EA is on a roll lately with their sports lineup for the PC. NBA Live 95 is the greatest basketball game ever made (possibly the best any-ball game ever), PGA Tour 96 has just come out and is looking good, and now here comes Road & Track Presents: The Need For Speed, a racing sim that makes the world of exotic sports cars accessible to everyone. These are the cars that people tell you, "if you have to look at the price, you can't afford it." We've all wanted to get into a car with super-charged whitchgizzits and turbo loppertubes and go screaming down the roads, waving at the cops as you breeze by. And why not? In the Lamborghini Diablo, top speed over 200 miles per hour, the cops wouldn't even put down their coffee and donut to try to catch you. Every car commercial on television shows us cars going impossibly fast down roads and around corners, but anytime we normal folks forget to watch our speedometer for a minute, a cop comes out of nowhere with ticket book in hand. For everyone who ever felt like this, EA's The Need For Speed is exactly what you need. Eight cars that, when one of those slinky clad models are draped across the hood, 10 out of 10 guys wish the girl would move so they could see more of the car.
The Need For Speed is one of those rare examples of a game on CD ROM that lives up to the term "multimedia." The designers knew what could be put on a CD and, by golly, they put it on there. Any time a section of the game is loading we're treated to photo-quality pictures of these super cars from every angle you could imagine. And instead of just supplying us with a game, The Need For Speed has an incredible showcase section which profiles each of these dream machines in the categories of performance, mechanical specs, history of the car, and general information. Each of these sections has beautiful photos of the cars highlighting the information, but as if that weren't enough, a special video of each car has been included. And the video isn't one of these watch-the-car-drive-by-once jobs, these are professional, MTV-style clips with full narration and hot CD-quality music.
But there is a game in this package, and a darned good one at that. The eight featured cars - the Mazda RX-7, the Acura NSX, the Toyota Supra Turbo, the Porsche 911 Carrera, the Dodge Viper RT/10, the Corvette ZR-1, the Lamborghini Diablo VT, and the Ferrari 512 TR - are all closely modeled after the real things. I've never driven anything even closely resembling these exotics, but I'll take their word for it. When one car is said to excel at acceleration while another is reported to excel in handling, when you drive those cars you can sure enough feel the difference. In fact, it's incredible how well the designers have translated the feel of an actual car into a PC sim. One note: make sure that you have a good joystick or a steering wheel peripheral before buying this game. The keyboard, while functional, simply cannot bring out all of the nuances that are involved.
There are six different tracks (there are actually seven tracks, but I'll cover that later) to race on, three open road tracks and three closed circuit tracks. The open road tracks are just that, made to resemble racing on the open road, including traffic in both directions, realistic landscape, tunnels, expanding and closing lanes, everything - even the cops. If a cop catches up with you and manages to get far enough ahead, your speed slowly diminishes until you stop and are handed a ticket, so it's just as well to stop immediately in order to quickly get back on the road. If you get stopped too many times - well, you'll just have to get the game to see what happens, but it's hilarious. You're not helpless in the race against the law, because even with all the ultra-performance in these cars, the designers made sure to include a radar detector which beeps faster and faster the closer you get to a cop. Don't ever slow down when a cop is on your tail since you'll lose the race, but it does help to know when the law is chasing you.
Making this great package even better are the different modes of racing that are included. Time Trial mode lets you race against the clock without any traffic or cops, letting you get used to the car and the track. Head to Head mode is for racing against a computer opponent, the car of your choice, or you can race against a human opponent over the modem. All the traffic and cops are included on the open road sections in this mode. The Single Race mode places the player against seven other computer opponents, or six computer opponents and one human player. The tournament mode divides all the types of cars into three classes - A, B, and C - which are rated for various tracks. Each class must be won in order to win the championship and advance to a special seventh bonus track, which is unavailable before the championship is won, but available all of the time after the victory. It's not as easy to win as it sounds, because the computer competition is very tough. I was able to win one race, but darned if I could get that second triumph under my belt. I even set a record-breaking track time and still lost the race to the computer.
The great thing about this game is all the extras that are included. Seeing that Road and Track magazine had a hand in the making of The Need For Speed, it comes as no surprise that this game keeps track of a ton of statistics. Your top track speed, acceleration time, lap times, and braking times are just some of that stats that are measured. The computer also keeps a record of your race that you can watch after the finish, showing either the entire race or computer selected highlights, everything being viewable from multiple camera angles. The only downside is that all of these views are different angles from behind the cars, there's no viewing angles from in front.
When I first got The Need for Speed, I thought that this is just another racing game. I mean, I played NASCAR racing, everything is just a letdown after that, right? Well, get ready for my next statement then, because I actually like The Need For Speed better than NASCAR. I'm not saying that it's a more accurate simulation or anything like that, I'm just saying that it's more fun. The tracks are incredibly fun, with lots of curves, hills, tunnels, traffic, cops and great landscape, and the cars look and handle su-weeeeet. This was initially a 3DO release, but the PC version is bound to be one of the year's biggest sleepers. If you're a fan of exotic cars, you MUST get this game. If you like great racing games, you MUST get this game. If you like well-done PC games, you guessed it, you MUST get this game. Road and Track Presents: The Need For Speed is the hottest racing game I've seen this year, or most any other year for that matter.
