Need For Speed ProStreet

Just six months ago, Electronic Arts made one of their biggest announcements ever: that a Need For Speed: ProStreet was under heavy development at the company's studios. You're probably wondering why this would count as one of EA's biggest, most ambitious projects to date. Well, to put it in short, ProStreet is the first NFS game that takes the series to a much higher level of racing, adding driving simulation elements to the already appealing arcade-ish ones the series is well known for. In fact, as EA themselves put it, NFS ProStreet brings gamers together for "competing at the highest level of street racing," a motto which, unfortunately, doesn't quite go for the PlayStation 2 version of the game.

Story The game follows Ryan Cooper's career as a legal street racer. Ryan is busy making a name for himself at one of the events when this hot-shot street racer, Ryo Watanabe, shows up and starts dissing him. Saying stuff like they must have lowered the standards letting guys like Ryan in on the racing, guarantees Ryo a good a*s kicking at the end of the game. Yes, as the urban graffiti will also reveal, Ryo is who you must meet again for the final showdown, should you win the huge number of events laying ahead. Not much of a story, if we're going to look back on the series, but yeah, I guess it qualifies as one.

Concept Fans know since the release of the very first teaser trailer that the game would feature racing sim elements, allowing gamers to customize their whole experience. Call it a blend of Project Gotham Racing and Grant Turismo if you will, it explains why superfast cars become available only towards the end of the game. However, NFS ProStreet for PS2 stands as living proof that a next-gen version of a game brings so much more.

The menu's background at the beginning of a race features a slide show of what should have depicted the unique atmosphere of a racing event. As you can imagine, the next-gen installments show the girls, the band on stage, the guys checking each other's rides out and everything else in motion (not referring to cutscenes). We can't mention this as a minus since this is not a version-comparison we're doing here, but the atmosphere clearly isn't as good as with the next-gen NFS ProStreet. The graffiti stylized menu along with a frenetic display of information does however give the impression that you're competing for something big.

Gameplay Although NFS ProStreet presents gamers with the upper mentioned urban-graffiti-like interface, the game's menu (and especially the options menu) looks like the work of a perfectionist. Surely even hardcore gamers would have found the interface annoying had it not featured such a straightforward display of options.

The first thing the game will ask you is your racing style, which is actually the difficulty setting. Casual manages your braking and assists you to the best line, Racer helps you just brake in difficult corners, while King lets you run loose and be in complete control of every aspect, leaving the arcade-ish gameplay in a trail of dust and bringing on the racing sim elements we've mentioned above.

Those picking up on the series for the first time (and not only) should hit Race Day before entering Career Mode, in order to familiarize themselves with the game's system. Here, you can create a Custom Race Day or play a Freestyle Race Day, which provides with an easy way to visit the track locations and race events you find most suitable for your style and taste. Don't get the wrong idea though. Race Day doesn't even come close to what you'd think is a "free run," or "quick race" mode, usually found within most racing titles out there.

After finishing a race, you are awarded points based on your place, time and damage taken. Combined scores will be taken into account so if you've had an "off day," so to speak, all is not lost. It's actually fun keeping track of how other racers have done so you know where you stand. If everything turns out well and you end up dominating the race day, you'll walk away with parts for your ride and cash.

Of course, all the popular racing events are in the game: grip races, drifting races, drag races and high speed challenges that'll have you totaling one car after another will keep you stuck to the screen, as no event is like the last. Good news for drifting fans in particular. If you drift too much and end up on the grass, you don't lose all your points - the meter just stops adding points until you return to the tarmac. But even as a King racer, in grip races you're still going to need that "best line," should you hit the NOS button (L1). Not braking at just the right moment will result in heavy damage to the car, or even getting totaled.

Control clearly deserves to be mentioned as a plus. It is smoother than with any other NFS title to date. As everyone enjoys a good drift race, you'll notice that the cars are very responsive when sliding on the tarmac and even grass. And as far as the view angles go, the camera zooms in and out as your speed increases or decreases, giving you a better view of the track when faced with choosing how to attack a corner, or which side of the road to position the car for the next turn, when traveling at over 200 mph on a straight line. Car physics seem to be as good as they were with the game's last installment so nothing much has changed from these points of view.

However, fans will soon find out that they've been kind of tricked into thinking ProStreet for the PS2 delivers the same extensive damage system available with the next-gen version of the game, since the trailers were identical for all ports. The least EA could have done was throw in a different intro for the PS2 and Wii installments. I mean, there's not a scratch on the car's body even when you take damage to the limit of getting totaled. You still have the option to repair your ride though, but that only occurs on a two-color guage that indicates the amount of damage taken, while below, you will have the cost for the repair.

Customization and tuning When entering Career mode, the Customization and Tuning options will become available. You can transform your 1980s Nissan 240SX S13 into a mean machine to give Ryo the shivers. New wheels, body kit, hood, spoiler, roof scoop, exhaust pipes, racing seats and a roll cage will not only give personality to your ride, but it will also improve its performance on track. As far as tuning goes, there are four main categories of car parts to be tuned: suspensions, the drivetrain, brakes and of course the engine, each allowing for a deeper tweak of their specific elements. Racing sim fans will find this feature alone worth giving ProStreet a go, whatever the system they're going to play it on.

The wind tunnel EA's been bragging about in multiple developer's diaries is there, but it doesn't make much difference - not as much as they wanted us to think anyway. But since we don't want to spoil your fun, we'll just let you check the rest of the stuff out on your own. And since we're now starting to move onto the bad stuff, there is somewhat of a glitch to be mentioned as well: the game freezes for as much as a second (at times) when you exit the pause menu and return to the race. Leaving aside that returning to the race is done rather suddenly (leaving the player with only a fraction of a second to move their right thumb from the triangle button to the X button), the game freezes for a little while, just after the player returns to the race.

Loading screens will always display tips. While some loading screens are faster than others, the developers didn't bother to program the shorter tips for the short loading screens, so if you're the kind of gamer that likes to have a complete experience, including reading tips within the first hours of gameplay, you might find this a little frustrating. As far as the split-screen 2 player battle goes, the game doesn't deliver anything that previous games in the series did, but actually adds slower frame rates, making it even more difficult to distinguish what's ahead when rolling fast, which brings us to our next topic...

Graphics Well, everything is fairly good with this game as long as we don't tap this topic. Clearly NFS ProStreet deserves a big, fat minus as far as the visual experience goes. Had this been an earlier PS2 title (say 2003 or 2004) we'd still count the graphics as bad. Car models look terribly simple - they're like toy cars, while edges and curves are as pixelated as pixelated gets. More than that, damage to the cars is practically non-existent, as mentioned above. Sure the game will notify you that you've experienced heavy damage, should you directly hit an obstacle at high speed, but pressing triangle to take a look behind will reveal a clean front end of the car with only a cracked windshield and maybe, just maybe, some smoke coming from underneath the hood. Don't even try playing this game on an LCD widescreen TV, the visual quality will only be worse. Mainly, whatever type of screen you're playing on, there's a lot of aliasing and poor frame rates to be dealt with.

Sound Fans of EA's NFS franchise will be glad to see that not much has changed as far as the sound goes. The game's playlist shuffles songs throughout the whole experience, whether gamers find themselves in the game's menu, or during one of the fiercest high-speed battles. The Trax Jukebox sports no more, no less than 37 different songs spanning a bunch of popular genres, which should make the delight of American players.

Whatever machine you choose, the car's engine purrs like a.. well, roars like a hungry tiger actually, while the high-pitched sound of the turbine (when shifting through gears) and tyre screeching are very realistic. To be honest with you, I myself am a Gran Turismo fan, but tyre screeching sounds dreadful in that game. In NFS ProStreet you'll probably notice it too and choose not to cruise along the optimum racing line, even if not in a drifting event, so you can hear the respective sound effect.

On the down side, the announcer sometimes screams too loud in the mic, while voice acting is also pretty lame. Overall, speech sounds pretty bad and phat throughout the game, but sound effects, including engine roar and impact noise sound good enough not to make the whole experience suck.

Conclusion Knowing that the next-gen versions of ProStreet deliver top notch visuals, online game modes, the possibility of sharing blue prints and becoming Street King on Xbox LIVE and PlayStation Network, we can't possibly say too many good things about the game's PS2 port, except that it does sport the typical NFS elements everyone loves, combined with racing simulation elements for more realism. But there is so much more to realism in a racing game, than just good control and car physics. Visuals, damage system, sound, they all need to leave a good impression if a series of such prestige is going to live up to its name. Sadly, we can't say that ProStreet does so, unless I was wearing someone else's glasses while playing the game... well, the rating will do the rest of the talking for me.