Need for Speed 4: High Stakes (Windows)

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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 with the longest name (ac­cord­ing to VNDB), called 寝取られ男の娘　～俺の幼馴染みの無邪気な彼女（男の娘）がまさか粗暴な体育教師に弱みを握られて調教されていつの間にか快楽に溺れてアヘアヘダブルピースでビデオ撮影されて喜んでいただなんて！！～ can't com­pete) ba­sic ar­cade mode and I re­mem­bered NFS4 has some kind of ca­reer mode. First I on­ly want­ed to play the ca­reer mode, but af­ter com­plet­ing the ca­reer, I de­cid­ed to try out the ar­cade mode of this game, just for the com­ple­tion­ism's sake. (Yes, I should re­al­ly write a re­view about NFS3 some­day. UPDATE 2024-11-04: I did it!)

As usu­al, let's start with the in­tro movie:

(Now, be­fore you grab your pitch­forks and come an­gri­ly to me on how could I man­age to cre­ate a ~4 MiB WebM with such hor­ri­ble qual­i­ty, the in­tro video in the game is sim­ply stored in such a shit qual­i­ty. 320x240, 15 FPS, a cus­tom video codec us­ing MPEG-1 lev­el tech­nol­o­gy, stereo, 16-bit, 22050 Hz, 93 sec­onds and 16 MiB. The WebM just re­pro­duces it faith­ful­ly. Or al­ter­na­tive­ly try the low-qual­i­ty AV1 video, it's around a mebibyte, while still look­ing shit. So I start­ed fuck­ing around with state-of-the-yes­ter­year up­scalers and made a video with 4X res­o­lu­tion, al­most 5 times the file size, while still man­ag­ing to cre­ate some­thing look­ing worse than the orig­i­nal. It al­so blows up ar­ti­facts, be­cause ei­ther the ren­der­er didn't sup­port sub­pix­el res­o­lu­tion, or the video codec lacked half-pel fil­ters and the mo­tion vec­tors got snapped to in­te­ger pix­els with­out ad­e­quate er­ror cor­rec­tion af­ter­ward. Well, that's what I get if I mess around with AI shit. But I'll get my AI wai­fu one day, I nev­er give up!)

Now, it's al­ways fun to dis­sect in­tro videos like this, where the in­tro has ze­ro to no rel­e­vance to the ac­tu­al game, but I'm get­ting ahead of my­self. At the start, we have the EA lo­go, as al­ways—but dif­fer­ent from NFS3. I think this was around the time when EA changed its lo­go every two years.

At 0:04, the ac­tu­al in­tro video starts, and we see two cars lin­ing up in front of a traf­fic light. Right is a black Porsche 911 Tur­bo (with­out the Porsche lo­go), but the left? Its lo­go looks like a Porsche lo­go, but the car it­self doesn't look like a Porsche at all. Or any oth­er car in the game. It got me puz­zled for a while, un­til I ac­ci­den­tal­ly run in­to this YouTube video, which had the an­swer. It's a first gen­er­a­tion Hon­da Civic Type R with some vi­su­al tun­ing, but it's rather prob­lem­at­ic. First, there is no Hon­da cars in this game. Sec­ond, this kind of vi­su­al tun­ing is on­ly avail­able from Un­der­ground, on­ly re­leased 4 years lat­er than NFS4. (There's a "Bonus Porsche" in the game, which have these kinds of rac­ing de­cals, but it's just one pre-baked tex­ture, you can't cus­tomize it). Sigh.

Any­way, 0:21, we get a glimpse of a traf­fic light, the stan­dard ver­ti­cal red-yel­low-green lights, you have in most places of the world. It is be­ing used as a count­down, ex­cept in nor­mal game you have a hor­i­zon­tal lights, three red and one green. Khm, close enough, I guess. At 0:25, it fi­nal­ly turns green, and the mu­sic starts. In the nor­mal game, the mu­sic starts be­fore the count­down... Plus this mu­sic is not in the game. But it's worse. When this weird car fi­nal­ly starts, af­ter a me­ter or two, it breaks down, and black smoke emerges. Sor­ry, what? Yes, un­like NFS3, this game has dam­age, and dam­age af­fects the car per­for­mance, but no mat­ter what you do, your car will still be op­er­a­ble. Look, here's a video where I try to dri­ve in ca­reer mode with a heav­i­ly dam­aged car:

It makes some fun­ny sounds, the per­for­mance is shit, it gives smoke sig­nals, but it is still go­ing. Al­so, the dam­age mod­el is pret­ty weird in this game, it's like 1/x, a light knock and you're al­ready at 10% dam­age, but if you want to go over 50%, you have to try hard. To reach 100%, you have to try re­al­ly re­al­ly re­al­ly hard. Reach­ing 100% dam­age in all four as­pect is al­most im­pos­si­ble, at least dur­ing the course of a sin­gle race. Long sto­ry short, the in­tro is com­plete bull­shit here.

For­ward­ing to 0:32, we see some new cars in the back­ground. What the fuck is this, a fly­ing start? This game doesn't have such thing ei­ther! But at least the oth­er cars are part of the game. Then we see them rac­ing on a track which is not part of the game. Just when I thought things are get­ting bet­ter.

At 0:41 we have a rail­road cross­ing. This is ac­tu­al­ly a new thing com­pared to NFS3, it didn't have a track rail­way cross­ing, or work­ing trains. There's one lit­tle prob­lem though. Ingame, the train nev­er cross­es the rail­way cross­ing. There's on­ly one lev­el cross­ing in the game (on track Kin­di­ak Park), with con­stant­ly blink­ing red lights... but noth­ing else. I've had many races, but I've nev­er seen the train cross­ing. So I got cu­ri­ous, and stopped in front of the cross­ing, and wait­ed. And wait­ed. I've wait­ed at least 10 min­utes, but the train didn't come. There's a sec­tion of the track where the train goes next to the road, you can crash in­to the train here if you want, but as long as you stay on the as­phalt track, you're safe. An­oth­er fuck­ing lie. Just like junc­tions where you can go in mul­ti­ple di­rec­tions, some­thing you had on­ly part­ly im­ple­ment­ed in NFS:HP2 then ful­ly in Un­der­ground 2.

At 0:47, you see the first po­lice car in the in­tro—which just turns on the siren and stays there. At least this ac­cu­rate­ly de­picts the gen­er­al state of the AI in this game.

At 1:03 there is a bump in the road, and the cars go fly­ing! Yewhoo! Don't try this in the re­al game, though, it kills your sus­pen­sion pret­ty fast, es­pe­cial­ly on bumpi­er roads. 1:08, and you see a po­lice he­li­copter, a new ad­di­tion to the game, NFS3 didn't have one. 1:14, an­oth­er junc­tion, but now with traf­fic lights! Home­town had a junc­tion with lights, but you can on­ly go in one di­rec­tion there (in the oth­er di­rec­tion you have con­crete blocks), and the traf­fic light doesn't work.

Then at 1:15, we see a road­block. I don't think I ever saw a road­block con­sist­ing of more than two cars in this game (the usu­al num­ber is one). Those red sticks look like some­thing from NFS:MW, this game on­ly has some flares at the road­blocks (and con­crete blocks, but these are miss­ing from the in­tro). Maybe this is not an in­tro video at all, but a time ma­chine pre­dict­ing the fu­ture of the Need for Speed se­ries? Any­way, af­ter this we see the cars ran­dom­ly brak­ing and U-turn­ing, un­til noth­ing but the Porsche re­mains. But then it too turns around, prob­a­bly to avoid the road­block? But you can't avoid the road­block when rac­ing, since you have to com­plete the spec­i­fied num­ber of laps on the track. Any­way, we will nev­er know the re­al an­swer, be­cause the in­tro ends as the Porsche speeds away...

Oh, and one more thing. Af­ter the in­tro ends you see the load­ing screen... and ow maw Gad! I in­clud­ed NFS3's load­ing screen, just to have some­thing to com­pare with. With the old screen, you have the cool 3D NFS3 lo­go, the NFS text placed over the ro­man III, over a blueish back­ground, tak­ing in­spi­ra­tion from the po­lice's siren's red-blue col­ors... And with the new? Orig­i­nal­ly I want­ed to say it's like some­one de­signed it in PowerPoint in 30 sec­onds, but then Win­dows 8 came, and we saw how it looks like when they lit­er­al­ly de­sign their GUIs in PowerPoint... but still, it cer­tain­ly looks like some unimag­i­na­tive di­ver­si­ty hire crap. The old screen had soul, this is just a bor­ing life­less shell. But I have to ad­mit, the Ger­man "Bren­nen­der As­phalt" lo­go looks badass, imag­ine shout­ing that ti­tle, your sali­va splat­ter­ing all over the place, like it's a song from a met­al al­bum. I don't know why did they change the col­or, though. And the kern­ing, aaaah! It hurts to look at it.

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Career gameplay#

NFS4 gen­er­al­ly fol­lows the foot­steps of NFS3, in­stead of chang­ing every­thing pos­si­ble, like it was the norm with the lat­er NFS edi­tions. It in­cludes the tracks from NFS3 as a bonus (but not the track-spe­cif­ic mu­sic, which makes them sound re­al­ly weird the first time you race them; al­so, han­dling is quite dif­fer­ent than in NFS3, so you'll need to race them a few times to get used to them), but not the cars. Two new big fea­tures we have here is a (very ba­sic) dam­age mod­el, and a ca­reer mode. (And the third nov­el­ty is re­lat­ed to the pur­suit, see be­low.)

So, ca­reer mode. First, you start with $25000 and you have to buy a car from this, which means BMW Z3 or Mer­cedes SLK 230. I went with the Mer­cedes, since it has a bit bet­ter han­dling, and in my ex­pe­ri­ence usu­al­ly han­dling > top speed. Af­ter pur­chas­ing your first car, you can en­ter your first cir­cuit.

Some ter­mi­nol­o­gy here: you have tiers, which con­tain (one or more) cir­cuits, which con­tain (one or more) tracks. Tier is the top lev­el cat­e­go­ry, com­plet­ing a tier yields you a tro­phy and un­locks new tiers. Cir­cuit is what I'd call a cham­pi­onship, a se­ries of races you have to com­plete in or­der with one car, and you'll get a medal if you fin­ish in top 3. Track is a sin­gle race.

Now, this game is try­ing to be some­what re­al­is­tic, you have re­stric­tions on which car can you use to en­ter a cir­cuit, you al­so have to pay an en­try fee in most cas­es, and you on­ly re­ceive your award af­ter fin­ish­ing the cir­cuit. If you dam­age your car, you have to pay for re­pairs. Af­ter you start a track, you can't restart it, on­ly for­feit the race, which is the same as fin­ish­ing last. In the­o­ry, this looks like a good idea to spice things up, but in prac­tice, there's a very high in­cen­tive to saves­cum at cer­tain places, but more on that lat­er.

You have three types of cir­cuits, Tour­na­ment, Knock­out and High Stakes.

Tour­na­ment: This is how nor­mal cham­pi­onships usu­al­ly works, you have one or more tracks, the first to fin­ish gets 30 points, the sec­ond 25, then 20, 16, 12, 8, 4, and fi­nal­ly 0 points for the 8th place. If the race has less than 8 en­trants, you get points, even if you do not fin­ish the race. Which brings us to a small ob­ser­va­tion, un­less you suck at dri­ving, by the time you get to the last track, you'll usu­al­ly have enough points to win even if you fin­ish last. So you can skip the last race, but you mustn't click on "For­feit" in the main menu! Do­ing so will make you quit the cir­cuit, with­out re­ceiv­ing any re­wards. You have to start the race, wait for the count­down, then "For­feit" the race from the pause menu. The game will con­sid­er it as if you fin­ished last, but with­out spend­ing time to ac­tu­al­ly fin­ish the race then pay for re­pairs. (Al­so, if you want to can­cel a cir­cuit you en­tered for what­ev­er ver­sion, you're bet­ter start­ing then im­me­di­ate­ly for­feit­ing the re­main­ing races, even if it takes more time. This way, at least you'll get the re­ward for the last place, which usu­al­ly at least cov­ers the en­try fee.)

Knock­out: This is the knock­out mode from NFS3, you have mul­ti­ple races where the last to fin­ish is elim­i­nat­ed from the up­com­ing races (and not the knock­out from new­er NFSs where there is a sin­gle race, and the last is elim­i­nat­ed each lap). It's the sud­den death ver­sion of Tour­na­ment, where a sin­gle wrong move at the wrong time can ru­in your cham­pi­onship. On the oth­er hand, it's enough to fin­ish sec­ond last each time to win the whole knock­out.

High Stakes: This is where shit hits the fan. Let's start with the de­scrip­tion, these are head-to-head races, and the win­ner takes the los­er's car. Sounds fun? Well, ab­solute­ly not in prac­tice. Take the first High Stakes you have in the game, in the High Stakes Tour. At this point you'll like­ly on­ly have a sin­gle class B car. To en­ter a High Stakes race, you need at least two cars (since you can lose the one you en­ter with), so you'll need to buy car. This cir­cuit al­so re­quires you to en­ter with a class B car, which leaves you in a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion. Should you buy an­oth­er class B car? Since there are on­ly two class B cars in the game, you don't have much choice, and it al­so means what­ev­er car you'll win in this race, you'll al­ready have it. Al­ter­na­tive­ly you can buy a class A car, in prepa­ra­tion for the up­com­ing tiers, but then if you lose, you won't un­lock a new tier, and you'll have to make mon­ey from the old­er cir­cuits with­out class re­stric­tion un­til you can buy an­oth­er class B car. And the lat­er High Stakes aren't bet­ter ei­ther, I think I on­ly had a sin­gle High Stakes cir­cuit where I ac­tu­al­ly won a car I didn't own be­fore. When you start with a new car class, you have to buy a car from that class be­fore you can do any race re­quir­ing that class (in­clud­ing High Stakes), and in gen­er­al I found it's bet­ter to just buy the best car from the class, rather than try­ing to save a few dol­lars at the be­gin­ning. And to­wards the end of the game, when the AI will have the best car in the cat­e­go­ry, amend­ed with jet­packs on steroids, you won't stand a chance un­less you al­so have the best car. Thus, you end up in a sit­u­a­tion where you can bare­ly win any­thing (you can sell the du­pli­cate car for pen­nies, or keep them un­used in your garage), while los­ing your car can be a ma­jor PITA. Not ex­act­ly at­trac­tive, right? So, I won't judge you if you saves­cum. Make your game not com­plete­ly an­noy­ing, and I'll re­con­sid­er my stance.

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And while I'm at the an­noy­ing parts, let's talk about pro­gres­sion and dif­fi­cul­ty in this game. You have four class­es of cars, B, A, AA, AAA. NFS3 had C, B, A, I don't know why did they switch to this brain­dead re­verse bra-size in­spired shit. (Or maybe it's not re­verse at all and we can agree flat is jus­tice?) Any­way, in ca­reer mode you can up­grade most cars (AAA and bonus cars are not upgrad­able). Don't ex­pect Un­der­ground-style cus­tomiza­tion, you just have up­grade lev­el 1, 2 and 3, you can up­grade one by one, and you can't go back. Which is ac­tu­al­ly not too ide­al, be­cause of one thing: re­pair costs in­crease pret­ty steep with car (and class) up­grades. To be hon­est, un­less the cir­cuit was fixed to a sin­gle class, I played it one (or some­times two) class­es be­low for the most part, be­cause the AI is shit (ex­cept to­ward the end), so you can eas­i­ly win with a worse car, on the oth­er hand you need shit­loads of mon­ey to buy all the weird cars you need, be­cause a lot of cir­cuits have weird re­quire­ments to en­ter. And cir­cuits on­ly start to pay well at the very end of ca­reer mode, be­fore you'll be con­stant­ly out of mon­ey.

Then dif­fi­cul­ty. It's shit. First, it's piss easy. Sure, the re­tard­ed AI self iden­ti­fy­ing as a tor­pe­do can give you some prob­lems, and the game here likes to ran­dom­ly play tracks in re­verse or mir­rored, just to con­fuse you, but it's man­age­able, noth­ing over the top.

Up­date 2024-11-12: or the same video with widescreen patch:

Then it starts to in­crease dif­fi­cul­ty at a snail's pace, un­til you reach the last few tiers, where the dif­fi­cul­ty sky­rock­ets. It con­sists of two parts. First, you have 4/8 lap long cir­cuits with many tracks, which is not ex­act­ly a dif­fi­cul­ty in­crease, but more of an "an­noy­ment" in­crease, since every­thing takes un­nec­es­sar­i­ly long time, and you'll have way more chance to fuck things up. Sec­ond, the AI lev­el is in­creased—but as I said, the AI is fuck­ing stu­pid in this game (and oth­er ear­ly NFS games), they fol­low a path, and if you're in their way, they'll just force their way through. So what the dif­fi­cul­ty in­crease does is giv­ing AI cars a rock­et or two, so they'll go faster. They won't dri­ve bet­ter, the on­ly dif­fer­ence be­tween am­a­teur and cham­pi­on dif­fi­cul­ty AI is in the lat­ter it just goes faster. To­wards the end, you'll have cas­es when the AI can't keep their car on the road and they crash in­to ran­dom things, ex­cept when they're off­screen. When off­screem, they can dri­ve, since the en­gine cheats the whole shit away and physics no longer ap­ply to them. Like this, see what hap­pens when the AI ac­tu­al­ly tries to dri­ve:

It's not enough the AI fucks it up, it has to fuck it up in front of me in a way I can't avoid the col­li­sion. Se­ri­ous­ly, if I'd have to choose the sin­gle worst thing in NFS3/4, it would be the AI. 99% of your races con­sist of get­ting first ASAP, then avoid­ing the 2 km ra­dius of every AI car.

An­oth­er thing I re­al­ly hat­ed was the "curl­ing" tracks to­wards the end. In this game, a snowy track + "Weath­er" (which means snow) = ze­ro grip. It's a night­mare to dri­ve AAA cars in these con­di­tions, plus the au­to­mat­ic trans­mis­sion al­go­rithm al­so fails many times, and it will just let you run the en­gine over the red line, where it can't ac­cel­er­ate fur­ther, for many sec­onds. In the last few cir­cuits, I was count­ing how many snowy tracks there are, then I just skipped as many as I could, be­cause they were so bad. Need­less to say, I long give up go­ing with old­er cars here.

Any­way, you com­plete all the tiers and cir­cuits, then you un­lock the Tour­na­ment of Cham­pi­ons. Oh boy, did I say the game was dif­fi­cult be­fore? For­get it, this is where the dif­fi­cul­ty be­comes in­sane in this game. 8 tracks (3 snowy), 4 laps, 3 AI op­po­nents, fixed McLaren F1 GTR, Mer­cedes CLK-GTR, and Bonus Porsche. They fin­ish in this or­der, al­most every time. So you pret­ty much need the McLaren, then a lot of prac­tice on each track with each weird track vari­a­tion. Then get pre­pared for the fun­ny case, where you beat the lap record, but you still lose a po­si­tion the same lap. First I gave up the game here, then a few months lat­er I watched a few jew­tube videos, and tried to de­code how to beat these guys, be­cause oth­er­wise there are hard­ly any in­fo about this game on the net. Like how to even start off the first track (Coun­try Woods, snow), be­cause of the above-men­tioned curl­ing ef­fect, I could on­ly achieve any sub­stan­tial speed af­ter 3–4 turns, at the end of the hilly range. Take every­thing I said above about the AI, and crank it up to lev­el 11. If you drop be­hind too much (even in the first lap), you will nev­er catch them with their in­sane off­screen speed. On the oth­er hand, if you're near, just fol­low them, soon they'll crash in­to a wall or flip their car over or some­thing.

...To be hon­est, af­ter you get the kick of it, it's not too bad—pro­vid­ed you know the ins and outs of each track by heart. Which of course give me some prob­lems on the sec­ond part of the Tour­na­ment, with the NFS4 tracks, since I haven't com­plet­ed them 2834843928 times be­fore, but at this point I al­ready stopped notic­ing the dif­fi­cul­ty spikes. And don't be dis­cour­aged if you lose by more than 45 sec­onds on the first try, your sec­ond try will like­ly suc­ceed. Yes, the tim­ing is com­plete bull­shit here, don't be­lieve what­ev­er it says.

I'm in­clud­ing two videos here, first my first lap on Dol­phin Cove, which was... ac­tu­al­ly fun. Com­plete bull­shit, and my dam­age went over the roof, but here some­how I got lucky enough with the RNG, so it on­ly fucked a lit­tle with me, but didn't fuck me over. A pret­ty rare sight in this game. And the end of the first lap, it's just the per­fect end­ing of the ca­reer mode.

And yes, I said end of the ca­reer mode, the last 3 laps was un­event­ful, so I didn't in­clude them in the video. I still had two tracks to com­plete af­ter, Snowy Ridge and a night(mare) Kin­di­ak Park, but guess what? Giv­en my points, it was math­e­mat­i­cal­ly im­pos­si­ble for me to not win the cir­cuit! So I just skipped the last two tracks, be­cause I couldn't be both­ered to do the last two tracks on this bull­shit dif­fi­cul­ty. Fuck you, who­ev­er came up with this bull­shit.

Arcade gameplay#

Af­ter fin­ish­ing the ca­reer mode, I've de­cid­ed to al­so com­plete the ar­cade chal­lenges, it shouldn't take long. That's what I thought. Oh well...

Any­way, you have four sub­modes:

Sin­gle Race: the same as in NFS3, ex­cept the dam­age. But here you have no mon­ey, hence you don't have to re­pair your cars, they're re­paired au­to­mat­i­cal­ly. You can race the un­locked cars on the un­locked tracks with what­ev­er con­di­tions you want, beat some track records... In NFS3 this was the main mode, here it feels like a bonus, to mess around af­ter you fin­ished every­thing.

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Tour­na­ment and Knock­out: al­so pret­ty much the same as NFS3 (so you can man­u­al­ly save your state and restart races with­out mess­ing around with your save files), ex­cept you have three dif­fi­cul­ty lev­els here (Am­a­teur, Pro, Cham­pi­on). Com­plet­ing the Cham­pi­on one will un­lock the re­wards of the low­er lev­els, so there's no point in play­ing on low­er dif­fi­cul­ties. Tour­na­ment un­locks all (non-po­lice) cars in the game, while Knock­out un­locks all(?) tracks. (The ca­reer mode un­locked the NFS3 tracks for me, so I on­ly had to un­lock the race­tracks.)

Hot Pur­suit: fi­nal­ly we have the pur­suit mode, which is the last el­e­ment of the game re­ceiv­ing a ma­jor up­date. This makes it es­pe­cial­ly trag­ic they left this out from the ca­reer mode. First, this sub­mode has three sub-sub­modes: Nor­mal, Get­away, Time Trap; but you can play all of them as a rac­er or cop, so you prac­ti­cal­ly have 6 dif­fer­ent modes to mess around.

Nor­mal, Rac­er is the same as in NFS3: two rac­ers (you and one AI), with traf­fic and po­lice, win the race with­out get­ting too many tick­ets: the lim­it is the same as the num­ber of laps, so with 2 laps, you can get 2 tick­ets, on the third one you're bust­ed. The UI is still as bad as with NFS3, you start from 0/3 tick­ets, 2/3 tick­ets means on the next tick­et you die, not that you have one more chance. Now, on to the changes. First, you can't dis­able the traf­fic here like in NFS3, but to be hon­est, traf­fic felt less an­noy­ing in this game, so I can give a pass here. Then, dur­ing the race you'll en­counter a few new me­chan­ics from the po­lice. You have con­crete blocks next to road­blocks, mak­ing them hard­er to evade (and if you hit the con­crete, it will hurt, a lot). And don't re­set your car near a po­lice car, it's still an in­stant tick­et. Al­so, spike strip place­ment is more cun­ning than in NFS3, ex­pect them in blind cor­ners and oth­er hard-to-see places (and they al­so give you per­ma­nent dam­age!). Fi­nal­ly, you have the he­li­copter, but it just flies around the map, and some­times gives sta­tus in­fo to the po­lice units, mak­ing es­cape mar­gin­al­ly hard­er. But in the nor­mal mode, where you have to com­plete the laps and win the race, this hard­ly mat­ters, so it was a slight let-down for me. It cer­tain­ly doesn't throw ex­plo­sive bar­rels, like in NFS:HP2. You can col­lect those steer­ing wheels emo­ji next to the tracks, like in NFS3, but here you on­ly have to do it with NFS4 tracks. I think the in­ten­tion here was to un­lock a car when you win all tracks, like in NFS3, but since I al­ready un­locked every non-cop car from the Tour­na­ment, I didn't win any­thing.

Up­date 2024-11-12: small cor­rec­tion here. Ac­cord­ing to wikia, you need to beat both the rac­er and cop mode to re­ceive your re­ward. And your re­ward de­pends on the num­ber of beat modes, not the mode it­self, so Chevro­let Ca­maro, Lam­borgh­i­ni Di­a­blo SV and La Niña, in or­der.

Nor­mal, Cop mode. The cop mode in NFS3 was weird, you were the sin­gle po­lice with a full grid of rac­ers, you had to ar­rest every­one (but a sin­gle tick­et was enough), and af­ter an ar­rest/re­set you tele­port­ed next to a still alive rac­er. In NFS4, it's com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent—it's just the nor­mal rac­er mode, but you're the cop. You have 2 rac­ers and mul­ti­ple cops, and you have to tick­et each rac­er 2*laps+1 times. So you can no longer cheat by in­creas­ing the num­ber of laps. Al­so, no more tele­ports (the as­sist is still there, but if you en­able it, you can't un­lock re­wards). You have some new me­chan­ics to help you, but they fall flat IMHO. First, you can re­quest a road­block, un­for­tu­nate­ly they're usu­al­ly as ef­fec­tive as a nor­mal po­lice road­block (i.e. none at all). But spam­ming it can still help, some­times. Next, you can re­quest a wing­man, which sup­posed to call one of the cops to help you. But the AI in this game be­ing the AI in this game, they will usu­al­ly just crash in­to you or spin you out. So we have the third new fea­ture, where you can change which cop car you're dri­ving. There are two prob­lems with this, first the fuck­ing cam­era re­sets every time you change cars to the weird third-per­son cam­era float­ing in air (and by the way, these ex­tra cop cars have no in­te­ri­ors), sec­ond most of the cop cars are uber shit. And it's not a hy­per­bole, they're (prob­a­bly) stan­dard pa­trol cars hav­ing prob­lems keep­ing up with class A cars. On some of those Amer­i­can tracks, you even have SUVs. Oth­er than your car, you usu­al­ly have one not shit cop car (I think the Di­a­blo SV cop car, most of the times).

Now on­to the tac­tics. You have to stop the cars 6 times be­fore they fin­ish to win. The op­po­nent's class de­pends on your car's class, and gen­er­al­ly I found it eas­i­er to go with the most ba­sic Pur­suit Corvette, so if you have to switch to an­oth­er cop car, it won't be to­tal­ly hope­less. What worked for me is to turn on the siren as soon as the race starts, wait un­til the game locks on to an op­po­nent, then hunt him down. When done, in­stant­ly turn back the siren (the game au­to­mat­i­cal­ly turns it off), and stay with him, you can even try to stop him. There is a cooldown af­ter a tick­et, 10 sec­onds, give or take, while you can't pur­sue and tick­et him, but as soon as it ex­pires, you're good to go again. I think there should be a min­i­mum speed lim­it the op­po­nent has to reach be­fore you can ini­ti­ate a pur­suit, but this nev­er caused a prob­lem for me, maybe it's a bit bug­gy af­ter a tick­et? What­ev­er is the case, just tick­et the poor guy un­til he's ar­rest­ed. Now on­to the hard­er part, name­ly find­ing the oth­er rac­er, which like­ly means switch­ing to a crap car, and al­so stop him as soon as you can. Gen­er­al­ly the AI can some­times catch one of the rac­ers, but don't ex­pect the AI to give more than one tick­et per race, so you still need to give 5 tick­ets. And since you have equal or worse cars than the dri­vers, it means one mis­take, and you'll nev­er catch up to the rac­ers. If you stub­born­ly de­cide to con­tin­ue go­ing af­ter them (which I did many times), you'll just lose a full lap or more just try­ing to catch up on them, and if you do it, you run out of time. You can't use re­set go get near to them ei­ther. In­stead, you pray you have a dif­fer­ent cop car at a bet­ter place on the map, and if it fails, you're fucked. Tech­ni­cal­ly you can turn around, race the track in the re­verse di­rec­tion and kamikaze the rac­er when you fi­nal­ly reach him, but I could nev­er pull it off. Spike strip is as un­re­li­able as in NFS3, if you drop them down with a bad tim­ing, noth­ing hap­pens, if they still man­age to hit it, it will just slow them a bit. When you're the rac­er, a strip is fi­nal, no ex­cep­tions. When you're the cop, it's just a mi­nor nui­sance to the rac­ers. Fuck this shit.

So this mode is hard. I'm not sure which was the hard­er, the Tour­na­ment of Cham­pi­ons or this, but they're pret­ty close. The for­mer is just ridicu­lous­ly cheat­ing AI, the lat­ter is sac­ri­fic­ing young vir­gins on the al­tar of RNG god tier shit. What's more, the re­wards are equal­ly use­less (with the tour­na­ment, you get shit­loads of mon­ey, but since you al­ready fin­ished the ca­reer mode, it doesn't do much; and with the hot pur­suit, by be­ing top cop on every NFS4 track you un­lock Pur­suit Ca­maro, which is like the sec­ond worst car you have in po­lice mode (see up­date above)). Choose your poi­son.

Get­away, Rac­er aka. now for some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. Here, you're alone. The whole po­lice force wants to gang-bang you. You do not have to com­plete laps, you're "rac­ing" against the clock, you have to sur­vive 2 min­utes with­out get­ting a sin­gle tick­et. Ac­tu­al­ly, it's ridicu­lous­ly easy. You just go sight­see­ing, when a cop ap­pears you try to get away, then you can go back to sight-see­ing. If on the ra­dio they say spike strip was de­ployed, you can turn around to not risk hit­ting the strip (which is fa­tal for you). To be hon­est, un­less you man­age to ac­ci­den­tal­ly hit a spike strip, or flip over while a cop is near­by, you can't re­al­ly lose. Af­ter two min­utes you have an op­tion to ei­ther quit or con­tin­ue, but this mode was so bor­ing I on­ly chose to con­tin­ue once out of cu­rios­i­ty. You on­ly need two min­utes to be­come "Most Want­ed." Here's a small de­mo of what to ex­pect of this mode, try to not fall asleep while watch­ing it:

Get­away, Cop: if the rac­er mode was ridicu­lous­ly easy, this one in journo mode. You have two min­utes to catch the rac­er (a sin­gle time!), while in nor­mal mode, you had 3–4 min­utes to give 6 tick­ets. A lit­tle dif­fi­cul­ty com­pared to the nor­mal mode is you don't spawn next to the rac­er at the start, so you have to find him first. Usu­al­ly some oth­er cop will find it first. And by the way you get there, there is a high chance they al­ready ar­rest­ed him. I man­aged to be "Top Cop" on all 7 NFS4 tracks by do­ing 3 ar­rests all­to­geth­er. I'm sure even with no con­troller in­puts, I'd win on each track af­ter at most two restarts. What kind of bull­shit is this? And the worst: do­ing this uri­nal­ist com­pat­i­ble game­play, you un­lock the Pur­suit Di­a­blo SV. WHAAAT? You get that car for do­ing noth­ing?! Why did I ever both­er with the nor­mal mode?! (See up­date above.)

Time Trap, Rac­er mode is the il­le­git­i­mate love child of Nor­mal and Get­away mode. You have an op­po­nent, you have to win the race, but in­stead of hav­ing a lim­it on how many tick­ets you can get, you have a time lim­it to fin­ish. (The time lim­it de­pends on your car's class and the track.) But in Rac­er mode, this is pret­ty much the same as Nor­mal mode, maybe a tiny bit hard­er (if you get two tick­ets, you'll like­ly not make it on time), but still pret­ty easy.

Time Trap, Cop mode. The dif­fi­cul­ties here on the 7 NFS4 tracks are the fol­low­ing (in or­der): easy, ba­by mode, triv­ial, I can do it with closed eyes, IMPOSSIBLE, where was the chal­lenge? The tac­tic I de­scribed with Nor­mal, Cop mode won't work here, as you can tick­et a rac­er an in­fi­nite num­ber of times. But on the oth­er hand, giv­ing them just one tick­et is usu­al­ly enough to make sure they don't reach the fin­ish on time. Two tick­ets, and it's cer­tain. Ex­cept on the fuck­ing Durham Road. That track a mas­sive PITA. You can go with a class AA cop car to have class AA rac­ers, and they will have 4 min­utes to fin­ish. Al­ter­na­tive­ly you can go with class A cars to have class A rac­ers, but they will have 4:30 to fin­ish. I had shit­loads of tries when they fin­ished with times like 4:28.36, 3:59.01, and the like, be­cause nor­mal­ly they can fin­ish a lap in like one minute on this track. Af­ter nu­mer­ous tri­als, what worked in the end is to start with a class A cop car, im­me­di­ate­ly at the start of the race switch to the Di­a­blo SV cop, turn around, go to the dual car­riage­way, turn around, spike strip, and wait. Then af­ter they ar­rive, try to ob­struct their way as much as pos­si­ble. Since now you have a Di­a­blo SV, while they're dri­ving some class A garbage, you ac­tu­al­ly have a chance to catch up to them. With some luck, you can win this. When I fi­nal­ly did it, I gave 5(!) tick­ets to one of the rac­ers, with few­er tick­ets he'd still fin­ish the race. (Al­so note how the oth­er car on­ly got a sin­gle tick­et. Through some RNG luck, he some­how man­aged to get caught up in every pile up I cre­at­ed.) Fuck­ing bull­shit. But hey, at least I got a Pur­suit La Niña as a re­ward (See up­date above). Not sure what I'm go­ing to do with this car, most prob­a­bly ex­it the game.

JXL PNGJXL PNG

Other shit#

Graph­ics is, well, I don't re­al­ly care about graph­ics un­less the game is so hideous it makes play­ing im­pos­si­ble, and it's cer­tain­ly not the case here. It ba­si­cal­ly looks the same as NFS3, and it looks at least 100 times bet­ter than the PS1 ver­sion. And there are in­dieshit games re­leased in the last few years look­ing worse than this. The screen­shots/videos in this ar­ti­cle were done with the mod­ern patch (with some of the widescreen patch men­tioned in the up­date at the end) men­tioned be­low, but all it does is in­creas­ing the max­i­mum res­o­lu­tion the game can run it, and the draw dis­tance a bit, it won't have high­er res­o­lu­tion tex­tures/ob­jects. And to think about it, I played this game with a 133 MHz CPU and no 3D ac­cel­er­a­tor is mind-blow­ing.

Mu­sic is well, dun­no, I re­al­ly liked in NFS3 how each track had two mu­sic tracks (a rock and an elec­tro). In NFS4 you on­ly have a bunch of elec­tro tracks, no per track mu­sic.

What I like in this game is the at­ten­tion to de­tail and ran­dom lit­tle things you bare­ly find in mod­ern games. I mean, when was the last time you saw a game hav­ing dead zone set­tings? Or 6 cam­era modes to choose from? Slideshow of each car avail­able in the game? Panora­ma pic­ture of the car in­te­ri­or? Pre­sen­ta­tion of each track?!

JXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNG

To sum up, ac­tu­al­ly it was bet­ter than I ex­pect­ed/re­mem­bered. I still think NFS3 is bet­ter, but NFS4 is al­right too, the pur­suit mode is much bet­ter (and some­what hard­er too), has a new ca­reer mode (but it can get very an­noy­ing at times).

Technical shit#

Note: most of the patch­es men­tioned in this sec­tion are mir­rored on my serv­er.

Fas­ten your seat­belts. First things first, un­less you're play­ing this on a 20+ years old com­put­er run­ning Win­dows 98, I rec­om­mend get­ting NFS4 Mod­ern Patch. Ac­tu­al­ly, un­patched game doesn't even start on XP or lat­er, and locks up if you have more than 1 CPU cores. This patch al­so al­lows you to run the game in res­o­lu­tions larg­er than 1024x768 (no widescreen sup­port un­for­tu­nate­ly). If you're on Win­dows, just fol­low the readme to in­stall, and stop read­ing this sec­tion.

On Lin­ux, it's a bit more com­pli­cat­ed. First, the cas­ing of the files on the CD and in the 7z file will like­ly dif­fer, so you have to man­u­al­ly make sure you don't end up with du­pli­cate files with dif­fer­ent cas­ings. Workaround is to copy files first to a case-in­sen­si­tive par­ti­tion...

Then you have the wine prob­lem. First, if you use a con­troller, you'll need wine 6.19 or ear­li­er, since in lat­er ver­sions they fucked up con­troller in­puts. Al­so run wine control joy.cpl and make sure you on­ly have one copy of your con­troller en­abled (it likes to add both joydev and evdev in­ter­faces to the same con­troller as sep­a­rate con­trollers, be­cause wine).

Next I start­ed the game, and I had some­thing like 0.5 FPS. Not sure if this is spe­cif­ic to AMD dri­vers, or a more gen­er­al prob­lem, but af­ter some tri­al and er­ror I've found two so­lu­tions.

1. Use DXVK, because apparently if you use Vulkan instead of OpenGL everything works fine. You need to select a thrash backend that ends up using a DirectX version supported by DXVK. Also use DXVK v1.10.3, I've had problems with newer versions, and you need to create a file named dxvk.conf next to nfs4.exe with d3d9.deferSurfaceCreation = True as contents, otherwise you'll have a black screen.
2. Disable CSMT. It's supposed to help performance except when not, and the patch mentioned above forces the process to run on a single CPU, with apparently catastrophic result. winetricks csmt=off should do the trick, or manually in regedit: HKEY_CURRENT_USER -> Software -> Wine -> Direct3D, new dword, name is csmt, value is 0.
3. Actually I think the software renderer works without any workaround, but seriously don't use it, it looks shit.

One fi­nal thing I have to men­tion is the se­lec­tion of the thrash dri­ver (you can set it in nfs4.ini) (see al­so my NFS3 ar­ti­cle for more in­fo):

• softtri: a software renderer, it was useful in 1999 where many computers lacked a 3D accelerator, nowadays when even toasters have OpenGL 4.6 capable GPUs, not so much.
• dx6, dx7, dx8: various DirectX renderers. dx8 is buggy as hell under wine, older versions work (but not with DXVK). It would be the recommended renderer if we would still live in 2005, but nowadays we can do better.
• glide3x, dgvoodoo, nglide: these use the Glide API, made exclusively for GPUs made by a company that went bankrupt in 2002. What, you might ask? The thing is, Voodoo cards were so much ahead of their time, many features are only available using the Glide backend, and fortunately we have pretty good Glide emulators now. dgvoodoo uses a bundled copy of dgVoodoo2, while nglide uses a bundled copy of nGlide to emulate the Glide API using Direct3D or Vulkan. glide3x just tries to use the system's glide3x.dll, useful if you want to use another emulator, or you want to tweak the settings. Personally I found nGlide to work better than dgVoodoo2 under wine, but stick to the Direct3D backend (even if this means, nGlide emulates Glide using Direct3D and wine/DXVK emulates Direct3D using OpenGL/Vulkan). In drivers/nglide/thrash.ini I recommend you to set NGLIDE_RESOLUTION and NGLIDE_ASPECT to 1 to scale the game's menu (which is hardcoded to 640x480) to run in your native resolution. In the game settings you should still set the resolution to your native one, so at least in race things will have normal size. All screenshots and videos in this blogpost were made this way (see update below).

Al­so, when you start a night race, your light will prob­a­bly flick­er like hell. The on­ly re­li­able workaround I found is to go to graph­ics set­tings, ad­vanced, and set head­lights to ver­tex. It will look worse, but at least it won't cause epilep­tic seizures.

Update, more than a year later (2024-11-12)#

Af­ter go­ing through all NFS ver­sions be­fore NFS4, it's time to re­vis­it NFS4 briefly again. First things first, I want­ed to add here the Home­town pre­sen­ta­tion from NFS3, but in NFS4 ren­di­tion:

I pre­ferred NFS3's hand-drawn map with land­marks over NFS4's plain, fea­ture­less blue line (which you can't ro­tate for some rea­son while the pre­sen­ta­tion is run­ning). But on the oth­er hand, you have videos in­stead of still im­ages, even if it looks a bit weird. The screen has a res­o­lu­tion of 384x180, for an as­pect ra­tio of around 2.133. A weird ra­tio, I have no idea how they end­ed up with it, the near­est I found in kike­pe­dia's list of com­mon dis­play res­o­lu­tions is 2.165 used by some iFag de­vices, re­leased many years lat­er af­ter NFS4. Any­way, the prob­lem is not this, but the videos be­ing played on this screen, hav­ing an 1:1 as­pect ra­tio (i.e. a square). It just looks weird.

I al­so com­piled all of­fi­cial EA cars avail­able in lo­cal­ized ver­sions and as down­load­able ad­dons, hunt­ed to­geth­er from nf­s­cars archives. And man, it con­tains a Nis­san Sky­line GT-R, cer­tain­ly one of the bet­ter class AA cars, and I com­plet­ed the game with­out it, argh! Plus took a quick look at the avail­able mods. This has all the tracks from pre­vi­ous NFS ver­sions avail­able (even if some of them crash­es if you en­able rearview mir­ror, WTF), in­clud­ing the un­fin­ished sis­ter track of Em­pire City.

And some ran­dom thoughts be­fore I go in­to tech­ni­cal­i­ties again, Load but­ton was re­moved from the set­tings. Peo­ple who al­ready de­vel­oped Stock­holm syn­drome are fucked now. No rearview mir­ror in re­plays here ei­ther, looks like it's an NFS3 mod­ern patch ex­clu­sive fea­ture. HUD cus­tomiza­tion is se­vere­ly lim­it­ed com­pared to NFS3, you have two pre­sets, and you can change a few com­po­nents, but you can't move HUD el­e­ments like you could in NFS3. (And in post-clas­sic NFS ver­sions you have even less cus­tomiza­tion.) Al­so, no rad bonus track here, like Lost Ve­gas in NFS1, Mono­lith­ic Stu­dios in NFS2, you on­ly have Em­pire City from NFS3 but no new track. Now, on­to the tech­ni­cal stuff.

Surround sound#

First, Dol­by Sur­round©®™ sup­port was re­moved from this game. So DirectSound 3D with DSOAL is the on­ly so­lu­tion here. First prob­lem is get­ting some bi­na­ries, as DSOAL has no of­fi­cial bi­na­ries, and build­ing soft­ware for Win­dows is on­ly rec­om­mend­ed for true masochists. Brows­ing through the is­sue track­er, there's a fork with au­to­mat­ed CI and bi­na­ries. I tried mul­ti­ple ver­sions from here, but they all hang up­on ex­it­ing the game—but hang so hard, than not even Ctrl-C or Ctrl-\ quits Wine prop­er­ly, the vir­tu­al desk­top re­mains, I have to use wineserver -k to kill it for good. It wasn't that bad last time I tried! ... Up­on some search­ing, I re­al­ized last time I used a dif­fer­ent site to get a bi­na­ry, but this site seems aban­doned now. And HTTP on­ly. But it works, even if it's an old­er ver­sion. (Fun fact, I've tried r444 from the github fork, it crashed on launch). Maybe they used a dif­fer­ent com­pil­er or what­ev­er, I've mir­rored it in case the aban­doned site goes of­fline. Or you don't trust an HTTP down­load. Ex­tract the con­tents to the game di­rec­to­ry, and in winecfg's Li­braries tab, add an over­ride for dsound. Then start the game, go in­to the au­dio set­tings, se­lect D3D/EAX, and if you press au­dio test, it'll try all 5 chan­nels of a 5.1 set­up:

By the way, it will use these 5 chan­nels even when you don't have an 5.1 lay­out. But the ques­tion is, is it bet­ter than NFS3's half-assed sup­port? Kin­da. Did the same test as in NFS3, col­li­sion sounds now at least come cor­rect­ly from rear speak­ers. But en­vi­ron­men­tal sounds are still on­ly heard from the front speak­ers. I dis­able mu­sic and en­gine sound, and stop in front of a wa­ter­fall on Aquat­i­ca. Sound comes from front, good. I turn around, the wa­ter­fall is be­hind me. Sound still come from front. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! But there's no Dol­by out­put, so I'll have to put up with this.

Widescreen#

There is ac­tu­al­ly a widescreen patch for this game, but it's a bit in­volved and not with­out its down­sides. First, the orig­i­nal mod linked from PCGW has van­ished from shit­buck­et. I found some mir­ror, but on­ly the bi­na­ry, not the source. Al­so, this was made be­fore mod­ern patch, and com­pat­i­bil­i­ty is not the best. If you want to try to mess around with this, take note, you'll have to copy the dri­ver dll both to the sub­di­rec­to­ry of drivers and al­so to drivers di­rec­to­ry! I tried to get Glide work­ing this way, but I didn't suc­ceed.

Then af­ter some search­ing on the net, I found this fur­ry shit, and it linked to a 7z file on jew­gle dri­ve. I tried it—and it worked! It doesn't use Glide but some ran­dom DirectX ren­der­er, com­bined with dgVoodoo2 to force res­o­lu­tion to your na­tive screen's res­o­lu­tion. Be­cause the above-men­tioned widescreen patch doesn't ac­tu­al­ly let you use widescreen res­o­lu­tions, it just fix­es the as­pect ra­tio of 4:3 res­o­lu­tions as­sum­ing it will be stretched on a widescreen mon­i­tor. This will al­so stretch the HUD/menus, like in NFS2. It ap­par­ent­ly has dgVoodoo2 v2.79.some­thing, I tried to up­date it to the lat­est ver­sion, then the game crashed. And I can't even fig­ure out which ex­act dgVoodoo2 ver­sion is and is it patched or not as old­er ver­sions on dgVoodoo2 down­load page gives 404. Even more AAAAAAAAAAAAA. At this point I just gave up and went with the files in the 7z and not try­ing to mess around.

Al­so, some tips for us­ing this shit. First, fire up winecfg and add ddraw on the Li­braries tab (it will pop up a warn­ing that it's not rec­om­mend­ed to over­ride that dll, just ig­nore it). I rec­om­mend run­ning dgVoodooCpl.exe and go through the con­fig, there are a few ques­tion­able set­tings there, and it al­so set out­put to DirectX 12 which seems un­avail­able with this Wine/DXVK ver­sion I use. Or even bet­ter, delete dgVoodoo.conf and recre­ate it from scratch, all you need is uncheck keep as­pect ra­tio, and on DirectX tab Res­o­lu­tion set to Desk­top. Every­thing else is up to your taste.

Af­ter­ward, start the game, nav­i­gate to graph­ics set­tings, and set res­o­lu­tion to 640x480x16. Not 640x480x32 or any high­er res­o­lu­tion. The res­o­lu­tion set­ting doesn't re­al­ly mat­ter (dgVoodoo2 will force your desk­top res­o­lu­tion) oth­er than the pause menu scal­ing, but fail­ure to do so will re­sult in graph­ics glitch­es like this:

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About the new ex­e­cuta­bles in the 7z file. If you read the readme of the orig­i­nal widescreen patch, you'll see for some brain­dead rea­son, it's Ver- in­stead of Hor+. If you com­pare the two ex­e­cuta­bles (the orig­i­nal nfs4.exe and nfs4_ws.exe), you find a sin­gle dword change:

-00191ed0  3f 2e fa 8e 3c 83 f9 22  3e 00 00 00 00 cd cc cc  |?...<..">.......|
+00191ed0  3f 79 58 a8 3c 83 f9 22  3e 00 00 00 00 cd cc cc  |?yX.<..">.......|

I have no idea what do these num­ber means, the on­ly plau­si­ble in­ter­pre­ta­tion of \x3f\x2e\xfa\x8e I found was 0.6835 stored as a big-en­di­an(!) float, and changed in­to 0.9740. If I com­pare the re­sults with and with­out the patched ex­e­cutable, it looks like prob­a­bly some kind of FOV con­trol in a weird unit. Al­so note how nfs4_ws.exe shows a bit more ver­ti­cal­ly than the 4:3 out­put, I think it's be­cause this patch was made for pleb 16:9 res­o­lu­tions, not the su­pe­ri­or 16:10. I have no freak­ing idea what nfs4_ws_nc.exe is oth­er than it changes one more dword in the exe.

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SilentPatch#

Like NFS2 (and 3, but I had ze­ro rea­son to use it there), NFS4 al­so has a SilentPatch. All it does is en­abling the game to run on more than one CPU cores (mod­ern patch pins the game to one CPU core be­cause oth­er­wise it locks up). And un­like NFS2, it ac­tu­al­ly works (af­ter you add dinput as a dll over­ride...)! Use some­thing like taskset --all-tasks -p $(pgrep nfs4) to ver­i­fy, on­ly a few lines should be 1, most of the threads should have a 0xffffffff affin­i­ty.

If you want to use this to­geth­er with the widescreen patch, you have to mess around a bit though. To en­able the fix, you need to put "SingleProcAffinity=1 to an INI file named like the game’s ex­e­cutable", ac­cord­ing to the readme. Nor­mal­ly it's nfs4.ini, but with nfs4_ws.exe you have nfs4_ws.ini. How­ev­er, it seems like mod­ern patch al­so looks for an ini file named like the game's ex­e­cutable, but it has a fall­back to nfs4.ini if it's miss­ing, but this fall­back is miss­ing from SilentPatch. Which means, with you need the full con­tents of nfs4.ini copied, not just the SingleProcAffinity line. But it's not that sim­ple. Mod­ern patch ex­pects keys to be un­der an nfs4 sec­tion even when the ini is re­named, while SilentPatch looks for a sec­tion named like the ex­e­cutable. Thus, you'll need some­thing like this in your nfs4_ws.ini:

[NFS4]
Language=english
NoMovies=1
ThrashDriver=ws_dgvoodoo_dx9
SingleProcAffinity=1
OwnHeapLimitMb=256
NoErrorReporting=0
Variant=0

[NFS4_WS]
SingleProcAffinity=1

An eldritch abomination is born#

Aka. I've down­loaded shit­loads of po­ten­tial­ly in­com­pat­i­ble patch­es, put it in­to a Wine in­stal­la­tion held to­geth­er by duct tape, and still ex­pect every­thing to work well. And ac­tu­al­ly, it more or less does—I have 3D au­dio (most­ly), I have widescreen sup­port (most­ly, HUD and menus are stretched), the game is playable. I tried to re-record two re­plays I had in the orig­i­nal ar­ti­cle, the end of ca­reer and the ran­dom re­play from the 4 lap At­lanti­ca race. The first went well, the sec­ond, not so. But let's start with the good news, pro­ject­ed head­light works! The bad is, this shit couldn't ren­der the game at sta­ble 60 FPS. I've dis­abled vsync, and it was con­stant­ly ren­der­ing at 63–64 FPS (the game it­self is lim­it­ed to 64 FPS), but frame time graph was full of lit­tle spikes. And OBS stu­dio doesn't care about when the game ren­ders the im­age, it just takes a "screen­shot" every 1/FPS sec­onds and calls it a day.

Try­ing to do some­thing about led to an­oth­er facepalm mo­ment. I thought my mon­i­tor runs at 60 Hz. It's sta­tus page (the mon­i­tor's built-in OSD) said 60 Hz in mono­spaced font. Games dis­played 60 FPS when they had an FPS me­ter. But xrandr re­port­ed 59.95 Hz. And mpv's in­fo page re­port­ed 59.9502 Hz. First I thought it's a bug, Nvidia's dri­ver were no­to­rius for re­port­ing bull­shit re­fresh rates in xrandr—but I have an AMD card now! Al­so, run­ning the game with Mesa's Vulkan over­lay (the VK_INSTANCE_LAYERS=VK_LAYER_MESA_overlay thingy), which un­like oth­er FPS mon­i­tor tools, dis­played FPS with two dec­i­mal places of ac­cu­ra­cy, con­firmed the mon­i­tor was in­deed run­ning at 59.95 Hz—or some­thing around it. But what ex­act­ly? Both xrandr's and mpv's out­put seemed like a round­ed num­ber for me, and OBS want­ed a frac­tion, so I went look­ing. Then some stack­over­flow an­swer gave me the so­lu­tion. I was too lazy to com­pile it, but for­tu­nate­ly I didn't need to, xrandr --verbose in­clud­ed every­thing I need­ed.

  1920x1200 (0x4a) 154.000MHz +HSync -VSync *current +preferred
        h: width  1920 start 1968 end 2000 total 2080 skew    0 clock  74.04KHz
        v: height 1200 start 1203 end 1209 total 1235           clock  59.95Hz

The an­swer is 154000000 / (2080*1235) Hz, or the pret­ty num­ber of 192500/3211 Hz. Or about 59.95017128620367486764... Hz. Isn't it beau­ti­ful? And the worst of it, af­ter I en­tered it in­to OBS, it saved it, but the out­put mkv came out with an FPS of 16846/281. Thanks, I guess? But for­tu­nate­ly the dif­fer­ence is around 6.650e-6, or ~24 ms af­ter an hour of record­ing. But this means—I RECORDED ALL THE VIDEOS UNTIL NOW WRONG (ex­cept the DOSBox ones)! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA! I hate tech­nol­o­gy.

And in the end I couldn't fix the spikes, so the widescreen race re­play video is a bit less smooth than the 4:3 one. (Un­less you play the LQ video, con­vert­ing to 30 FPS, or more like 29.9751something FPS elim­i­nat­ed most of these hic­cups.)

But now to fin­ish this blog­post off with some­thing more pleas­ant whin­ing. Back to the night races. I whined about how the street­lights ba­si­cal­ly emit about ze­ro light in NFS3. Now in NFS4 they fixed it, but on­ly for NFS4 tracks. See for your­self, I made a few screen­shots with turned off head­lights. Street­lights emit light, the win­dows of hous­es are bright, the tun­nel is bright, parts of race­track is so il­lu­mi­nat­ed that it could be day­light. But on NFS3 tracks, lights on­ly af­fect the 5 cm ra­dius of the light source. It's com­plete­ly dark un­der the street­light, the on­ly thing lights in the tun­nel il­lu­mi­nates is your dash­board, what's sup­posed to be a pow­er­ful neon light or a spot­light is like a can­dle. WHY?!

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But if you go back to the night race re­play, at least the car has a dash­board back­light, un­like in NFS3. Al­so, sor­ry for us­ing At­lanti­ca as a sam­ple track both in the NFS3 and 4 ar­ti­cle, this is what hap­pens when more than a year pass­es be­tween writ­ing the two blog­posts...

(Lo­go source)