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25/01 - Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes
31/01 - Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas
01/02 - SOMA (Safe Mode)
09/02 - Shadow Warrior
18/02 - Mulaka
26/02 - NieR: Automata - 3C3C1D119440927 DLC
02/03 - Race Driver: GRID
04/03 - Bladed Fury
10/03 - Devil May Cry 5 (Devil Hunter)
13/03 - AER: Memories of Old
17/03 - Devil May Cry 5 (Son of Sparda)
20/03 - Devil May Cry 5 (Human)
05/04 - God of War III Remastered
12/04 - Devil May Cry 5 (Dante Must Die)
14/04 - Journey
15/04 - ABZU
22/04 - Journey
28/04 - Lost Planet: Extreme Condition - Colonies Edition
30/04 - Dangerous Driving
02/05 - Final Fantasy XV - Episode Gladiolus/Episode Prompto/Episode Ignis
12/05 - The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings - Enhanced Edition
21/05 - RiME
22/05 - Remember Me
20/06 - Bioshock
08/07 - Ty the Tasmanian Tiger 2
11/07 - Bioshock 2
25/07 - Inside
05/08 - Bioshock Infinite
14/08 - Eastshade
23/08 - Judgment
11/09 - Astral Chain (Pt Standard)
13/09 - Jettomero: Hero of the Universe
15/09 - Assault Spy (Normal/Asaru)
19/09 - Prey (2006)
23/09 - Leaving Lyndow
24/09 - Assault Spy (Normal/Amelia)
04/10 - Need for Speed: Underground 2
Something that just started as a spontaneous moment of curiosity ended up as me playing through this whole game again. I was very impressed with how well this game has held up so many years later. Although I have poked around with this game a couple of times since it was new, this is the first time I've actually committed to playing more than the opening hours since back on the Gamecube/PS2. With how the series has floundered around since, failing to live up to the legacy of this game, I had considered the possibility that maybe this one wasn't as good a I remember. That perhaps it was just nostalgia making me hold it up as better than it was. But nope, it's still great. And it still puts many modern racing games to shame in some ways, even outside the NFS series.
Most crucially the feel of driving is really fantastic. Even though it's approachable and arcadey, it actually has a sense of subtlety to it that I suspect hides more going on under the surface than one might realise. Cars have a really nice progressive sense of grip to them, where you actually have to pay attention to controlling throttle and oversteer, and getting your racing line right is important. Engine braking is even a thing here too. There's a sense of nuance and communication between you and the car which feels really nice. It's still really satisfying to play, and is much more rewarding and involving than many other racing games today. If you could take this handling model out of this game and just drop it in to something that came out yesterday, it would still stand out as among the best the genre could offer.
The structure of the game is very straightforward and quite basic by modern standards, but it generally works to the game's strengths. The open world is large enough to feel like a sprawling city for you to explore, but still small enough that every part feels unique and you can build up an intimate knowledge of it. It feels a bit strange going back to a game that locks off parts of the world with barriers until you progress more, but you unlock the majority of the city relatively quickly, so it's no big deal in practice. The career structure generally feels like a long list of arbitrary races, but as you unlock more areas, tracks do tend to get more technical, so there is a difficulty curve of sorts. There's a nice progression to upgrades for your car too, with each step noticeably making the car feel different each time.
There's a decent variety of race types, with a range of quality to them. The standard circuit and sprint races are what they sound like, and are fun as the meat and potatoes of the game. The "URL" races on closed courses that are outside the city are among the best in the game as they really reward a proper racing line, and don't have any traffic or sneaky kerbs to mess you up. Street X races, that take place in tight courses made from car parks were pretty fun as they also reward similar skills, but are held back by AI racers having a tendency of crashing in to you in the early race and ruining things. I wasn't much a fan of the drag or drift modes though. Drag races require near perfect timing for changing gears, so you need to be looking very closely at your revs, while at the same time trying to dodge between lanes to avoid obstacles, with really sluggish and unresponsive turning. The drift mode doesn't feel very well thought out. They change the handling of the car in that mode, and all it does it basically makes it more slippy, but in not a satisfying way. It doesn't have a good sense of momentum.
The AI in general isn't great either. That problem of them crashing in to you at the beginning of races persists in most modes. It's just that it's more of a problem on the Street X tracks than on other courses. They also don't seem to be following the same physics rules as you either. They aren't good at taking a racing line, yet they manage to get around corners faster than they should be able to given the route they take. While the game doesn't feel unfair for the most part, it's not hard to see where the rubber banding is happening, and sometimes you'll need to restart a race a couple of times just to get away from opponents acting like idiots in the first few corners.
Graphically the game doesn't look too bad. It's still obviously a PS2 era game, with all the low poly environments and limited lighting effects you would expect from that, but the overall picture it manages to paint still works. The central city area in particular looks quite nice, with all the colourful neon lights in the dark, and some real effort going in to creating memorable spaces. When you go up to the more mountainous area, seeing the city below you from afar is also still kind of impressive. Although the illusion breaks down a bit if you scrutinize it too much. It's a backdrop that obviously was never meant to be seen in a 1920x1080 resolution. Unfortunately the later areas of the game are a bit drab. An industrial area that is mostly factories or dock warehouses, etc. Not interesting to look at or be around. The car models themselves aren't bad. Obviously they can't stand up to the likes of Forza these days, but they have fairly impressive detail for a PS2 game. The paintwork and lighting on them isn't great though. It's not that hard to notice they have per-vertex lighting, and it often seems to reflect either too brightly or too darkly. But speaking of the look of the cars, I have to give credit to how you actually can upgrade them tastefully. Since the game is aping the early Fast and Furious style look, one might think that it's stuck in that era, only giving you options to make your car look ugly, but that's not actually the case. While you still need to embrace that aesthetic to a certain degree, there's still a good amount of body parts and such which look cool, and not like you're slapping ugly gaudy bits on to your car that don't belong.
Playing on PC these days, there are a few technical hiccups however. In some tracks and parts of the world, the game stutters quite badly. I'm not exactly sure what it is. It behaves somewhat like a double-buffer v-sync issue, but it's not quite the same. It's worse than that. On a few rare occasions there's a lighting bug that makes the sky strobe rapidly too, usually at the same time as this frame stuttering too. Very unpleasant. Luckily those things only happened infrequently enough that it didn't ruin things though. The game also crashes quite a bit, usually when entering a race, but a couple of times it happened randomly mid-race too. Pretty annoying, but the game loads so fast these days that jumping back in only takes seconds. Although, honestly, I'm giving the game a lot of slack, for being old and out of date for modern systems. If a new game was breaking like this, I probably wouldn't let it slide anywhere near as much.
Yet again, ended up rambling much more than I meant to. But I think this game warrants it. It's one of my favourite games of all time, one that meant a lot to me growing up, and is still one of the highest points in the genre. Now, what next? Another old NFS game? Which one? Hmm...