Racing Games Have Evolved

I'm not a huge fan when it comes to racing games. I own a couple racers for all of my systems, but the type of racing games I have aren't typical. I'm the guy who plays F-Zero, Mario Kart, Podracing, that kind of thing. The old arcade racing games didn't keep my interest.

The last racing game that I owned that featured plain old cars was Cruisin USA for 64, and I have to say I found it boring. So I passed up most of the racing games during the GameCube generation, and hadn't played any yet on the new-gen systems.

But I just finished the career mode on Need for Speed Carbon, and having finally played an updated racer, I feel like a changed man. I won't say that NFS Carbon is perfect, it has its share of problems. But I was expecting a halfway decent game that would hold my attention for maybe 2-3 hours. I bought it for the multiplayer. But after spending about 40-50 hours with the game, most of that in single player, I have to admit that Carbon is a great game.

I'll post a review soon with the full run-down, but these are the new features that impressed me most. First of all, the career. The game actually featured a "Fast and Furious" style story, and though it won't win any awards for best video game story, it was enough that I always wanted to keep playing, to uncover the next bit of story.

The gameplay centered around winning races in specific areas of the city, so that I could "steal control" of those areas away from the local racing gangs. It was a nice approach, in that I knew how much I still had to do, I had a logical reason for having all of these races, and I had the conquering mentality to keep me motivated. It'd be late at night, but I'd always want to beat just 1 more race, to take over 1 more territory. And to give some freedom to the game, I was allowed to conquer most of the races in whatever order I wanted (within an area at least). If I didn't feel like drifting that night, I could just do all of the circuit races, and drift later.

That's another great aspect of the game: the many types of racing it offers. There are the standard circuit races, sprints, and checkpoints, like any racing game. But I had never tried drifting before, so that was a blast (after I figured out the rules & stopped embarrassing myself). It also featured a Speedtrap mode, where your score was based on your speed at certain checkpoints. And it featured the Canyon Duels, which were the most frustrating or the most entertaining, depending on the race (more on those later).
The Free Roam mode also surprised me. I hadn't expected the game to be an open-world sandbox, and while you couldn't get out of the car, you could drive all over the entire city, cause trouble, and start huge crazy cop chases. It felt a little like GTA-lite, and I mean that as a compliment. Too bad the achievements for the cop chases are so hard to get.

And finally, I was wowed by the massive range of options for customizing my cars. I know I'm behind the curve on this one, and I knew that all racing games nowdays featured customization, but I never dreamed of how much. I've unlocked about a dozen styles of paint, which come in thousands of colors and shades, for hundreds of aftermarket modifcations, and a limitless combination of vinyls and designs. The performance tuning is probably more realistic in simulation racers, like Gran Turismo, but the visual-tweaking in this game kept me giddily happy, and made me very attached to my little tuners and exotics.

So racers have definitely matured since I last gave them a shot. Even though I'm playing a 3-year old game, I am thoroughly impressed by it. I guess I found a new genre to get sucked into. Now if only the new games would still feature offline multiplayer...

- Scott