Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Ron Burke

The Need for Speed series debuted in 1994 and has spawned 12 (or 13 if you count the ill-fated Motor City Online) sequels.  The original creator of the series, Distinctive Software, was purchased by Electronic Arts, morphing into EA Canada to produce titles up until 2002.  At this point, Black Box Software (later purchased and changed into EA Black Box) took over development of the series starting with Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2.  Need for Speed: Carbon spells the development teams 6th title in the series, releasing on the PSP, Nintendo DS, GBA, Xbox 360, Xbox, PC, Wii, Gamecube, PS2, and PS3.  We got to take the PS3 version of the title out for a spin on the freshly-launched console.  While it does take some steps in the right direction, it also loses a little traction in some of the turns.  Let’s get behind the wheel.

It is very clear that the Need for Speed series is influenced greatly by current racing trends.  With the rise in popularity of Drift Racing, and the subsequent horrible film, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, the folks at EA Black Box busted their tail to bring Drift Racing to the game, while putting more emphasis on the Import Tuner culture and street racing.  For all intents and purposes they have succeeded in those objectives, but little else new is brought to the table.

*Slight Spoiler for NFS:MW* At the end of Need for Speed: Most Wanted, you pick up the car that was nabbed from you in the very beginning and make a break for the city edge.  The only cop I know that drives a race tuned Corvette, Sergeant Cross, (no relation to Jericho Cross, the undead guy from Dark Watch) is pretty pissed off but you lose him over a destroyed bridge.  *End Spoiler*

Need for Speed: Carbon picks up from there.  Cross has caught up with you as you pull into Palmont City.  He gets some payback on your car, completely destroying it in the process.  Before you are hauled off in handcuffs, an old friend named Darius (who has apparent history with you prior to Most Wanted) picks up the tab on your bounty.  There is no such thing as a free lunch though, so Darius (played by Tahmoh Penikett, aka “Helo” Agathon from Battlestar Galactica) puts you to work racing other street racers to reclaim the contested turf areas around the city.  The word on the street is that you fled Palmont City on bad terms with a sack full of cash under your arm.  As the story unfolds you’ll find out where this rumor came from, who is behind it, and slowly reclaim the city under your own banner.  You’ll also, once again, become the most notorious street racer in the city.

One of the cool things in Need for Speed: Most Wanted was the use of actors with computer generated backgrounds to tell the game story.  While some of the acting was laughable, it was still better than an all CG cast.  This trend continues with Need for Speed: Carbon in more ways than one.  Actors and actresses like Emmanuelle Vaugier (Detective Angell from CSI: NY), Tahmoh Penikett (“Helo” from Battlestar Galactica), Chris Gauthier (Vincent from Eureka), and Dean McKenzie (Detective Sam Nepps from Earth: Final Conflict) make up a pretty great leading cast.  They overact their way through the storyline, each recounting what they know about your quick escape from Palmont City.  The guys you face throughout the rest of the game are played by folks who have IMDB credits like “Cop #1” and “Restaurant Patron”, so don’t expect any of them to turn in any Oscar-caliber performances.  Still, its fun and it adds to the game in a way that pure CG wouldn’t accomplish.  A heavy neon-pastel look is brushed over EVERYTHING in these cutscenes, so sometimes it is hard to tell if a driver is human or CG.  I get what they were going for visually, but it ends up a glowy mess. 

Getting behind the wheel shows off the strength of the game engine a little better.  The whole game takes place at night, giving EA Black Box the chance to flex the lighting engine muscle.  The cars reflect light from the neon light sources on either side of the street, and your car is showroom-shiny and beautiful.  Every object in the game is beautifully rendered (although the building textures stand out as the exception to rule) and shows off the graphic power of the system nicely.  At this point, EA Black Box dumped the engine into a big vat of Vaseline and created a blurry distraction. 

When your car achieves any level of speed, the game tacks on some very excessive motion blur effects, as well as little contrails coming off the sides and back of your car.  I’ve recently had Lasik surgery, and my night driving suffered for a while, with large white streaks coming off of street lights, and a bit of a haze around all other light sources.  Need for Speed: Carbon simulates this perfectly when the motion blur is applied; giving me a great example to show my wife, but making the visual aspects of the game far less detailed.

I got to play the Xbox 360 version of Need for Speed: Carbon at a friends house.  He showed me an aspect of the game that is sadly missing from the PS3 version.  In the 360 version, you can take a snapshot of your car at any point and email it to your friend.  Given the extensive mod system, this gives players the chance to show off their modded rides to their friends.  The PS3 version lacks the snapshot feature, and by proxy the upload feature. 

I’ve said a lot of negative things about the graphic engine used in Need for Speed: Carbon.  I’ll also reiterate that the game is great looking, packing in a great amount of detail with a solid framerate. Unfortunately it is also a launch title, which means that it had to hit a certain ‘window’ for release.  The engine feels ported, and it shouldn’t.  Perhaps next year we’ll see the PS3 version flex its muscles and use all that power packed into that ‘heavy as a planet’ package.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted had some great sound work.  Using the surround sound system to its maximum, you could clearly hear the nitro valve unseat, the pavement give way, and the tires ripping your speed up to the cars maximum speed.  Well, why fix it if it isn’t broken?  Much of the sounds in Need for Speed: Carbon sound exactly the same as they did in Need for Speed: Most Wanted, and that is a good thing.
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Another great aspect of Need for Speed: Carbon is the soundtrack.  I was very surprised to hear “Are Friends Electric” by Gary Newman in the rotation.  The rest vary wildly, leaning on the side of a more techno feel.  There is still some rock, metal, hip-hop, and rap mixed in, but the licensed tracks only play when you are in Checkpoint races or riding around in free roam.  This actually work really well as you don’t tire of the 28 licensed tracks too quickly. 

The voice work, as I mentioned above, is somewhat ham-fisted and over the top.  Unfortunately it also tends to repeat pretty often, so you’ll learn to tune it out.  It’s a small knock against an otherwise great auditory experience.

The controls for Need for Speed: Carbon are very easy.  The new triggers on the PS3 controller act as you might expect, with the right trigger acting as a gas pedal, and the left trigger acting as a brake pedal.  The L1 button looks behind you, and the R1 moves between the usual racing view options.  (up close, over the hood, no hud and ground level, slightly behind, and further behind)  The left analog controls your steering, and your right analog can shift up or down.  You can shift up and down at any time, even if you are otherwise driving with automatic shifting.  Just as in Need for Speed: Most Wanted, the X button is your handbrake, the Square activates your slow-mo Speedbreaker, and the O button activates Nitrous if your car has it.  What is new is the Triangle button.  This button tells your wingman to move into action and do whatever they are designed to do.  (We’ll talk about them later)  The D pad, when used in Career mode, displays a world map, enters a shop or event, or allows you to look at your phone for messages.  If this particular configuration doesn’t suit you, you can also select from a host of alternate control schemes. 

What I imagine most folks are interested to know is how the Sixaxis controller is used.  Well, you’ll be disappointed to know that it does very little.  When you’ve got your tires completely cranked, if you also tilt the controller in that direction you can give yourself a little ‘oversteer’.  In theory you could think of all sorts of ‘tires left, counter steering right’ moments in your head, but it doesn’t quite translate to that.  It is just steering a little more in that direction.  You’ll probably forget about it in the time it took you to read this paragraph.  Just like the graphics, maybe next year.

The good news is that the game controls very well.  The new drift racing mode is easily integrated into the control scheme, and you never really feel like you are fighting the controls. 

Need for Speed: Carbon brings a few new things to the table.  The first, and probably the most notable, is the addition of a wingman.  These wingmen are split into three categories – drafters, scouts, and blockers.  Drafters jump out in front and attempt to set up a draft for you to pull some extra speed.  Scouts try to let you know where the shortcuts are within a race area.  Blockers put their car between you and the other racers in an attempt to slow them down.  Playing through the game I found that I relied on the Blockers to put second place a little further behind me.  I really didn’t use them to ‘advance’ my position nearly as much as their intro video might suggest you should.  Scouts on the other hand are all but useless.  When you are doing 140mph and your scout suggests you make a hard right turn, you tend to tell him to take a hard left off a straight peer.  Occasionally they’ll give you enough warning to take advantage of a shortcut, but more than likely you’ll spot it before they warn you.  Drafters are almost as useless as the scouts as there are few opportunities to use their draft power.  You really need a straightaway to use the drafting ability, of which this city has few.   Still, it is something new, and I fully expect to see a refined version in the next game.

The races in the game are very similar to what we saw in Need for Speed: Most Wanted.  In fact, almost all of the circuit races, sprints, speed-trap, and checkpoint races we saw in Most Wanted have made there way here.  In addition, you also get a new drift racing event, as well as a few boss battles in Carbon canyon.  The drift racing is fairly straightforward – drift around the corners as fast as you can, chaining one drift to another, without hitting the wall.  You earn points for good drifts and the racer with the most points wins. 

The boss battles are against the rival crew leaders.  These take place in what can only be called the most suicidal races in the series history.  First you’ll take them on in the city streets you should be very familiar with from taking their turf.  These are pretty easy to handle, but it really only serves to piss them off.  Next up is a tight rope walk down a narrow canyon road, often with a large cliff face on one side for you to commit vehicular suicide.  In the first part, you tailgate the boss through a series of checkmarked races.  In the second half you’ll be in the reverse position with the boss chasing you.  If you can get ahead of him by 10 seconds, you automatically win.  If he gets 10 seconds ahead of you while you are in chase mode, he wins.  If you happen to fail the second half, you’ll also get the treat of re-running the first race.  The Sixaxis controller costs 50 bucks and I was still tempted to throw it out the window in some of these races.  It wasn’t that the race was overly difficult, I just got tired of having to rerun the first race every time I screwed up.

There are three classes of cars that you can drive in Need for Speed: Carbon - the Tuner Cars, Muscle Cars, and the Exotic Cars.  The Tuner cars stick to the road like glue and generally are the cheaper cars in the game.  The Muscle cars are quick off the line and are typically American classics like the Mustang.  The Exotics are European cars that have a fairly even balance of top speed, acceleration, and handling in general.  There are over 55 cars in the game, including some classics like the 1970 Plymouth Hemi Cuda, and the 1971 Dodge Challenger R/T, as well as new cars like the 2007 Mazda Speed3, and the 2007 Lamborghini Murcielago LP640.  I’m sure in a roster like this, anyone can find a car they want to hold on to.  You can purchase cars at the car dealership, and you earn the money to do that by winning races.  Having a mod guy on staff allows you to work with pre-fabricated body kits that you can modify almost any way your heart desires.  It is akin to the face generation system in Tiger Woods – there is that much detail.  Armchair Tuners will dig this part of the game.

Overall, you can take out most of your competition in a dozen hours in the single player game.  Of course, that also assumes that you are a Need for Speed veteran.  Novice or new players will find that this game will stretch on for a while as they earn their racing stripes, and learn to deal with the patented “EA Catch-up Racing” system.  If you were a fan of the previous title, but would like to race without having to generate a heat level artificially, you’ll really enjoy the more race-focused Carbon, and you know what level of cheating to expect out of the AI.

There is a lot to like in this package.  The game looks pretty good (motion blur notwithstanding) and sounds fantastic.  The actors turn in some over the top acting to keep the pace of the game moving, and the addition of wingmen is a great idea.  Once I cleared the single player game it was time to go online and try my luck.  As we are still in the ‘launch window’ of the PS3, that proved to be more difficult than it should have been. 

There are several modes for multiplay in Need for Speed: Carbon.  You can do a head to head duel called (creatively enough) Canyon Duel.  It is the same races you drive against the bosses of the single player game, only the second player is your friend.  Canyon race pits you against three other drivers in a race to the bottom of a canyon.  Checkpoint is a race to certain points of the track before time runs out.  Canyon Checkpoint is the same as Checkpoint, but you drive on the dangerous canyon route instead.  Canyon Drift is suicide in a can as you drift around the treacherous canyon roads for points.  (No, you can’t drift race in the canyon against your friends)  Pursuit Evasion is similar to the evasion portions of Need for Speed: Most Wanted.  If you shake your tail quickly you can earn a medal.  Trade Paint is again similar to objective by the same name in Need for Speed: Most Wanted.  Circuit, Sprint, Drift, and Speedtrap are exactly the same as the single player game.  Race Wars pits you against 11 other drivers in a three-lap race.  You can play Circuit, Sprint, and Speedtrap in co-op or split-screen mode, if you are into that kind of thing. 

While the visual effects of this title and the night-only races may turn away some players, the customization options in the game will bring tuners back to the series, and folks who liked the racing style of Need for Speed: Most Wanted will find the white-knuckle racing to their liking.

So here we are, at the end of a review for a PS3 launch title.  What is amazing is that the end product isn’t that bad.  I was once told that every launch needs a racer, and Need for Speed: Carbon filled that ‘requirement’.  We just get the added bonus that it is actually a pretty decent title, if not visually off-putting.  It will make for a great stepping stone for next years installment – I can’t wait.

Gaming Trend Score

82

1. Graphics: 75
2. Audio: 90
3. Controls: 80
4. Gameplay: 80
5. Value/Replay: 86
6. OVERALL:82