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Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit (Windows) Created: 1730751278 (2024-11-04T20:14:38Z), Updated: 1731116945 (2024-11-09T01:49:05Z), 7402 words, ~31 minutes, Tags: review, western, ea, nfs, racing
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):
Read more...Need for Speed II (Windows) Created: 1726690283 (2024-09-18T20:11:23Z), Updated: 1733170428 (2024-12-02T20:13:48Z), 3345 words, ~14 minutes, Tags: review, western, ea, nfs, racing
The Special Edition of the second Need for Speed game (オーバードライビンII in Japan as usual), released in 1997, one year after the Special Edition of the first game. Now, I tried this game a couple of years ago, but I didn't get far that time, so this is my first time I'm trying it out for real. A huge step forward from the first game, I must say, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's look at the intro video first, which for some weird reason, has smaller resolution than what NFS1 had (NFS1 was 320x240 with 320x192 for the inner part, while NFS2 has a pretty weird 304x224 resolution—but when played back ingame, it has a black border around the video, probably to pad it to 320x240, but I didn't verify it). Also new year, so new EA logo, while the Pioneer Productions logo went away.
Read more...Loudness normalization with FFmpeg Created: 1725908832 (2024-09-09T19:07:12Z), Updated: 1729543407 (2024-10-21T20:43:27Z), 3458 words, ~15 minutes, Tags: linux, tech, rant, meta
AKA 2024 updates
I was writing a blogpost on NFS2 (to be published soon™), when I made the mistake of opening one of the video files in Audacity with show clipping on—and oh my gosh, it was all red.
Even the original recording was heavily clipped, and this prompted me dig around—and so a multi-day journey began.
First thing I did was switch obs-studio to record float samples instead if S16, so at least in my input videos samples won't be clipped. I didn't redo the old recordings, they're still broken and there's no fixing them, but at...
Read more...Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed (DOS) Created: 1724509051 (2024-08-24T14:17:31Z), Updated: 1733170428 (2024-12-02T20:13:48Z), 2135 words, ~9 minutes, Tags: review, western, ea, nfs, racing
It happened. In 2024, I finally checked out the first NFS game from 1994, having the mouthful title of "Road & Track Presents: The Need For Speed," (known as Over Drivin in Japan, or the full title of ロード&トラックプレゼンツ:オーバードライビン) or more exactly the DOS version of the Special Edition, released in '96. (The Road & Track refers to some American car magazine EA collaborated with while creating this game.) It also had a Windows version, but according to PCGamingWiki, getting the Windows version to work is a PITA compared to the DOS version, and honestly I'd rather not mess around with wine for a half day again, so I just popped it into DOSBox-X.
Read more...Need for Speed 4: High Stakes (Windows) Created: 1689889630 (2023-07-20T21:47:10Z), Updated: 1731521142 (2024-11-13T18:05:42Z), 8925 words, ~38 minutes, Tags: review, western, ea, nfs, racing
First things first, I like NFS3 better than NFS4. The only reason I started to play with NFS4 recently (and I'm just going to refer to this game as NFS4, officially called Need for Speed: High Stakes in the Americas, Need for Speed: Road Challenge in Europe, Need for Speed : Conduite en état de liberté in France, Need for Speed: Brennender Asphalt in Germany, オーバードライビンIV in Japan, and maybe under different aliases), because I was a bit bored with NFS3's (officially Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit, ニード・フォー・スピードIII ホット・パースート or オーバードライビンIII in Japan, and whatever else. Even the VN...
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