As you saw in my last journal, you get to see every game, even the ridiculously bad ones, when you work in a game store. You also tend to play most of them eventually, even the notoriously bad ones, if you get bored enough.

Thankfully, the game in the title above isn't necessarily one of those, but it could be better. I picked up this little thing after seeing all these racing games on the shelf and wondering when was the last time I played one. It came as a bit of a surprise even to me, but the last one I had played was Cruisin' USA way back on the N64 (Mario Kart in any incarnation doesn't quite count as a real racing game, for many reasons that I will be happy to disclose over a bottle of wine).

So I had to choose between this and Midnight Club: Los Angeles. Story's pretty important to me in a game, and I heard that this one had a fairly dececnt one, so I chose Need for Speed.

Well, it has a story, a pathetic excuse for one, but a story nonetheless. The back of the game box suggests a story of lies, deception, and betrayal. Normally these things are very good in a story, but not when they're completely expected. Put simply, you're an undercover cop that joins a street racing syndicate in order to bring them down since the cops are too slow and stupid to do it themselves. They say you need to "collect evidence" which turns out to be total BS, since all you do is race. After racing in a certain area enough times, you betray the people you raced with by ramming them repeatedly until they pass out at the wheel. Rinse and repeat that two or three times and you have a story of "lies, deception, and betrayal." I suppose there is the bit about your character's boss too, but that might be considered a spoiler, if the game didn't practically spell it out for you on the back of the game box and in the intro movie!

*sigh* Anyway, I do find driving around a nameless city in a Lamborghini at 240 MPH to be quite refreshing, but alas it does tend to cause headaches. The cars are all well done, and the races are decently challenging, if not frustrating on many occasions. Put simply, it's a decent racing game, but probably not worth more than $20. Maybe Midnight Club will be better.

Oh wait, probably won't have time for Midnight Club. I'm back into Oblivion at the moment while at the same time helping my roommate endure Persona 4. I say endure because he gets stressed out over the simplest of things (getting ambushed in the random battles, which happens every...3 minutes), and expects boss fights to be simple and clean (Kingdom Hearts reference there).

Hopefully this might persuade him to finally pay his half of the grocery bill, or maybe sleep for less than 12 hours a day...


Uplifting thought for the day:

RENT GAMES FOR FREE! Do this by going to any Gamestop or EBGames location, buy a used game, then return it within a week. Simple as that. The return policy is that you get your full money back for pretty much any reason (even if you just don't like the game) so long as you have your receipt and return it within a week of buying it. So exploit the system!