It is by far the closest that the franchise has come to recapturing the magic of its golden era. However, 2010’s Hot Pursuit is an exception to the norm. It’s a shame that Electronic Arts hasn’t been able to improve the games at the speed that the game engines and technologies have. Need For Speed: Underground 2 (2004)Īs you might have noticed in this best need for speed games list so far, the best games tend to be from the good old days. However, the graphics have obviously aged terribly and they look even worse compared to the Playstation versions released later. Need For Speed II left an indelible impression on the gamers who tried their hand at it over 22 years ago, and today it finds itself on the best need for speed games list. All of that mouth watering stuff was set to the amazing soundtrack from Saki Kaskas and Rom Di Prisco. While it only included nine vehicles, these were the most breathtaking supercars the late ‘90s had to offer, inspiring a generation of budding enthusiasts to lust after the McLaren F1 and Ferrari F50, as well as oddities like the Ford GT90 and lost-to-time Isdera Commendatore 112i. The overall car roster is a total gem, and perhaps the best of the classic era. Typically overlooked in the franchise’s legacy, Need for Speed II deserves recognition for ditching the rather uneventful highway cruising motif of the first game in favor of a selection of unique, epic courses, each brimming with wild moments and true personality. From a technical standpoint, High Stakes happens to be one of the franchise’s high points sadly, it feels like a chore sometimes as well. The tracks are far too boring to justify their length, and the emphasis on gratuitous multi-race championships makes the experience feel like a slog from the very start. What holds High Stakes back is that it strays too far in that direction, to the point of curtailing the series’ trademark pick-up-and-play enjoyment. In retrospect, High Stakes was a bold spin on NFS’ established formula up to that point, and an astute one given how Gran Turismo established the car-PG genre the year prior. Such a revolutionary change is a big reason why this edition of the game finds a spot on the best need for speed games list. With High Stakes, developer EA Canada applied the original Hot Pursuit’s revolutionary chase mechanic to a fully fleshed-out single-player campaign that saw players purchasing vehicles and racing for pink slips for the first time in the series. The gameplay did suffer a little because of the excessively long and boring point to point racetracks. It sounds quaint by today’s standards, though for a generation of gamers and car lovers that grew up with Lamborghini Diablos postered on their bedroom walls, it was pretty exciting. These cars had interior views, were modelled on their unique specifications (owing to that Road & Track tie-in) and came accompanied with oodles of CD-ROM-filling multimedia content, like press photos and videos. At a time when licensed vehicles were still a rarity in racing games, The Need for Speed offered a smorgasbord of the most desirable sports cars in the world, with an attention to detail that none of its contemporaries possessed. However, compared to the heights that this game would go on to achieve, this game had nothing special (this was still better than the steaming piles that were Need for Speed: Carbon and Need for Speed: Payback). The first Need for Speed was a really adequate debut for the franchise, there was nothing really wrong with it. So we decided to kick our list off with the legendary Road and Track Presents The Need for Speed. However, it feels wrong to not include the granddaddy of all NFS games on the best Need for Speed games of all time list. While the first Need for Speed game might not be the definitively 11th best NFS game of all time, 2014’s NFS Run might have something to say about that.
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