks except for those Ministry and Rise Against songs.
There's also plenty of bugs, glitches, and overall lack of polish to go around. Several times I have fallen through the track and respawned. Computer cars have gotten stuck on pieces of scenery. In certain races, computer cars crash into the same shortcut every single lap. There is a mode called "Rally Relay" where you face one other opponent and each of you uses two cars, one for each lap (remember the game can only render four cars at once, which is why you can't face more than one opponent here!). Furthermore, several "Rally Relay" races are three-race tournaments where the winner of each race gets 8 points and the loser gets 6. Obviously if one person wins the first two races the opponent can't catch up and overtake them in the points standings, even if they win the third race. Does the game realize this? Nope, it makes you do it anyway.
One saving grace for this game would be online play. You might jump for joy when you read the back of the box and see that it says there is online play. W00t! Good times now! Only, not. There is no online play. Even though it says right on the box that there is, it's not there. You are limited to passing the PSP around to a couple friends, trying to beat each other's times. I cannot imagine something more fulfilling than that, can you? "An unfortunate error", claims an EA rep.
Playing this game is an unfortunate error. Don't waste your time.
But as a need 4 speed fan, I have high hopes for the next installment nfs pursuit. So if I were you I would either wait of try this out from Eb - 7 day gurantee.
Submitted by Norrath
20/09/2005
4
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