Top class graphical detailing, utmost sense of realism and options to adjust it for the weak of the heart, more resilient physics rendering engine and potentially infinite customization options and yet Need For Speed fails to impress, and terribly so. It’s like a beautiful Aston Martin tricked out, modded, tweaked and given a whole new personality only to find a little later on that the rig is missing an engine and everything else that makes it work. A hollow system.

But the news is not all bad. Here are some really strong points of the game:

i) Need For Speed: Pro Street features some of the best graphical detail available in any game till date. Even at considerably low poly counts, car models look perfectly smooth and with well blended corners. The illumination is well done and the car details due to lighting conditions is amazing.

ii) The game also features a whole new Damage system with a revamped physics engine. So now, even a slightest rub against the competition will show up almost perfectly realistically and moving on to major crashes or bumps, one can easily see the bumper get cracked and fall down, the hood detach and fly off back into the screen, all is taken care of, even second and first degree bumps, scratches and blemishes. It’s absolutely lovely to drift with a broken side mirror, so to speak.

iii) The Autosculpt is now functional and does not affect just the looks of the car, rather goes deep into fine tuning the performance and drag co-efficients as well.

iv) Pushing the envelope to much higher levels, the game also provides utmost realism and 3 levels of intensity to adjust to a player’s style. From simple and well known, easy Arcade style driving to the kind of realism that will literally make you bite the asphalt off the black top, the game lets you decide how tough you really are.

v) Drift races have been improved on heavily and are actually fun to play now, especially in comparison to the horrible drifting experience we got from Need For Speed: Carbon (also seeing that Carbon was based around the concept of drifting as it was, which made it even more horrendous). I played the entire game on the hardest level of realism and I must say, I was rather much pleased with how the car reacted in th Drift mode. Due to the major advancement in the realism and reaction control on drifting tracks, the game designers deserve big kudos.

vi) Drag races finally make sense. They made sense partially in Need For Speed: Underground 2 and made absolutely no sense in Need For Speed: Most Wanted, since even while portraying the underground culture, most Drag races would take place on busy roads with peak amounts of traffic. Need For Speed: Pro Street changes it all. Secure racing tracks with no external interference, such as traffic, dragging really pleases the player. The cars also behave near perfect realistically on a Drag track and can sift freely over the road surface, contrary to the 4 lane grid movement offered by previous versions.

vii) The customization options already had permutation sets counting in at staggering billion figures, but with Need For Speed: Pro Street the number of these options is practically infinite. Talking about the Vinyl and Decal placements alone, you can Move, Scale, Rotate, Skew, change color and placement over any part of the car. And you can add as many layers as you wish for. Although it does seem to limit at nearly 20 layers for Vinyls, but even that limit is hard to reach since the Decal layering has no limits. Not one that I encountered yet and I modded my ride so much that it looked like hell spat it back out. You get the drift, dontcha?

But that is that and that is probably the short list of things that make Need For Speed: Pro Street impressive. Other than the beauty of it, the reality of Pro Street is rather drab and as interesting as two skeletons getting their heat on in a tin can.

Here are the reason why the gameplay is mediocre and unsatisfactory:

i) The game requires nearly 8GB of free hard disk space to reside and run. Not really something that bothers me, but the fact that other than some Damage system meshes and better graphic options, the game doesn’t really have anything else to account for the massive amounts of hard drive storage it eats. Carbon did it in near 5GB, what’s the extra 3GB used for anyway? Beats me.

ii) Unless and until you have a very high end machine, the game’s performance is poor. I myself run on AMD Athlon 64+ with 2 gigs of RAM and 512 of dedicated video memory, and still at a resolution of 800 x 600, a refresh rate of 75 Hz, world details set to lowest, car details set to high and environment effects set to lowest, the game lags. And to think of it, there is absolutely nothing too special or different going on in the game, especially during the races!

iii) In-game interfaces and menus are graphically trendy with the neo-urban styles used, but at the same time, the design is extremely weak in terms of functionality. A terrible menu system that takes more than a first few glances to get the hang of.

iv) In-game music is redundant and boring. You will hear the same childish rant music over and over again with a couple of decent tracks in there, one of them performed by Avenged Sevenfold and another decent electonica number played by an artist I don’t remember the name of, nor do I bother.

v) The game’s engine does not seem to have a clue of what is going on within the game at several points, most noticeable during the vocal acting and narration clips. The narratives are blunt, redundant and inaccurate. Here is why:

- The announcer seems to have a something something for the main character of the game - Ryan Cooper. Constantly hearing your name over and over again is more than likely to piss you off within the first 5 minutes of playing the game, I assure you.
- And for some strange reason, the game’s announcer will say out “Ryan Cooper” - the full name too all the time too. Add this to the point above.
- It doesn’t matter if you perform terribly in a race or beat the next competitor posting thrice his score, the game will not know what to say and comment about. In most cases when I posted a 4800 point score in the earlier Drifts, I could hear the announcer saying, “Oh I’m sure Ryan Cooper is not happy with today’s run. He can do much much better, I know.” WTF? I just beat the guy who came in second by posting thrice his score!
- AND! No matter what you name your alias in the game you will ALWAYS be “Ryan Cooper”. The very name sounds a little too Ryan-ish, if you know what I mean. This is just a peeve than a major negative point in the game anyway - The game lacks a storyline. If you think Carbon had a bad story, this is much much worse. The whole point of the game is, you got dissed by some little Asian dude who would probably die of a fart attack. A 6 year old could come up with a better storyline than that.

vi) One just HAS to go through 3 separate runs in a Drag or a Drift. Just to see who can post the best score/time. What? You either win or you lose. One run is enough. Where’s the mystery part involved here? And for God’s sake, each and every Drag race has a mini-game before it that you need to play - The “Heat Up Your Tires” traction game. Doesn’t make a fuck worth of a sense. It does seem to have an effect on the run, but seriously, do we really need that bogus trickery?

vii) The worst part of the game - Everything is Closed Circuit. There are no more free runs, no more cop chases, no more bounty runs, basically no more free will or fun. All you do is, you go in and race the day out. BORING! This is one of the biggest reasons the game starts to feel more like a chore than play anyway.

viii) This time over, the name of the components in the game have been re-hauled. Tranmission upgrades are now called Drivetrains, Turbos are named Forced Induction. Sweet names do not make a “Pro” game.

ix) Even the toughest of races in the game have the most meager amounts of cash in rewards, which makes modding your ride properly in time and having some real thrill, next to impossible. Unless of course you’re one of those presumptuous ethical freaks who’ll try to knock the game using the Nissan 240SX you get for free.

x) The Evos and many other tuner cars CAN NOT be used for drifting. May I ask, WHY THE FUCK? Another attack at free play/

xi) The Nissan Skyline GTR Proto does not support any sort of body modification, graphical or custom body kits.

xii) You just NEED to have 4 different cars, one for each race type in the game. Which inevitably, at some point within the game means, you will not have enough cash to have a car you’re fully satisfied with. This is rather unnecessary and bogus. Another attack at free play.

xiii) If you decide to change race mode(s) for a car, you lose all modifications you made to it and you have to build that car from scratch again. Worst idea ever. Another attack at free play.

xiv) You cannot leave a certain race day without repairing all your cars. What if I don’t want to repair my car? What if I want to burn it to crap? What if I want to put it in a garbage disposal truck and yell “Good ridding!” while mooning the truck driver? Bullshit obligatory actions within the game - Another attack at free play.

xv) Even if you buy some old school muscle such as the Ford Shelby GT500 and mod the hell out it, it will fail to perform in a Speed Challenge. It will own serious momma-ass in Drags though.

xvi) Through the entirety of the game you never make enough money to buy the Lamborghini Murcielago and the Pagani Zonda is priced so high, you’ll need to beat the game 5 times just to buy the stock version of it. Bogus!

xvii) No matter how powerful your car is, the game’s rival - Ryo Watanabe (alt. spellings: “What-A-Noobie”, “What-A-Nob”, “Crotch-Stain”, “Cockmaster”) will always outrun you in the final Speed Challenge races with his lame ass Lancer Evo X which looks like some Japanese mail order wife had some bad sushi and puked up a huge load of crap.

xviii) No matter how weak and “stock” your car is, you can always outrun Ryo in the same Speed Challenge near the last turn on the track. Hence the names, “What-A-Noobie”, “What-A-Nob”, “Crotch Stain”, “Cockmaster” oh and I almost forgot “Skidmark”)

xix) The cutscene videos in the game cannot be skipped. Even the ones that can be skipped, require you to break you head on the ENTER or the ESC keys, or both at the same time. The same obsessive compulsive behavior of the game.

xx) You just CAN NOT modify a car you won during a challenge series without losing ALL of its modifications first. What’s the point in winning a high end modded car anyway then?

xxi) If you do not Dominate a race day and leave, you have to start again with zero points in case you decide to show up again.

xxii) Racing Seats have absolutely no effect on the performance of the car but it is advised that you spend 3000 bucks on them because they keep you safe during tight turns and shocks. Okay… I AM PLAYING A FRIKKING GAME. Most of the times at extremely low volumes at night. I think I can get away with having no speakers, leave alone having no frikkin racing seats!

The game compels the player to do several things against their will just because that is the way the game behaves.

Other than all the nitpicking and cursing, the overall verdict on the game - Despite all the graphical sweetness and mind numbingly realistic and difficult driving, the game has absolutely nothing to offer in terms of fun other than the revised realism and fun in the Drift races. One of the very worst from all of Need For Speed titles till date. This fact can be fully realized by the fact that I, myself, am an avid NFS player and a die hard fan who still has NFS 2 SE, NFS 3 Hot Pursuit, Underground 2, Most Wanted and Carbon always installed on my system, just deleted the whole of Need For Speed: Pro Street last night (that’s right. I did not uninstall it, I gave it a cold delete.) after beating the game twice. And I played it twice, only because the first time play was rather dubious and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t really missing out on something. I still play Underground 2 and Most Wanted in my spare time on a regular basis, but I have had more than I really demanded from Pro Street. What a waste of time, money and energy.

But really, don’t let my words discourage you. The game sure is worth one full play or two. After that, it’s just one of those things you do to be faithful to a cult series.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 23rd, 2007 at 7:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.