Need for Speed II (Windows)

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.

Still 90% re­al-world footage. Al­so, did you no­tice the right 2 pix­els columns for some rea­son lack col­or in­for­ma­tion in the re­al-word footage? Maybe a messed up chro­ma sub­sam­pling re­sult­ing from the weird res­o­lu­tion men­tioned above? Who knows, but still weird that no one in the pro­duc­tion team no­ticed it. It was in the orig­i­nal PS In­tro, and sur­vived un­til SE. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Al­so, love the video around 1:06, old Fi­at honk­ing and flash­ing lights at the car in front of it, then start­ing to over­take it, while the two sports­cars try­ing to make a race be­hind them. When you could do things like that, with­out hav­ing a fuck­ing speed cam­era on every cor­ner, con­di­tion­ing dri­vers in­to id­iot pussies who can't even find the gas ped­al in the car. Al­so, what's the ob­ses­sion show­ing all those gear shifts in the video? (We're still in the age of H-shifters, in­stead of putting pad­dle shifters in any­thing that looks re­mote­ly a sports­car.) Amer­i­tards don't even know what a man­u­al gear­box is! Some­one should have told the Ital­ian pro­duc­tion crew who made the in­tro video...

The Main Menu#

Af­ter the in­tro video you end up in the main menu—and OMG, they used the same menu mu­sic as NFS3! I mean, to not break space-time con­tin­u­um, NFS3 reused some mu­sic from NFS2, and not the oth­er way around... (Al­so they on­ly reused one out of the two menu mu­sic pieces, but the RNG seems bro­ken and it al­ways se­lects Ro­mu­lus 3 when start­ing up the game). Plus, the look and feel is al­so much more like what you had in NFS3/4 (with a bit less vi­su­al eye can­dy), in­stead of the mag­a­zine in­spired thingy in NFS1. In­stead of se­lect­ing be­tween sin­gle­play­er and mul­ti­play­er on the first screen, that set­ting is now hid­den un­der game set­up, along with a new split screen op­tion. Woohoo! Too bad there's no one to try it with, and I can't dri­ve two cars at the same time. Al­so game modes were reshuf­fled, you have three modes (in­stead of 4 in NFS1):

Sin­gle race: this is the com­bi­na­tion of Time Tri­al, Head to Head and Sin­gle Race from NFS1. In­stead of sep­a­rate modes, you can se­lect the num­ber of op­po­nents be­tween 0, 1 and 7 in the op­po­nents menu. (Why can't you se­lect any­thing be­tween 2 and 6?!) When not us­ing the full grid, you can en­able traf­fic, which is ex­act­ly as an­noy­ing and stu­pid as in NFS3 and 4. Un­like NFS1, po­lice is ab­sent from this game—and well, based on how lim­it­ed and pushover they were in NFS1, it's not a big loss.

Tour­na­ment: more or less what you had in NFS1. You can race the tracks in any or­der, and you need to be the first score wise, you don't have to win every race. The ran­dom car class re­stric­tion by track is still here. To save the state of the tour­na­ment, you still have to go to the set­tings menu... You can un­lock bonus cars by win­ning the tour­na­ment.

Knock­out: a new mode in NFS2. Each race, the last play­er is elim­i­nat­ed from the knock­out. So prac­ti­cal­ly you on­ly have to win the last race, but you can't be the last in any of them. One wrong move, and you're toast. Un­like tour­na­ment, you have to race the tracks in or­der, with the same car. And here comes the worst: no restart, and no save. If you fuck up the 7th race, or the game freezes (which hap­pens, un­for­tu­nate­ly), tough luck, start over. But if you man­age to win, you'll un­lock prob­a­bly the rad­dest bonus track in the his­to­ry of NFS.

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In the same menu, you have an op­tion called style, and man, I wish I found it ear­li­er. Now, call­ing it style was about as good as plac­ing save/load in­to the set­tings menu, it should have been called physics mode, be­cause that's what op­tion af­fects.

Ar­cade: the de­fault one, but prob­a­bly call­ing it non-physics mode would be more cor­rect. Cars have in­sane ac­cel­er­a­tion, brak­ing, and in most cas­es, in­sane over­steer­ing. When dri­ving, your car is in one of the two pos­si­ble modes: it ei­ther has grip on the road, or you have Tokyo drift, and noth­ing in-be­tween. The change be­tween the two modes are abrupt and pret­ty much ar­bi­trary, hope you have good re­flex­es.

Sim­u­la­tion: this is a more re­al­is­tic mode (well, as re­al­is­tic as 1997 HW and SW al­lowed). Cars no longer reach their top speed in 2 sec­onds, you can ac­tu­al­ly dri­ve around with­out hav­ing a drift­ing com­pe­ti­tion in each cor­ner. I'm not sure this is just be­cause of the gen­er­al­ly slow­er speeds, or even the grav­i­ty is dif­fer­ent, but bumps no longer send you fly­ing for that long. If I had found out what this cryp­tic set­ting do at the be­gin­ning of the game, I wouldn't have touched the ar­cade mode at all. There are a few down­sides, though. Just as the cars no longer ac­cel­er­ate that in­sane­ly fast, the same is true for break­ing, so if you got used how to dri­ve in ar­cade mode, you'll end up in the wall a lot. Some­times even af­ter fin­ish­ing the game. Al­so, no ABS, so say good­bye to steer­ing while break­ing.

The tro­phy will be de­liv­ered to the dri­ver's grave

Wild: a new mode in SE. From a quick look it looks like ar­cade, just even faster, but I didn't re­al­ly try this mode. Nor­mal ar­cade is crazy enough.

The game has 7 tracks (plus one bonus), avail­able in mir­rored and now al­so in re­versed! That's four vari­a­tions for the price of one track, yay! And the num­ber of laps can be 2, 4, or 8, on every track. Yup, this is where it start­ed. Al­so, the lo­go of the first track, Prov­ing Grounds, doesn't it look like the Pi­o­neer lo­go from NFS1 in­tro? Just like in NFS1, you have a small pre­sen­ta­tion and stats for each track.

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Up­date 2024-12-02: added an ac­tu­al track pre­sen­ta­tion here too.

On the cars front, it has 12 cars, plus 3 bonus cars, most­ly ex­ot­ic cars, as is the gener­ic theme of clas­sic NFS ti­tles. You still have the ran­dom in­fo about each car, with some com­pa­ny his­to­ry, slideshow, video... but un­like NFS1, you can change the col­ors of the cars! Well, you can on­ly choose from a few pre­de­fined ones, and some cars have fixed col­ors, and you don't have a pre­view like in NFS3, but still. A new fea­ture is that you have some ba­sic tun­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties on the cars. But I'm too noob for cars, so I nev­er used it...

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Un­like NFS1, you can se­lect the op­po­nents' cars or car class­es, and whether you want traf­fic or not (with ze­ro or one op­po­nent). Oh, and fi­nal­ly you can have km/h dis­play in­stead of mph! The cryp­tic hori­zon set­ting un­der graph­ics means en­able sky­box. Sav­ing and load­ing tour­na­ments and re­plays are still un­der set­tings. And the lat­ter one de­serves some ex­pla­na­tion. In knock­out mode, af­ter each race, you get a save re­play op­tion on the re­sult screen. If you don't se­lect it, and in­stead se­lect con­tin­ue, the knock­out con­tin­ues with the next trace and your re­play is poof. But what hap­pens af­ter a nor­mal/tour­na­ment race? There's no op­tion to save the re­play on the race re­sults screen. You have to quit the re­sults, go to set­tings, save re­play, and that op­tion will save the last re­play. Se­ri­ous­ly, what kind of ass-back­wards log­ic is this!? Es­pe­cial­ly that in knock­out mode they have the save but­ton in a log­i­cal po­si­tion, so it's not like they'd have to do ex­tra de­vel­op­ment! Heck, if the code is not hope­less­ly spaghet­ti, you'd just need to re­move a sin­gle if to have save but­ton on nor­mal race re­sults too. (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

Gameplay#

Enough of triv­ial mat­ters, let's race al­ready! And I have to say, play­ing this af­ter NFS1, I was mind blown. The im­prove­ments from NFS1 are im­pres­sive, it's like a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent game. It ac­tu­al­ly has physics! You can dri­ve the car around! Well... of course don't ex­pect a mod­ern sim­u­la­tor, even NFS3/4 han­dles weird, but still, I'd take this over NFS1 any day.

Not the AI, though, it's as stu­pid as al­ways in clas­sic NFSs, with the ad­di­tion that it likes to cre­ate may­hem way more than in NFS3 and lat­er. At least, in NFS3, the AI can, most­ly, dri­ve through the track. Here they are more of­ten in the wall or rolling or crash­ing than not, and you can con­sid­er your­self lucky if you're not tor­pe­doed out of the track. Which gets me to the next point, in NFS2 you can ac­tu­al­ly fall off the track! Most­ly on bridges and on the Mys­tic Peaks track, if you fly off the track, there's no in­vis­i­ble wall in the air to bump back from like in lat­er NFSs, but you in­stead fall off the track. Looks cool, but there's still no re­set but­ton, if you fall off or roll over, you'll have to watch the scenery for a cou­ple of hours be­fore the game de­cides to have mer­cy on you and re­set you back on the track. If you're not lucky enough and stay on sta­ble ground, you have to get back to the track on your own. Looks like I was wrong, there's a re­set but­ton, it's just bound fixed to F11 (F12 for the sec­ond play­er) with­out men­tion­ing it any­where in the game. Even this GameFAQ guy who played NFS2 for years didn't know about it! (And by the way, what's with this guy? He com­plains about on­ly be­ing able to race against 7 AI cars in SE ver­sus 11 in the nor­mal NFS2, be­cause it's more fun. Did he for­get to take his meds or WTF? Do­ing one race against the AI de­creas­es your life ex­pectan­cy with 1 year, it's so fuck­ing an­noy­ing! Your races con­sist of try­ing to steer as far away from the AI as pos­si­ble.) And while there are no in­vis­i­ble walls in the air, there are still a few on the ground, but the sit­u­a­tion is much bet­ter than in NFS1.

Here's a video of me try­ing to not get knocked out by the crazy AI:

(No­tice the geom­e­try float­ing in thin air around 0:16? Or the weird sky­box as the cam­era ro­tates around? First I thought it's a bug from the widescreen patch (see last sec­tion), but no, it hap­pens in the orig­i­nal ver­sion too. Nor­mal car cam­era views are most­ly OK, but re­play cam­era views are bug­gy.)

And on­to the tracks. Man, I love 'em. They're in­sane, they're stu­pid, but that's why they're prob­a­bly pret­ty en­joy­able. I think you on­ly find more in­sane tracks in Re-Volt. There are a lot of bumps on the tracks, which will con­stant­ly send you fly­ing, and es­pe­cial­ly on ar­cade mode, at times you'll feel like you're play­ing a flight sim­u­la­tor, not a car rac­ing game. Of course, when you dri­ve more se­ri­ous­ly you don't want to take off at every bump, but oth­er­wise they're pret­ty fun. If there's some­thing I miss from lat­er in­stall­ments, is this in­san­i­ty.

And mu­sic! OMG, mu­sic. While it was an af­ter­thought in NFS1, in NFS2 they're just... per­fect. Menu mu­sic by Rom di Prisco! Each race­track has two unique mu­sic tracks, one tech­no and one rock, match­ing the theme of the track. But wait, there's more, this game has dy­nam­ic mu­sic! Dif­fer­ent mu­sic plays de­pend­ing on where you are on the track, just check the videos in this post, you'll hear the same mu­sic at the same spot on both laps. Un­for­tu­nate­ly this fea­ture was scrapped from NFS4, and on­ly re­turned in lim­it­ed form in Most Want­ed many years lat­er.

(The dust par­ti­cles be­ing all over the place is a bug of the widescreen patch.)

Versions and technical shit#

A new fea­ture of the Spe­cial Edi­tion is a Glide ver­sion of the game, to run it with hard­ware ac­cel­er­a­tion, if you were a su­per rich kid with a Voodoo video card in '97. No need to men­tion, most play­ers at that time stuck to the orig­i­nal soft­ware ren­der­er. Un­like NFS3, the Glide ver­sion was a sep­a­rate ex­e­cutable, and there were some fea­ture dis­par­i­ty be­tween the two ver­sions. The Glide ver­sions had a few ex­tra ef­fects, a dif­fer­ent count­down im­age at the race start, but there is a huge de­fi­cien­cy: it lacks the dash­board view. Se­ri­ous­ly, what the fuck they were think­ing? If I were to take a guess, they couldn't get that work­ing be­fore the dead­line and they just shipped a rushed ver­sion, but still in­fu­ri­at­ing. The on­ly rea­son I used this ver­sion, is be­cause it has a widescreen patch and I can run in res­o­lu­tions high­er than 640x480. And lat­er NFS ver­sions lack cock­pit view too, so it wasn't re­al­ly that un­usu­al.

Any­way, it's 2024 now (or lat­er), and you want to play this fine game, what are your op­tions? First, you have the orig­i­nal ex­e­cuta­bles on the CD, but un­less you have a Win98 ma­chine (au­then­tic re­al or vir­tu­al, PCem worked well in my tests, just don't for­get to set Voodoo em­u­la­tion threads to 2, the de­fault 4 caus­es glitch­es in the main menu), for­get about it. Don't try them on any­thing more mod­ern, like oth­er ear­ly NFS games, it won't run on NT based Win­dows or if you have a mul­ti­core CPU. So, what are your op­tions? AKA why every­one plays the DOS ver­sion of NFS1 these days.

One com­mon theme with all these patch­es (ex­cept NFSIISE), is that they sup­pos­ed­ly solve the mul­ti­core CPU bugs, but when I test­ed them, they didn't (at least on wine, I didn't try on re­al Win­dows). So be pre­pared to run these ex­e­cuta­bles with taskset -c 0 wine ... to force them (along with the whole wine) to a sin­gle CPU (and wel­come the per­for­mance drop), oth­er­wise the game will lock up, gen­er­al­ly even be­fore get­ting to the main menu. And even with this op­tion I saw some ran­dom lock-ups, so be pre­pared to use kill -9 when need­ed (and pray it doesn't hap­pen dur­ing a knock­out). Same as NFS4, you'll need wine 6.19 or ear­li­er if you want con­troller sup­port.

For the soft­ware ren­der­er, you have the NFSIISEN project, which patch­es the game ex­e­cutable, so it has a chance of start­ing on more mod­ern Win­dows ver­sions or un­der wine. Just fol­low the in­struc­tions to copy the files to a di­rec­to­ry. Un­der wine, I rec­om­mend set­ting up a 4:3 vir­tu­al desk­top in winecfg, be­cause oth­er­wise it'll just stretch the game to your desk­top's res­o­lu­tion. Un­like the orig­i­nal game, this can run on res­o­lu­tions high­er than 640x480, but it will just up­scale the 640x480 im­age, with pret­ty bad per­for­mance (but that might have to do with forc­ing the whole shit on one thread).

Now, on­to the Glide ver­sion. One con­tender, no­table for hav­ing a na­tive Lin­ux ver­sion and not re­quir­ing taskset workarounds is NFSIISE, not to be con­fused with the pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned NFSIISEN (it's a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent project de­spite be­ing made by the same guy). Clone the git re­po, build, copy the files from the CD, use the script to down­case the file­names, and run. And it'll just work. Just don't try to reuse the files with the Silent patch be­low, it has an in­com­pat­i­ble save for­mat, and if you open it with the exe, weird things will hap­pen. Every­thing works fine, since this is a 3D game, it will ren­der it at your screen's na­tive res­o­lu­tion, the on­ly miss­ing fea­ture is widescreen sup­port, which leads us to the next en­try.

Silent patch, com­bined with mod­ern patch. Mod­ern patch adds OpenGL ren­der­er, widescreen sup­port, op­tion­al near­est fil­ter­ing, dis­ableable Gouraud shad­ing and fog. HUD is stretched (and so the menus), so it's a bit ug­ly, but at least the 3D part is prop­er hor+. Silent patch is sup­posed to fix some of the is­sues cre­at­ed by mod­ern patch. Add taskset to the mix, and you'll end up with some­thing that ac­tu­al­ly works most of the time. One unique fea­ture is that you can switch be­tween the clas­sic tex­tures and Glide tex­tures. Glide tex­tures have more col­ors (16 bpp in­stead of 8 bpp), but low­er res­o­lu­tion. IMHO the high­er res­o­lu­tions looks bet­ter than the ex­tra col­or depth.

Now, get­ting this to work un­der wine is a bit in­volved, as it re­quires over­writ­ing files with dif­fer­ent cas­ing, mess­ing with dll over­rides, and gen­er­al­ly com­plete­ly un­doc­u­ment­ed. First make sure you have wine 6.19 or old­er if you want to use joy­sticks, run wine control joy.cpl, and make sure you dis­able any du­pli­cates/non-con­trollers. (Like, for me, it finds my moth­er­board as a joy­stick de­vice(?!!) with com­plete­ly bo­gus read­ings.) Then you have to do some­thing like this (re­place $stuff with the cor­rect val­ues, make sure cor­rect wine is in path and WINEPREFIX is set cor­rect­ly):

cd $desired_destination_directory
# --no-preserve: CD will likely have permissions fucked up
cp -r --no-preserve=mode $nfs2_cd_mount_dir/{FE,GAME}DATA ./
unzip -Ppcgw $path_to_nfs2_se_patch_1.05.zip

# If you don't have ruby installed, try to find something here:
# https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5412/lowercasing-all-directories-under-a-directory
# Most of the answers require some debianism though, and I gave up figuring out
# which non-standard shit I need to execute them...
ruby -e "Dir['**/*'].reverse.each {|p| File.rename p, File.join(File.dirname(p), File.basename(p).downcase) }"

# overwrite files (can't mv, that can't merge directories...)
cp -r nfs2_se_patch_1.05/* ./
rm -rf nfs2_se_patch_1.05

unzip $path_to_SilentPatchNFS90s.zip
# readme.txt is for modern patch, ReadMe.txt is for silent patch, deal with it

# setup dll overrides, make sure wine/WINEPREFIX is correct!
echo $'REGEDIT4\n[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Wine\\DllOverrides]\n"dinput8"="native,builtin"' | wine regedit -

Here is a lit­tle com­par­i­son of the dif­fer­ent ver­sions, all set to the high­est qual­i­ty:

• The software renderer in 640x480
• The original Glide version running in PCem. This is probably the closest you can get to the authentic look of the original Glide game without owning a computer with an actual Voodoo card. Notice the dithering artifacts.
• NFSIISE running on Linux, in 640x480 resolution.
• NFSIISE running on Linux, 1600x1200 resolution.
• Silent patch in widescreen (1920x1200), using the classic textures.
• Silent patch, classic textures, nearest filtering, effects disabled.
• Silent patch, Glide textures.

Per­son­al­ly I used silent with clas­sic tex­tures, and so does the game­play videos on this post (ex­cept menu screen­shots, they were made in NFSIISE in 640x480, be­cause oth­er res­o­lu­tions just stretch the 640x480 menus).

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As you can see, there's lit­tle dif­fer­ence be­tween how the menu looks in dif­fer­ent ver­sions, the 640x480 im­age is just stretched to the game's res­o­lu­tion. The soft­ware ver­sion's menu looks a bit dark­er. The rea­son be­hind this is that the Glide ver­sion has gam­ma cor­rec­tion, which ap­plies both to 2D and 3D items. With­out gam­ma cor­rec­tion ingame looks way too dark, but if you in­crease the bright­ness of the game, menus be­come brighter too.

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More or less the first im­age you see af­ter start­ing the Pa­cif­ic Spir­it track. The soft­ware ren­der­er is com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent from the rest with the in-car view, dif­fer­ent count­down im­age, and with­out the rain ef­fect. Al­so note how all of the Glide wrap­pers make the HUD blur­ry, even when us­ing 640x480 (ex­cept if I force near­est in Silent's patch). The afore­men­tioned small­er res­o­lu­tion tex­tures are not that bad on 640x480, but on HD res­o­lu­tions, the Silent mod with clas­sic tex­tures look way bet­ter. Ex­cept for the sky­box, I wish I could have Glide sky­box with soft­ware tex­tures.

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