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

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!

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.

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.

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...

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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