Reflections on the game

Engine braking happens in stages. First the bumper brakes, then the radiator grille and headlights. Next - the radiator, and only after that the engine.

(c) Internet

Silence... Everything has frozen before the explosion... Autumn leaves, helplessly swirling in the air, fall onto the asphalt, while the yardkeeper Uncle Petya, methodically waving his broom, clears the parking lot in a nearby courtyard. Moscow. Mozhayskoye Highway towards the center, six in the morning, the traffic police are sleeping sweetly. Red traffic light. The goal is the 3DNews editorial office on Smolenskaya. Ready?
Steady. Go!!! First gear, clutch, gas! The roar of the engine becomes denser than the air, the wide low-profile slicks break into wheelspin for a split second, the headrest hits the back of your head painfully, the hood rears up, the rear squats, the revs jump to the limiter, an explosion of torque... Rrrring! And first gear is over. Rrrring! And second gear is over. Rrrrring! And third gear is over, and along with it, the cars that ran the green light a minute ago. Rrrrrring! And everything is over, because the speed is already past two hundred, and it's unclear who allowed everyone around to reverse so fast. Rrrrrrrring! And the speedometer is over, we need to brake, we've already arrived.
Racing is always racing. Adrenaline addiction leads to the fact that once you've tried it, you can only get out of it due to an acute shortage of cash and vehicles. Moscow, in this respect, is a crazy city. For a long time now, probably more than a year, you can meet cars on the streets with the lettering "Street Racing" and "Bimmer.ru", most of which move by nothing other than lane-weaving. There's no counting the head-crazy ones among these racers. As if that's how it should be, they cut off deaf old grandpas in late-seventies domestic cars, feisty girls in RAV4s, brothers loaded with mobile-phone chatter in six-hundreds, and the rest of the traffic participants. Imperceptibly to themselves, they give the people on the oncoming lane, at interchanges and in corners a real scare. With squealing tires and all axles sliding, they burst onto overpasses, burn brake pads to the ground before traffic police posts and individual radar operators.
To race or not to race in the city, everyone decides for themselves, sometimes forgetting that the traffic rules unambiguously interpret speeding not in the driver's favor, and a pedestrian hit on a zebra crossing could turn out to be someone's elderly father or mother. Dynamic hits on the radio only spur on lovers of drive. As soon as Tatu in "Uskorrritele" on Radio-Ultra (100.5 FM) starts wailing about how they won't catch us, a third of the flow on the MKAD presses the accelerator if not to the floor, then definitely into the asphalt. And it doesn't matter what's under the person's backside - a tuned Lamborghini Diablo VT, which will slice the air to the second hundred within a dozen seconds, or a falling-apart Zhiguli baring its teeth like a panther with patches of rust. The madness of drive forgives everything. It's just that in Russia there are no these chases after street racers with helicopters, police U-turns, ambushes and TV cameras. But firing after them from an AKS-74 so that they won't be tempted to fly past the striped batons, that's always welcome.
Fast and the Furious drove many crazy, and now green neon under the undercarriage, R18s on Japanese cars and blue washer nozzles have become everyday things. The new NFS came at just the right time, joined the ranks of the general hysteria over street racing, with a thirst for speed and the need to be a wild driver, spitting on everyone and everything, even on yourself.
Need For Speed has always been something that caused delirium tremens, even without being a simulator. The first was interesting as a precedent and simply an excellent game, the second amazed with long straights, and having received the letters "SE" surprised with a crazy frame rate and fashionable texture filtering under Glide. The third, aka Hot Pursuit, brought us cops with their black-and-white garbage cans, and the fourth brought money. The fifth added amazing physics, and such successful rear-wheel drive dynamics that it's impossible for the author, an apologist for exclusively RWD cars, to list analogues. You could play Porsche Unleashed for hours, enjoying how the front axle breaks into a skid, how the rear swings out, how corners are taken with the handbrake and... What's there to say? The cameras in PU alone give the moral right to enshrine the game in a hall of fame.


Their police aren't even in Mercs...

We meet the sixth NFS today. We meet it with tears in our eyes and delight in our chests. Tears, because it's gotten worse. Delight, because it's still NFS, drive and all that... By the way, whatever they say, it will be the sixth. Motor City and the rest don't count, and let someone else call this dirty business NFS. Graphics, cameras and sheet metal


Gangster showdowns.
The graphics core of the new NFS is stunning. You expect twenty-first-century capabilities from it, pixel and vertex shaders, super-polygonal models, every blade of grass on the curb and every brick in a house by the roadside drawn out. It disappoints cruelly - at first glance, our Hot Pursuit 2 is not different from previous NFS games by a single jot. Later, along with driving on the shoulders, a mass of interchanges and forks, alternative route sections and insanely stylish cities, the understanding of the moment comes, but... As in that joke: the spoons were found, but the aftertaste remained. Beautiful, clean, decent textures, and nothing more. It could have been done better, it should have been, but they couldn't, didn't have time...
At the same time, they removed the race replay from alternative cameras, and only in the PC version. On one of the PlayStation 2s installed at Gorbushka, we managed to see everything that was there before, plus a set of beautiful motion-blur effects. And so? They killed half the fun :( Well tell me, what driver wouldn't want to look at his bulging eyes from the side at the moment of taking an unexpected T-shaped corner in a fan drift at 180 kilometers per hour, when there's a risk, if the ladies will forgive me, not only of crapping yourself but also of splattering everyone around within a twenty-meter radius?


An ideologically correct start.
On the other hand, they added a camera that shows your junker in flight. It looks beautiful, it looks spectacular... Like in The Matrix. With the only difference being that it distracts you from the driving process to death, and not figuratively, but in the very, truest sense. How many idiots, yanked by a mighty hand out of the seat for a second of their lives to see how they, like proud falcons, fly over the cobblestones, then fail to get back into character and smash to pieces, having failed to catch the car that swerved after landing?
Not a single one. You can't smash to pieces here. The suspension is indestructible, problems with the bodywork are purely theoretical, because cars don't crumple like that from such impacts. And you can't drive a real BMW ///M5 with the hood open at 150 km/h - the hood will be torn off with flesh, the fenders will be bent and something else too. You're lucky if you survive to crawl to the Autodom parking lot and, under the stunned gazes of the mechanics, dictate the VIN to the service manager. Tested in practice.


For some a failure, for others a stroke of luck...
The major car corporations can be understood - a wrecked car is bad advertising. How many tears were shed at Mercedes over the death of Princess Diana, we are not given to know. But let us not disturb the memory of the departed. The conversation is not about that, but about the fact that a head-on collision with a full route bus still does not lead to the death of the sports car's crew by way of pressing the hood into the trunk, and flying off the track and tumbling into a ditch do not produce what you can often observe on the Leningradka. By the way, even an impact of insane force at full speed, at maximum speed, into a police car from behind does not lead to broken necks and other body parts of the, in this game, disrespected officers of the law...
They won't call you an ambulance under any circumstances, even after the twentieth tree in a row. At most, they'll move you to the center of the track, and off you go again. On one hand, this creates the notorious drive and gives a sense of permissiveness, on the other... How shall I put it? Anyone who hasn't, by unhappy chance, on an icy track, gone to ram a pole, or worse, an oncoming Kamaz, and successfully failed to dodge it, won't understand. Yes, it's scary and you don't even want to think about what could have been, but... If Carmack had been working not on Doom 3 but on NFS, we would have gotten the most naturalistic simulation with a photorealistic core. But EA Games is not iD Software; it needs to sell the game to children, which means wrecked cars are not our method.Physics
Without good physics, a racing game won't hook those who have at least once sat behind the wheel of a real steel steed. Only schoolkids can drive anything - scooters, spaceships, or boxes glued to asphalt rails that outwardly resemble roadsters. We, those who are obsessed with drive, drifts and which oil to pour into the engine, need only one thing - strict adherence to the rules of how a car behaves on the road. The physics of rear-wheel and all-wheel drive in Porshe Unleashed shook out the soul and left emptiness in it. Hot Pursuit 2 didn't go further than its ancestor, but playing it is very, very, very pleasant.


That's how I dragged it, about two hundred meters.
At speed you can perfectly feel how much the sporty BMW Z8 roadster differs from the charged family sedan ///M5 of the same Bavarian concern, and that only a real psycho can drive fast through corners in a Mercedes, even an AMG-charged one. The roadster from Opel, which, it would seem, is also a sports car, and costs in Hanover a laughable-for-a-German thirty-something thousand euros, turns out to handle not badly, but it simply doesn't go. The American cars, especially the Fords, are such fools... that you might as well make the roads straight. And the McLaren has such fine and sensitive steering that it becomes scary to turn the wheel in corners. Definitely, after NFS you start to respect Dodge and think better of Chevy. Believe me, if you're not a soulless blockhead, then in every car you'll find something intimate, deeply your own, dear. I'll admit honestly, the syndrome of the first NFS, when out of all the cars you picked the one with the smaller number in the "0-100 acceleration" column, Hot Pursuit 2 cured me of. Try in a brand-new, spick-and-span Ford Crown Victoria to take a sharp corner at speed, and you'll understand what heroes these guys in uniform are.
Drive physics and on-road behavior, that's one end of the stick. The second end, traditionally hiding in the fog of deliberate underdevelopment, is the car's behavior off the road, for example in flight, after an impact, with improper steering. You can do "ears" on most real cars without even accelerating too hard. Gas, wheel left, wheel right, more gas, rocked it, sharply threw it sideways, rolled... Welcome!


Engine braking, a visual aid. Phase 1.
Crashes and jumps in NFS very rarely lead to cars flipping over. Throwing the rear end out while pulling away from a standstill in a car with 405 Bavarian horses under the hood is practically impossible. A triumph of ASC-T or just simplified physics? More likely the latter. Simply put, they make things pretty and pleasant for us, but by no means realistic.Cars
Calling Hot Pursuit 2's car roster a junkyard would be a stretch. The models are stunningly detailed. Sure, without the special effects of the Doom III monsters, but still very, very beautiful. Compared to Porsche Unleashed, everything is slightly simplified - doors, trunks and hoods don't open, roofs don't come down, and in general the driver is given to understand that looking is fine, but touching is not. It's not yours, you were only given a ride. But it's beautiful.
The whole roster is divided into ideologically clear components - your choice of German and American cars, plus pieces of tuning and design thought from the world's leading studios. Ferrari, Lamborghini, McLaren - anyone who doesn't know these names, please stand up and leave the room. True Aryans burn rubber in Opel, Mercedes and BMW, children of the prairies take Ford, Dodge and Chevrolet into their hands. There's no point listing them all - better to sit down and drive once than hear about it a hundred times. There are no Japanese cars, none at all. Apparently a shortage, and rising duties at developer customs. So you won't be able to compare the ///M5 with the EVO-7 in the game. Maybe for the best.
They don't give it to you at first. You have to go through event after event, race after race. In the final of one of them you get into a McLaren F1. Even after the Lamborghini Murcielago, paired with the Porsche Carrera GT, pressing that throttle is scary. And the fear justifies itself, oh does it... The kitty drives so fast that your hands on the wheel break out in a cold sweat, and expressions escape your lips that Ozhegov never recorded in the annals. There's no time to look around, the main thing is to stomp on the brake in time, yank the handbrake and frantically crank the wheel away from the guardrail. And even though the F1 steers better than anything else, it also slams you all the way to the Netherlands, so much so that even on the autobahn the R20 wheels can't hold this marvel in a corner, no way at all.
Only a complete cynic would skip Hot Pursuit 2. Maybe someone gets a kick out of downloading a patch from the internet to unlock everything at once. But my deeply personal opinion is that you need to play through NFS, and only from the very beginning, from the crappy budget junkers up to the supercars, just to understand what steers and what doesn't, what drives, what burns rubber, and what slams you senseless. Sorry for the slang.Tracks
Remember that old Soviet cartoon? The one with "malavata"? Exactly that situation - there are only 12 tracks, and the wide variety is achieved by systematically overlapping and combining certain sections. But what's worse - rain, snow, hail and black ice no longer threaten us. Nor does the night blazing with streetlights. Why? What the hell? Silence in response...
Degrading? Cutting development time? Lowering system requirements? Who knows with these developers. Sadly, but futuristic tracks, snow-covered alpine roads and autobahns flooded with water are gone now. There's forest, tropics, hot spots with volcanoes and Mediterranean tracks. All very neat, but without a spark.
Compared to previous versions, the play area has expanded even more, detour options have appeared, and the recommendations even talk about cutting across the shoulders and pushing through the bushes. In places, this helps save time. Oh, to see an F1 cutting through the bushes in the forest and die. Stanislavsky is in a coma.
The detail of the tracks has grown, and with anti-aliasing, sometimes it seems that all of this is really here, nearby. The houses in the village, the bushes and the rest are pretty, although they haven't gone far from High Stakes. However, in places there is something to look at, to admire, if there's time. And there isn't. This game wasn't made for looking around. At speeds approaching three hundred, your gaze narrows to a string. The most that flies past your eyes is one continuous strip of road markings and the gray tongue of the road. The rest is secondary. But quality work on the secondary is good form. NFS has always been made with quality. By the way, now you come across genuinely long roads - up to 12-plus miles, even in a very powerful junker you don't arrive right after the start.
Music accompaniment - a pianist for Radeons?
Not at all. A gentleman's set of sound APIs for those with Creative sound cards or without them. The music is exclusively from famous bands. Right during the game, MTV-style captions pop up showing the track artists and song titles. It's a shame that "Ready? Steady. Go!" and "Nas ne dogonyat" aren't on the list, but... even without them, the tracks from the creators for street racers burn.
We won't talk about the car and ambient sounds. Believe me, here EA is traditional, a big, fat, juicy five. Some neighbors have already asked why I took the engine out of my car and dragged it up to the fourth floor. Others are curious why and how I listen to police radio chatter around the clock. They're worried that there are so many racers in Moscow. Who would doubt it - 24 hours a day, swearing and shouts on the radio "Fifteenth to two hundred first. Fifteenth to two hundred first. Spotted a violator. Doing two hundred!", or worse "Ending the pursuit, this is too dangerous. Requesting backup..."Modes, network and all that
Guys, who even cares? It's all here - single player, elimination, playing as the police, and even over a network and via the internet. Profiles, as before, are set for each player. The menu organization has changed somewhat, but that's about it. No revolutions to note, but... let's discuss the details.
* Quick RaceA quick race is good for those who just want to start driving. The car will be provided at random, but the track is always the same.* Single RaceHaving settled on this game type, you can choose not only the car or the game level, but also enable / disable the presence of police or set a certain number of opponents.* Lap KnockoutThis is the game variant familiar to us from previous "NFS" games, whose main rule is that after each lap ends, the outsider loses the ability to continue. In the end, only two racers remain in the final stage, fighting for the single prize.* Be The CopA completely new mode. We get to be in the shoes of a cop chasing speed violators. The whole confrontation comes down to banal ramming, and as it progresses, the life bar gaping above our victim's car decreases. A zero level means our victory.* Hot PursuitThis is the main mode of the game. For the first time, the developers introduced a non-linear progression system. Now, using the mission tree (33 in total), you can jump from mission to mission in any convenient order. Say, if you can't win the "Opel tournament", you can go seek your fortune in knockout races around Palm City Island. Naturally, the prizes for each task are different too: in one variant a brand-new car, in another a secret track.
"Hot pursuit" literally translates as "hot chase", which means the Highway Patrol will join the race. The cops this time are very well prepared. They've moved from budget cars into the most elite vehicles, which, unfortunately, are not specially selected machines but the same repainted BMWs and Lamborghinis that you and I drive every day. The cops' attitude toward us is determined by the number of stars, as it was in "GTA3" on the principle of - the more, the closer they watch. At two stars they'll simply try to pin us to the roadside, and at three a helicopter will appear, dropping barrels of napalm on us, cruel as that is.
NFS is a purely humane game, and in any case we can't be blown up or destroyed, which means we'll just lose time. In the worst case, the race will end with a funny cutscene in which the caught racer is arrested. But let's continue with the modes:
* ChampionshipThe same as Hot pursuit mode, but without the presence of police.* MultiplayerDespite the fact that the AI (artificial intelligence) in the game is very decent, it's best to compete with real opponents. All standard: connect to the internet, launch the game, select multiplayer in the menu. Today over 80 servers from all over the world are available. Unfortunately, at present only two modes are available for online play: Single race and Lap Knockout. Hence the surprise of many internet users: "how come we're without cops??!". Whether patches will help fix the situation is unknown.
RequirementsFor all this drive and beauty, the game has the right to and will demand payment from you. With what? Of course, with colored metals and their derivatives - iron. On a GeForce 4 Ti4600 with a Pentium 4 whose clock speed is pushing closer to three thousand megahertz, everything flies, which no one should doubt. But only until the first antialiasing. Turn on 4xS and that's it, pit stop, you can't play. A car is not a turtle; in a racing simulator FPS means almost more than in a shooter. And it's not there. Want stereo? Then you're either a psycho or a developer on insane hardware. And no need to argue, we're talking about maximum graphics quality and high resolution. After all, you wouldn't run NFS at 640x480 on such a configuration?!
However, those who don't demand a fur coat from a Bavarian shoulder will appreciate the rich settings. As always, you can reduce everything to a puritanical minimum to enjoy poor graphics, skimpy models and small textures. On an Athlon 800 with a GeForce 2 MX400 the game can also fly. Relatively.
The only reason to mourn the departed 3dfx is precisely NFS. The ancestors of the current one ran noticeably better under Glide than under Direct3D.Impressions
Something's missing. Why does everything become so bad? The intro movie is no longer filmed but drawn, in places even very good, but... it's not a natural shot of a race car, raven-black, slicing through falling leaves in an autumn forest setting. The NFS museum fails time after time. At this rate, they'll finally make a stuffed animal out of it, where the name says the best about the car. Why so few cars, where are the tracks, where have these cameras finally gone? Why, why is everything so bad :((
I regret that I didn't play the new NFS with stereo glasses. Perhaps that would have given extra food for thought. Even more I regret that there's no ACT Labs wheel with a manual gearbox and three-pedal unit at hand - I'd like to know whether Hot Pursuit 2 can handle that thing. As soon as I change the gearbox and make a tin body on a real one, I'll upgrade the steering block on the virtual one. I'll buy a used seat from an old BMW, drive the last screw into the stand simulating a real car's cockpit, set up 5.1 so the neighbors get even more scared, and blow my money on a projector. Just give me money. Exclusively for the sake of the new NFS.