Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed (DOS)

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.

The time of in­tros made of 100% re­al world videos. The funky thing about the in­tro is that is made up of three dif­fer­ent videos and the mid­dle one has a dif­fer­ent res­o­lu­tion than the oth­ers. I've com­bined them in­to a sin­gle webm that changes res­o­lu­tion mid­way (and al­so in­clud­ed the fi­nal load­ing im­age at the end, which has a third res­o­lu­tion and dif­fer­ent FPS for ul­ti­mate mind­fuck). If your brows­er didn't crash try­ing to play the video, con­grat­u­la­tions. Al­so, the mid­dle video (be­tween the EA/Pi­o­neer lo­go, and the Need For Speed "ti­tle") is ac­tu­al­ly ran­dom­ly cho­sen from 3 dif­fer­ent videos every time you start the game, so you might see some­thing else when launch­ing the game. I've made the above from video #1, if you want to see #2 or #3, I guess you'll have to get the game. In ad­di­tion, every time you win a race, the game will play a video ran­dom­ly cho­sen from a pool of 7 and when you're bust­ed by a cop you al­so get a ran­dom video (from 3), and every car in the game has a video. I guess they had to fill up the CD some­how...

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Before you start a race#

When you start the game, it asks you whether you want sin­gle play­er or state-of-the-90s mo­dem or se­r­i­al port mul­ti­play­er. I on­ly tried the sin­gle play­er one, even though with DOSBox you're sup­posed to be able to play over IP. But I have no friends any­way, so sin­gle play­er then.

The game has 8 cars (plus one fic­tion­al bonus car, un­locked when you win the tour­na­ment)—but you can't change their col­or. For each car, you can view var­i­ous stats and in­for­ma­tion about them (on­ly in amer­i­tard units, like cu­bic inch and oth­er abom­i­na­tions), you have a small pho­to gallery, au­dio com­men­tary... the stan­dard stuff in all clas­sic era NFS games. Any­way, you al­so have one (re­al life) video for each car, dri­ving around on var­i­ous test tracks with ex­treme­ly weird cam­era an­gles. What's the point of it, I have no idea. The oth­er parts at least look like some­thing you'd find in a print­ed car mag­a­zine. I'm per­son­al­ly not too in­ter­est­ed in things like these, I just se­lect a car and press race.

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As for the tracks, there are al­so 8 of them in the Spe­cial Edi­tion, with one ex­tra un­lock­able. You al­so have a map and an au­dio com­men­tary, like in all clas­sic NFS games, if you think about it, many of the ba­sic fea­tures of the ear­ly NFS games are al­ready there. One triv­ia is that this game had point-to-point sprint races, not just cir­cuits. Be­fore I tried this game, I al­ways thought NFS5 (that weird Porsche game) was the first to have them. Why did they re­move it from NFS2? No idea. But un­like NFS5 (and lat­er), sprint races here are made up of 3 seg­ments—I guess they couldn't fit the whole track in­to 8 MiB RAM... Each seg­ment has a start and fin­ish, you have a nor­mal start at each, and at the end the times of the three seg­ments are added to­geth­er. So you can even win if you're not the first to fin­ish the last seg­ment, it's like some ral­ly game. No such seg­ment­ing stuff on cir­cuits, and you can se­lect be­tween 2, 6 or 12 laps (4, 8, 16 for Rusty Springs Race­way and the bonus track). Where did those num­bers came from? But at least it's good to know even in the first NFS you couldn't have odd num­ber laps...

Up­date 2024-12-02: since track pre­sen­ta­tions be­came a pet peeve of mine in the lat­er ar­ti­cles, here's one from NFS1 too:

"Roads snaking every­where, un­der­pass­es, over­pass­es, con­crete bar­ri­ers, long wind­ing tun­nels"—ohh, he's al­most hav­ing an or­gasm just from think­ing about them! Ok, ok, I un­der­stand, I stop here. End up­date.

Fi­nal­ly, the avail­able game modes:

Time Tri­al: what it says on the tin. You're alone, rac­ing against the clock.

Head to Head: you race against a sin­gle op­po­nent, and you can se­lect his car too. On road tracks, you have traf­fic and po­lice. Yes, this game had po­lice, even though they're pret­ty lame, the just turn on the siren, and that's about it. If you some­how crash around a po­lice car or slow down too much, they'll catch you, but I on­ly play­er a few races with po­lice so I'm not com­plete­ly sure of the specifics.

Sin­gle Race: one race against a full grid (7 op­po­nents, I think). No traf­fic or cops here.

Tour­na­ment: mul­ti­ple Sin­gle Races chained to­geth­er. Af­ter each race you get some points, and who­ev­er has the most points when fin­ish­ing, wins. You can use this to un­lock the bonus car, bonus track and mir­rored tracks. Un­like oth­er modes, you're re­strict­ed of the cars you can se­lect (and op­po­nent cars are al­so fixed). A very an­noy­ing "fea­ture" here is that you can't restart a race in this mode, but you can save and re­load the state of the tour­na­ment af­ter each race. So prac­ti­cal­ly you can restart a race, it just takes a ridicu­lous amount of clicks. (Al­so, guess what, where's the tour­na­ment save and load op­tion? In­side set­tings...)

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Enough bullshit, let's drive already#

So, khm, here comes the part I didn't want to get in­to at the be­gin­ning of the post. Maybe I had too high ex­pec­ta­tions (I was most­ly used to NFS3 and lat­er ones, af­ter all), but it was a dis­ap­point­ment. I mean, graph­i­cal­ly it's fine, it's about what I ex­pect­ed from a game of this age, sound is cool too. But physics. Oh my. More like a lack of it. I get it, you had a 75 MHz proces­sor, and you had to squeeze in­to it a soft­ware 3D ren­der­er, AI, sound, and a physics en­gine. Com­pro­mis­es had to be made. And while I un­der­stand it was bet­ter than what most oth­er games at that time could too, it's still the age of rac­ing games, where you stay ex­act­ly in the line or every­thing breaks down. And in ad­di­tion to this, ridicu­lous amounts of hid­den walls. Prac­ti­cal­ly there's a hid­den wall along the edge of road, but it's a bit ran­dom. Some­times you can't even get close to the white line sig­nal­ing the end side of the road, and some­times you can go in­to the dirt next to the road, but still hit an in­vis­i­ble wall halfway be­tween the side of the as­phalt and a fence run­ning along the track. And the in­ter­ac­tion with wall, whether it's vis­i­ble or not, is a mas­sive slow­down. Even though there's no dam­age, you don't want to hit walls in this game. Plus the AI, it was an­noy­ing in NFS3/4, but here it's a spe­cial kind of night­mare. In the NFS4 re­view, I wrote the fol­low­ing about the AI:

they fol­low a path, and if you're in their way, they'll just force their way through.

Now, here it's the same, ex­cept the physics en­gine is weird as crap, and col­li­sions with AI cars feel like you have ze­ro mass and them hav­ing in­fi­nite. You have no chance, they'll spin you out, flip you over up­side down, and make you make that fuck­ing sound. And they al­so cheat, they trav­el the road fol­low­ing a sine wave, with­out los­ing speed, and some­how cen­trifu­gal forces in the cor­ners don't ap­ply to them, so they can take the cor­ners at stu­pid speeds. Don't try to im­i­tate them, you'll crash in­to the (in­vis­i­ble) wall.

(EDIT 2024-09-27: by the way, did you no­tice all the de­tails at the right side of the track? The sandy beach and para­sols just at the start of the video? Or around 0:51 or 1:02, sand, then shal­low wa­ter, then deep wa­ter? I on­ly no­ticed it af­ter watch­ing the video for the 100th time do­ing com­par­isons be­tween var­i­ous video en­code set­tings. The things you prob­a­bly nev­er no­tice when play­ing, be­cause you're too busy watch­ing the road ahead of you.)

But hey, we have a work­ing speedome­ter! Ig­nore the fact that the steer­ing wheel doesn't ro­tate along its cen­ter...

Oh, and a pret­ty an­noy­ing fea­ture: at the start of the race, you have to shift in­to dri­ve. You can't do that be­fore the count­down, and af­ter the count­down, you don't want to wait a lot. I mean, I get it, more re­al­is­tic, but pret­ty an­noy­ing and that's not how of every lat­er NFS games work. Al­so, if you crash, some­times the game puts you back in­to N, mak­ing sure you'll lose a sec­ond or two un­til you fig­ure it out.

There's a re­play video (yes, it al­ready had save­able re­plays!) of me try­ing to do a race for the first time with­out any kind of cheat­ing. Yes, I nev­er both­ered to fig­ure out how this non-physics is sup­posed to work. And you know what's the best about it? I got the third best time on this track, the two bet­ter times were from a time tri­al, and yet I on­ly fin­ished 5th. (And be­fore you ask, this fea­ture is still present in NFS4.)

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This al­so show­cas­es a new fea­ture of Spe­cial Edi­tion, race at evening. But as you can see, it's more like late af­ter­noon that evening, and just a palette swap. Don't ex­pect any light ef­fects. Al­so there's some sound­track, but by the de­fault it's so qui­et that you won't hear any­thing of it.

Here's a sec­ond video, where I tried hard­er, best of 4-5 tries. It's the game where you have to dri­ve al­most per­fect­ly if you want to win, not the win all races on first try un­less you're a com­plete re­tard like in lat­er NFS games, but how to do it on the non-straight parts, I couldn't fig­ure out. DOSBox-X save states were a use­ful fea­ture in com­plet­ing the tour­na­ment with­out spend­ing a year of my life per­fect­ing each tracks.

You can al­so see some weird han­dling of tim­ings at the end, the op­po­nent was clear­ly in front of me, but it on­ly counts tenth of sec­onds, and I had the same time as the first, so it count­ed me as first. Then on the post race screen, we're both first. Just so that in the next screen, I'm the on­ly first again...

Fun fact, if you you se­lect a mir­rored track, in the rear-view mir­ror, you'll see the back of the cars in­stead of the front! But hey, at least you have a work­ing rear-view mir­ror, even if you can't see any ob­jects in it, on­ly the roads and oth­er cars. (I have a sus­pi­cion that they ac­tu­al­ly didn't mod­el the back of the ob­jects, as the cam­era on­ly ever points for­ward. Even when us­ing the in car cam­era, if you turn around, it switch­es to a third per­son cam­era look­ing ahead. And it on­ly has mir­rored tracks, not re­verse.)

Technical shit#

Ac­tu­al­ly, not much, rel­a­tive to the age of the game. Orig­i­nal­ly I went through the pain of set­ting up GUS sound for DOSBox, think­ing that it might give me a bet­ter op­tion, but I don't think NFS1 can ac­tu­al­ly use any of the ex­tra fea­tures it has. The de­fault SoundBlaster card em­u­lat­ed by DOSBox-X is more than enough. Here is the con­fig file I used, most­ly stan­dard stuff, and some autoexec good­ie so things are mount­ed cor­rect­ly. But it should start even with the de­fault con­fig. (I've dis­abled joy­stick be­cause SDL with evdev back­end is stu­pid since and rec­og­nizes every­thing as joy­stick, and I didn't feel like fig­ur­ing out how to use joy­stick with this game.)

[sdl]
output=openglpp
autolock=true

[render]
doublescan=false
aspect=true

[video]
allow low resolution vesa modes = false

[dosbox]
fastbioslogo=true
startbanner=false
quit warning=false

[dos]
hard drive data rate limit = 0
floppy drive data rate limit = 0

[joystick]
joysticktype=none

[mixer]
rate=48000

[autoexec]
mount c: c
imgmount d: NFSSEBBC.cue
c:
cd nfsse

Conclusion#

I re­al­ly don't want to bash this game (un­like some lat­er NFS in­stall­ments), so I'll keep this short. Hum­ble be­gin­nings of a great se­ries. Yes, it's rough around the edges, and if you haven't played it be­fore, I don't think I can rec­om­mend it (oth­er than some cur­so­ry check­ing), but still, this is how the NFS se­ries start­ed.