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Warn­ing! This blog can con­tain 18+, NSFW, NSFL, etc con­tents. Get the fuck out, you filthy un­der­age.

Try­ing to sur­vive the Christ­mas (yes, it took me al­most a month to write a post, again), I had a weird idea. Con­sole ver­sions of ear­ly NFS games were some­times dif­fer­ent from the nor­mal Win­dows re­leas­es, so I de­cid­ed to check out some of them be­fore mov­ing on to more "mod­ern" NFSs. Why NFS3? I know the orig­i­nal 3DO ver­sion of NFS1 is pret­ty dif­fer­ent from the lat­er ports, but hon­est­ly I didn't want to touch NFS1 again. Plus I want­ed to try this on my Vi­ta, and em­u­lat­ing PSX is way eas­i­er there than em­u­lat­ing 3DO. NFS2, I boot­ed...

If I could give a sub­ti­tle for this post, it would be "A dawn of a new era". But be­fore this post it nev­er oc­curred to me to have sub­ti­tles, and I don't feel like im­ple­ment­ing it for just this post... Any­way, an­oth­er fa­vorite NFS game, hav­ing the ti­tle Need for Speed: Hot Pur­suit 2 (or Need for Speed : Pour­suite in­fer­nale 2 in France), the 6th game in the se­ries... al­so where num­ber­ing starts to break down. It's HP2, to sig­ni­fy it is a spir­i­tu­al suc­ces­sor to NFS3 which had the sub­ti­tle of Hot Pur­suit, while be­ing the 6th main­line game in the se­ries.

Let's start with the in­tro as usu­al.

Oh, boy. Now this is a game I re­al­ly nev­er played un­til a cou­ple of days ago. Mo­tor City On­line, orig­i­nal­ly des­tined to be the next NFS af­ter NFS5 (Porsche), but in­stead they made an on­line MMO with­out the NFS ti­tle in 2001. At that time I didn't know about the game, I prob­a­bly didn't have an in­ter­net con­nec­tion fast enough, I'm not a fan of mus­cle cars, some­where I read it was US on­ly, and it al­so had a $10 month­ly sub­scrip­tion fee (around $18 in 2024!)... hell would freeze over be­fore I'd even con­sid­er it. Any­way, many peo­ple con­sid­er it as an NFS game, so I put it in­to the NFS se­ries too, but with­out giv­ing it a num­ber.

The servers were shut down not even two years af­ter re­lease in 2003, turn­ing every copy of the game in­to an ex­pen­sive pa­per­weight. Or did it? Ac­tu­al­ly some­one found a way to get in­to a hid­den de­bug mode of some be­ta ver­sion of the game, where you can play against AI op­po­nents. But be­fore we go in­to de­tails, the in­tro!

Need for Speed: Porsche Un­leashed, aka Need for Speed: Porsche in Ger­many/Latin Amer­i­ca, and Need For Speed: Porsche 2000 in the rest of the world (no more オーバードライビン in Japan). An­oth­er NFS I didn't re­al­ly play un­til now. I have a feel­ing I will write this a lot, maybe I should note when there is an NFS I played in­stead. I re­mem­ber try­ing this out, and hav­ing fed up with do­ing slaloms be­tween the cones and fuck­ing 360s and just left it. Al­so, ap­par­ent­ly back then, I got a rip ver­sion from a friend with­out movies and mu­sic, and it cer­tain­ly didn't help me to fall in love with this... thing. But speak­ing of movies, the in­tro!

Oh, boy. The very first NFS game I've played and still one of my fa­vorite. (Well, not com­plete­ly true, the first NFS I played was the de­mo ver­sion of NFS4, with its on­ly "Route Adonf" track, but the first full ver­sion NFS I played was NFS3.) Need for Speed III: Hot Pur­suit (still オーバードライビンⅢ：ホットパーシュート in Japan, and Need for Speed III: Pour­suite In­fer­nale in France as a new con­tender) from 1998, here I come! Al­so, the last NFS to have a prop­er num­ber and the first where the mar­ket­ing de­part­ment start­ed to at­tach stu­pid names to the ti­tle of the game.

As usu­al, start with the in­tro video, which is back at 320x240 res­o­lu­tion this time, for the whole du­ra­tion (but the sec­ond part of the in­tro is let­ter­boxed from var­i­ous ran­dom as­pect ra­tios, ex­cept when it looks like an orig­i­nal­ly 4:3 video was made wide screen by adding black bars, but fuck­ing it up so the so one row or col­umn of pix­els at the side of the video still there, vis­i­ble around 01:14-01:20 or af­ter 1:30):

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