Need for Speed 5: Porsche Unleashed (Windows)

Need for Speed: Porsche Un­leashed, aka Need for Speed: Porsche in Ger­many/Latin Amer­i­ca, and Need For Speed: Porsche 2000 in the rest of the world (no more オーバードライビン in Japan). An­oth­er NFS I didn't re­al­ly play un­til now. I have a feel­ing I will write this a lot, maybe I should note when there is an NFS I played in­stead. I re­mem­ber try­ing this out, and hav­ing fed up with do­ing slaloms be­tween the cones and fuck­ing 360s and just left it. Al­so, ap­par­ent­ly back then, I got a rip ver­sion from a friend with­out movies and mu­sic, and it cer­tain­ly didn't help me to fall in love with this... thing. But speak­ing of movies, the in­tro!

Where do I even start...? First we're back to dif­fer­ent res­o­lu­tions, like with NFS1, the EA lo­go is 320x240, while the rest is 320x176, an­oth­er weird as­pect ra­tio of 20:11. And while I'm at the EA lo­go, the video looks the same, but the sound is def­i­nite­ly new. Yeah, the re­design lo­go every year con­test.

Then on­to the ac­tu­al in­tro, and I'm re­al­ly try­ing to not write a wall of text like I did with NFS4. At 0:06, we see a Porsche test dri­ver. Fact check: true, you can be a Porsche test dri­ver in this game. But the sim­i­lar­i­ties with the ac­tu­al game end here. Next, the test dri­ver sneaks in­to the garage dur­ing the night and starts brows­ing around the cars. Wrong! No, no way! In the game you can on­ly be a good cor­po­rate drone, do­ing ex­act­ly what the oth­ers tell you (at one place even your ju­nior!), with ze­ro au­ton­o­my. The first car he looks at is a 550 A Spy­der—and while this car is in the game, you can't dri­ve it as a test dri­ver! Al­so, as a test dri­ver you on­ly dri­ve in rac­ing suit and hel­met. The ca­su­al clothes are re­served for non-fac­to­ry-dri­ver events. What comes at 0:23 is al­so bull­shit, there's no mis­sion where you have cones at the side of the road, on­ly slaloms. Plus hit­ting about 9 cones (the pic­ture for ants res­o­lu­tion and 15 FPS makes the fate of some cones am­bigu­ous) is not a good idea ei­ther, un­less you want a 9-sec­ond penal­ty. 0:40: I don't re­mem­ber see­ing poles like that at the side of any track. At 0:50, the dri­ver looks at a blue Porsche (dun­no which mod­el, ex­cept the few race-class Porsches, they all look the same), and goes rac­ing. There's a small prob­lem though—there's no prop­er race­track in this game. Monte Car­lo comes close, but it's still a road track, even if there are some curbs at the side of the road. There's def­i­nite­ly no pit lane in the game any­where. Then at 1:11, we get to see the po­lice. There's ac­tu­al po­lice in the game, but it's se­ri­ous­ly dumb­ed down from what you had in NFS3/4. Then the switch­back at 1:19. Let me tell you what would hap­pen if you try this for re­al in game: you crash in­to the wall. This is a Porsche, not a Sub­aru or Mit­subishi where you have ac­tu­al han­dling. These piece of shit cars are un­con­trol­lable over 30. The Tokyo drift at 1:24 is more rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the game. Lat­er he choos­es the black Porsche, at 1:41 we can see he's lis­ten­ing to 52Kultur (or Szkul­tur or what­ev­er), I bet he's some snob on­ly lis­ten­ing to clas­si­cal mu­sic. Who doesn't want to race to Mozart? Then he goes to dri­ve at places kin­da re­sem­bling places avail­able in the game. And at 2:15, we re­turn to the spark fetish from NFS3.

Af­ter watch­ing all this (or skip­ping), you're re­ward­ed with the load­ing screen, still in glo­ri­ous 640x480 res­o­lu­tion.

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General impressions#

First thing first, this game is about Porsches. You have Porsche, Porsche and even more Porsche, but noth­ing else. Even the po­lice is Porsche! You're stuck with these rolling piece of rusts for the whole game. And un­like NFS3/4, the mod­ding com­mu­ni­ty is pret­ty-much nonex­is­tent, and as far as I know, new cars added by mods are not avail­able in ca­reer play, so... yeah. If you don't like the Ger­man garbage, you're fucked. But if you hap­pen to like them, you'll be de­light­ed to know there are 87 cars in game (in­clud­ing bonus and down­load­able cars), even though most of them are mi­nor vari­a­tions of the same cars.

Re­mem­ber how I bitched about NFS4 be­ing a curl­ing sim­u­la­tor on snowy tracks? Well, here you have two kinds of cars, cars with grip and cars with­out. And un­for­tu­nate­ly, 95% of the cars in this game fall in the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry. I hope you know curl­ing, be­cause this game is a curl­ing sim­u­la­tor, not a rac­ing game. But at least bumps no longer give you ridicu­lous amount of dam­age, like in NFS4.

On the pos­i­tive side, AI got re­al im­prove­ments, now they'll at­tempt to over­take you, in­stead of self-iden­ti­fy­ing as mis­siles and try­ing to bomb you out of the track. Ex­cept at the end of the evo­lu­tion mode, where the game tries to in­crease the dif­fi­cul­ty by in­creas­ing the AI ag­gres­sive­ness to lev­el 11, there­by restor­ing the old AI be­hav­ior. But for the rest of the game, have fun play­ing dirty with them. If they want to over­take you, just steer in their di­rec­tion, to avoid crash­ing they'll steer too, so you can eas­i­ly force them off the road, and with some luck, they'll crash in­to some­thing. Just don't try to spin them out, 99 times out of 100 they'll re­cov­er, and you'll end up in a worse sit­u­a­tion than when you start­ed.

Sound­track is su­perb, most­ly com­posed by Rom di Prisco, for some rea­son cred­it­ed as Mor­phadron here. Sad­ly, the on­ly re­al­ly good part of this game.

Factory driver#

Un­like the pure ar­cade NFS3, and the ar­cade-ca­reer mode hy­brid NFS4, NFS5 is heav­i­ly fo­cused on ca­reer mode. Heck, you can't even ex­it the game with­out cre­at­ing a pro­file! In ad­di­tion, this game has two ca­reer-like modes, then first be­ing the fac­to­ry dri­ver. You're a fresh­ly hired test dri­ver at Porsche, and your goal is to be­come the ace test dri­ver by com­plet­ing a se­ries of grad­u­al­ly more dif­fi­cult tasks. I mean, that's the premise. This is a com­plete­ly lin­ear mode with au­to-saves, you have to com­plete the mis­sions in or­der, you can't even choose your car, and when you fin­ish a mis­sion, it's done, you can nev­er go back. Ex­cept, of course, save-scum­ming or saveg­ame edit­ing. This game is com­plete­ly un­playable with­out them, it's worse than the most lin­ear FPS out there. And there are oth­er prob­lems.

Most of the tasks in­volve you slalom­ing, turn­ing around cones, and do­ing 360s on a test track. Es­pe­cial­ly the lat­ter is quite bitch, de­pend­ing on how good you are, ex­pect the game to reg­is­ter one 360 out 4–10 at­tempts. Be­fore each as­sign­ment, you can view a map and a brief­ing, but the brief­ing won't help you at all, nev­er­the­less it will still oc­ca­sion­al­ly break the fourth wall (like when cau­tion­ing about the bro­ken re­set fea­ture of the game, but it's so much nerfed in this game, you'll prac­ti­cal­ly lose if you have to use it). It's on­ly there to mock you or try to put a shit­ty "sto­ry" in­to the game. 0 use­ful in­for­ma­tion. And dif­fi­cul­ty wise, ex­cept the first few tasks, ex­pect them to retry mul­ti­ple times un­til you suc­ceed. Which is not fun when the task you have to do is not fun to be­gin with, and this game mode is about as fun as a re­al work­place, 100% frus­tra­tion and an­noy­ment, 0% fun. The on­ly re­al fun mis­sions here are the "Cap­ture the Flag" mis­sions, where you have to hit cones in a spe­cif­ic or­der (but you don't know the or­der in ad­vance, and the ar­row dis­play is a bit fick­ly, so it can still fuck you up). This is al­so the on­ly game mode where po­lice makes an ap­pear­ance, but it would have been bet­ter if they left them out. They won't ar­rest you like in pre­vi­ous games, all they do is be­ing in the way, and some­times try­ing to spin you out. They're on­ly mar­gin­al­ly more an­noy­ing than the traf­fic, which you al­so have in some as­sign­ments.

The first as­sign­ment where I had re­al trou­ble was the one where you have to do a 360 with a 911 GT1. GT1 is one of the about two cars in the game where the grip is not ze­ro. With most cars, you can just steer right full, re­lease gas, hand­brake, and keep it un­til the 360 is done, then just con­tin­ue. Not with the GT1. You do at most a 180 with this method. Af­ter some search­ing on the net I found a use­ful GameFAQ, where I found out I have to re­lease hand­brake around halfway and steer in the oth­er di­rec­tion. Even armed with this in­fo it took me like an hour to fi­nal­ly com­plete this as­sign­ment. And of course, I read on­line about that one lev­el, the com­mer­cial mis­sion, how some peo­ple strug­gled it for days, and I was al­ready wor­ried how fuck­ing dif­fi­cult it will be. You have to do a 180, re­verse in­to a next set of cones, do an­oth­er 180, some turns, and fi­nal­ly a 360, all while us­ing man­u­al trans­mis­sion. And I have to tell you, us­ing man­u­al trans­mis­sion on a gamepad sucks. So I sat down, men­tal­ly prepar­ing for the worst, start­ed the stop­watch and dive in. 11 min­utes 21 sec­onds. In­clud­ing start­ing the game, read­ing the brief­ing, load screens, etc. I was dis­ap­point­ed. I felt emp­ty. The her­culean, im­pos­si­ble mis­sion... was this? It was about as hard, as any oth­er. Av­er­age at best. Sigh. Any­way, here's a re­play of me do­ing it. It won't win world cham­pi­onship points (es­pe­cial­ly not the sec­ond 180, and no, I wasn't try­ing to re­pro­duce the cheat from the FAQ), nei­ther for the time nor for style... but as I said, you can't retry fac­to­ry dri­ver mis­sions eas­i­ly, and I had no in­cli­na­tion to do this more than once. Al­so, ig­nore my in­abil­i­ty to shift.

(And man, I have to rant about the re­play fea­ture now. Or more like, the miss­ing fea­tures. On­ly NFS3 with mod­ern patch had a rearview mir­ror, but here every HUD el­e­ment (ex­cept the timer in fac­to­ry mis­sions) are miss­ing, and no way to get them back. You don't know your po­si­tion, time, the lap... any­thing! And when the re­play ends, it au­to­mat­i­cal­ly quits in­stead of restart­ing, pos­si­bly de­stroy­ing your on­ly chance of sav­ing the re­play at the end of a race. Argh!)

Any­way, af­ter com­plet­ing the com­mer­cial, you have a few more tasks, then you get the fi­nal show­down. To be­come the ace dri­ver, you have to beat the cur­rent one—and of course, it has to be a woman. A stuck up bitch. The on­ly woman in the whole fuck­ing game is the ace test dri­ver. Sure, sure, DEI apart­ment at work, what­ev­er. In re­al­i­ty, she's not a big chal­lenge, get­ting to the point of chal­leng­ing her is the chal­lenge. I showed her her place af­ter she tried to over­take me, then there were no prob­lems for the rest of the race.

(Ah, look­ing back how I do the hair­pins lit­er­al­ly hurts...)

But the year is still 2000, so at least I got a con­grat­u­la­tions mes­sage af­ter beat­ing her, not a lec­ture on tox­ic mas­culin­i­ty or some­thing. Al­so note how af­ter re­ceiv­ing the fi­nal mes­sage, ex­it­ing the fac­to­ry dri­ver mode means you can nev­er again go back. Not even to check out the cheap plas­tic ID card you got. You nev­er get to use any of bonus cars you win in fac­to­ry dri­ver through the fac­to­ry dri­ver mis­sions, and evo­lu­tion mode is bugged in this re­gard (more on it lat­er). What's the point?

Evolution mode#

I'd say this is the meat of the game, some­what sim­i­lar to NFS4's ca­reer mode. The storm of 4 and 8 lap races at the end of the ca­reer game­play was re­moved (es­pe­cial­ly giv­en most races are sprint races, not cir­cuits), but I don't think any­thing else im­proved. The au­tosave, no restart sys­tem is still there, and while High Stakes races were re­moved, there are lots of oth­er an­noy­ances.

The idea be­hind this mode is you start in the year 1950, and you progress through time un­til 2000 as you com­plete races. Now, how does it look in prac­tice? You start the game with 11000 un­spec­i­fied units of mon­ey, and at the new car deal­er, you can buy a Porsche 356 1100 Cabri­o­let or Porsche 356 1100 Coupé Fer­di­nand. Both costs ex­act­ly 11000. What you buy is prac­ti­cal­ly ir­rel­e­vant, be­cause on the first race the AI is so shit (es­pe­cial­ly if you com­plet­ed fac­to­ry dri­ver be­fore) you could win the race rid­ing a bi­cy­cle, and af­ter fin­ish­ing the first tour­na­ment you want to buy a new car any­way.

By the way, tour­na­ment. There are two types of events in evo­lu­tion mode, and at the start of the evo­lu­tion mode you can on­ly en­ter tour­na­ments. Do a few races, and who­ev­er gets the most points, wins (in case of a tie, you win). You get mon­ey based on your po­si­tion af­ter each race, and fin­ish­ing the tour­na­ment in top 3 ad­vances the time in game. The game is di­vid­ed in­to three eras, fin­ish­ing the last tour­na­ment in each era ad­vances you to the next era. When you ad­vance to a new era, you won't be able to ac­cess the tour­na­ments of the pre­vi­ous era, and most tour­na­ments re­quire cars from the cur­rent era, so this is where club races come in­to view. Fin­ish­ing an era un­locks the club races of the re­spec­tive era, and club races don't "ex­pire" like tour­na­ments, but they won't ad­vance the time ei­ther. Think of them as op­tion­al side quests for some ex­tra mon­ey. Un­like tour­na­ments, club races some­times fea­ture traf­fic, or ral­ly style events, where you don't col­lect points, but your to­tal race time com­bined counts.

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So, what's the prob­lem? Af­ter fin­ish­ing the first tour­na­ment, you end up in 1956. You can buy the shiny new 356As from '56 in the shop, but the 356s are gone. Huh? What? Well, shop is not ad­di­tive, like in many oth­er games, but it tries to be re­al­is­tic. You can on­ly buy still man­u­fac­tured cars, the cars of the past are gone. In­stead, you can go to a used car deal­er, and buy cars from there. And all of them will be thrashed, but you can re­pair them. Al­so, don't wait too long, as cars get old­er they be­come rar­er at the used car's deal­er. (There's no penal­ty on used cars ingame, af­ter you re­pair them, they're as good as new. This al­so means, you gen­er­al­ly don't want to buy new cars if you can, buy­ing them used and re­pair­ing a few years lat­er is cheap­er.) Which gets me to the point: there are (al­most) per­ma­nent­ly miss­able cars in the game. If you want every car in your garage (and read­ing the al­ready men­tioned GameFAQ made me want it), you have to stop af­ter each tour­na­ment and buy every (used) car you still don't have. The more you wait, the hard­er it will be­come to ob­tain them.

So you need a lot of mon­ey, ear­ly in the game. How? By buy­ing cars, re­pair­ing them, and sell­ing them for a prof­it, with­out ex­cep­tion. Yes, Need for Speed Porsche is ba­si­cal­ly a well dis­guised click­er game, you spend more time in the menus than dri­ving. (And af­ter writ­ing this sen­tence, I spent the next cou­ple of hours play­ing can­dy box. I'm not link­ing it here, you don't want to open it.) But at least this way you won't have mon­ey prob­lems any­where in the game. (Just note the game usu­al­ly doesn't ac­tu­al­ly save your progress un­til you start a race or quit the game, so if you're scared of los­ing progress af­ter a crash, ex­it and restart the game every now and then.)

Now on the ac­tu­al flow of the evo­lu­tion mode. In the menu you can se­lect any tour­na­ment in the cur­rent era, which might give you the im­pres­sion of you have some free­dom on how you com­plete them, but in re­al­i­ty, en­try re­stric­tions make this game mode pret­ty lin­ear. Let's see what you can choose from in clas­sic era:

• 356 Challenge: 356 models only
• 356 A Cup: 356 A models only
• 356 B Endurance: 356B, limited to 1600cc (and the text overflows the container)
• 2000cc Challenge: 2000cc 356B or 911
• 911 Cup: Any 911

At the start of the game, as I men­tioned you can on­ly buy 356s, so you're lim­it­ed to start­ing with 356 Chal­lenge. Fin­ish­ing it, you end up in 1956, and you have ac­cess to more 356s and the brand-new 356 As. What does it give you ac­cess to? 356 B En­durance? No. 2000cc Chal­lenge? No! 356 A Cup, the sec­ond item in the list. Fin­ish that, and you end up in 1960. In '59 you get two new 356 A mod­els, and in '60 a bunch of brand-new 356B mod­els (but all of them are 1600 cc), so you can on­ly start 356 B En­durance. Then you get to 1965, with '62 356 B 2000 GS Car­rera 2 and '65 911 Coupe as new cars. Wait, now you can en­ter both the 2000cc Chal­lenge and 911 Cup. Yay, you have choice! What hap­pens if you skip ahead, though? Noth­ing re­al­ly, you'll ad­vance to '69 like you com­plet­ed the 2000cc Chal­lenge, you still have to fin­ish the 2000cc one. The num­ber of com­plet­ed tour­na­ments counts, not the tour­na­ments them­selves. And your free­dom will be sim­i­lar in lat­er eras too.

What hap­pens when you win the last tour­na­ment in an era? First, you au­to­mat­i­cal­ly fin­ish the era and ad­vance to the next one. In prac­tice, this means you can't retry the last tour­na­ment if you suc­cess­ful­ly com­plete it. If you're at a bad po­si­tion (but still in top 3) at the end, your on­ly op­tion is to ei­ther re­store an old save be­fore the event, or quick­ly quit the race be­fore fin­ish­ing it, and for­feit­ing the tour­na­ment to restart it. But wait, it's get worse. When com­plet­ing an era, you get a bonus race, where you have one (1) chance to win a bonus car. If you mess up the race, the game locks up on the load screen, bluez de­cides to crash dur­ing this race de­spite not do­ing any­thing like that in the last 5 years, it's gone—and yes, it all hap­pened to me. You can buy the bonus car from the new cars menu for a few years, but it will be ridicu­lous­ly ex­pen­sive. So do your­self a fa­vor, be­fore start­ing the last race in the last tour­na­ment of an era, ex­it the game, and make a back­up of your savedata fold­er be­fore con­tin­u­ing.

And cars. First, the good parts: you have ex­ten­sive up­grade op­tions. You can mix and match var­i­ous parts, un­like NFS4 where you on­ly had up­grade lev­el 1, 2 and 3, this is hon­est­ly more like what you will have in Un­der­ground, but with a fo­cus on per­for­mance parts. Vi­su­al tun­ing is way more lim­it­ed, you can change the body and in­te­ri­or col­or, you can put a rac­ing num­ber on your car, some full body vinyls, while with some cars you can re­place the rims and some body parts. The prob­lem with the lat­ter is you have 0 vi­su­al feed­back, you have to buy the item, put on the car, and ex­it back to the garage to see the re­sults. I mean, if you can spot the dif­fer­ence, as all Porsche cars look the same. And with per­for­mance up­grad­ing, I think they did it like this, so you can up­grade your car in small­er steps, but in prac­tice it al­so falls flat. First, you'll gen­er­al­ly on­ly use a car for a few races, then you'll move on to the new shiny, so you'll just buy the car, put the up­grades you can, then for­get about it when it's no longer use­ful. And if you do the used car sell­ing thing I men­tioned, you'll have enough mon­ey to buy all the up­grades right away. Oth­er than the gear­box and tires, you'll gen­er­al­ly just want the best part any­way.

The worse part is, fig­ur­ing out what you want. Where's the car com­pare screen? Not in the garage. I've found it in two places. First, you can go to the new cars screen, se­lect one car, and com­pare it with oth­ers. You on­ly have head-to-head com­pare, and the left car is fixed to what se­lect­ed in the pre­vi­ous menu. If you want to change it, you have to go back, se­lect a dif­fer­ent car, and com­pare again. And of course this way you can on­ly com­pare new cars against all the oth­er cars in the game. Or just mem­o­rize the val­ues you're in­ter­est­ed in and on­ly use the right side of the menu. Al­ter­na­tive­ly, you can ex­it evo­lu­tion mode, go to quick race, and the garage there, for some un­known rea­sons, will have a com­pare but­ton. So there you can com­pare cars you own with every­thing else. How do you com­pare used cars? I don't think you can. Al­so re­mem­ber the de­tailed car show­case from pre­vi­ous NFSs? Well, I on­ly found it in the evo­lu­tion mode's new cars screen. This means you can't check the de­tails of the cars you can no longer buy as new. What the fuck is this uber bull­shit? But at least Porsche 2000 did one thing right: showed how low-IQ dumb­ed down user in­ter­faces of the new cen­tu­ry will look like. I want to throw up.

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The sec­ond prob­lem will on­ly man­i­fest dur­ing the end of your evo­lu­tion game­play. In the garage, you can have 80 cars. You can't get the 4 down­load­able cars in evo­lu­tion mode, but you still have 83 cars in game to store in the 80 spot garage. But ap­par­ent­ly this 80 lim­it is not be­cause the game has a Car cars[80]; or some­thing sim­i­lar in the code, as you can have more than 80 cars, you can't just buy more cars if you al­ready have 80. You can still win bonus cars. And this is where I fucked up. Ap­par­ent­ly, if you do evo­lu­tion mode first, you can get the 77 nor­mal cars and 3 era bonus cars nor­mal­ly (for a to­tal of 80), then do fac­to­ry dri­ver to get its bonus cars too. Maybe. I'm not restart­ing this shit game from the be­gin­ning to try this out. I did fac­to­ry dri­ver first, then reach­ing the re­spec­tive year in evo­lu­tion mode un­locked 2 out of the 3 fac­to­ry dri­ver bonus car (I have no idea why I didn't get the '73 911 Car­rera RS 2.7 Coupe, ei­ther the game is bug­gy, or I man­aged to ac­ci­den­tal­ly sell it). Then I won the mod­ern era bonus race to get a 81st car in my garage, and missed two cars. And the fuck­ing GameFAQ nowhere men­tioned this. (But, if you're new to the game and this doesn't both­er you, I still rec­om­mend start­ing with fac­to­ry dri­ver. You can eas­i­ly restart mis­sions there, re­pairs are paid by Porsche, and no miss­able con­tent, giv­ing you a gen­tler in­tro­duc­tion to this bull­shit curl­ing sim­u­la­tor.)

Oh, and the cher­ry on top. You some­how get the shiny bonus car from fac­to­ry dri­ver, and you run in­to a tour­na­ment re­quir­ing the same car. Joy fills your eyes, fi­nal­ly all the blood and sweat you had to sac­ri­fice in or­der to fin­ish the fac­to­ry dri­ver paid off! You se­lect the car, click on race and...

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the game just shows you a huge mid­dle fin­ger. Be­cause a fac­to­ry dri­ver bonus Boxster is ap­par­ent­ly not a Boxster. Dun­no what it is then, maybe a cheese grater? Did they even playtest this piece of shit?!

Dif­fi­cul­ty wise, dur­ing the tour­na­ments, it starts very easy, and the dif­fi­cul­ty in­creas­es pret­ty slow­ly. You shouldn't re­al­ly have ma­jor prob­lems un­til the sec­ond part of the mod­ern era, es­pe­cial­ly if you com­plet­ed fac­to­ry dri­ver be­fore, as that is the point where AI dri­vers stop be­ing race car dri­vers, and in­stead trans­form in­to hy­per­son­ic mis­siles. Club races are a dif­fer­ent mat­ter, though, you reach the prob­lem­at­ic races much ear­li­er there, even as soon as do­ing the clas­sic club races. But com­pared to the bull­shit you had to do in fac­to­ry dri­ver mode, they're still eas­i­er.

One thing I didn't un­der­stand about this mode, what the hell is it sup­posed to be? You have the same op­po­nents dur­ing all evo­lu­tion races. But a race dri­ver's ca­reer usu­al­ly don't last 50 years. And while the cars are chang­ing, the tracks are the same—Côte d'Azur in 1950 looks the same as in 2000. I on­ly found one ex­pla­na­tion for this: this must be some LARP event. A group of id­iots LARPing through time, imag­in­ing they're some kind of race dri­vers. But then where did they get all those an­cient cars in such huge quan­ti­ty? Wait a minute... if it's LARP, they're prob­a­bly made from card­board. It ex­plains why dam­aged cars look like crum­pled pa­per, and maybe even the han­dling—are we just dri­ving RC cars? Wait a minute... U3 en­ters the Gulliver cheat in­to NFS5. Damn, I knew it!

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Miscellaneous shit#

What else is in this game be­sides fac­to­ry and evo­lu­tion mode? There's a Porsche chron­i­cles screen, prob­a­bly they made this in ex­change for the nerfed car show­room. You can watch some videos here, look at old pho­tos and some mag­a­zine scans. The lat­ter are very low res­o­lu­tion though, so you're not go­ing to read any­thing be­sides the head­ings.

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The load re­play is still in the main menu, and I've al­ready rant­ed about it, so I won't do it again. No saved ghosts or knock­outs/tour­na­ments like in the pre­vi­ous ver­sions. Plus a load game but­ton, but it would be more cor­rect to la­bel it load pro­file.

Then you have a sin­gle­play­er mode, the meat of the game in NFS3 and be­fore, here it's just there. To mess around with the game when you're done with the ca­reer modes, I guess. I mean, if you can stand the game, but then you won't even no­tice the an­noy­ance of quick race for­get­ting your set­tings, even af­ter a sin­gle race. You can't even un­lock any­thing here, and be­fore com­plet­ing the ca­reer mode, you bare­ly have any­thing here. I'm pret­ty sure this was al­so a rea­son why I dropped the game back then, I came to this menu, and saw the game has like 4 tracks and a few cars. Any­way, this has three sub­modes, quick race, quick knock­out, and knock­out. Quick race is a sin­gle race, knock­out is sup­posed to be the knock­out known from ear­li­er NFSs (I nev­er tried it) where the last each lap is elim­i­nat­ed. Fi­nal­ly, there's quick knock­out, you can on­ly play it on Monte Car­lo, and each lap the last play­er is elim­i­nat­ed (i.e. the knock­out mode of Un­der­ground and lat­er).

Didn't any­one tell the de­vel­op­ers the dash­board lights are not a Christ­mas tree? Why all the fault in­di­ca­tors are lit? Monte Car­lo nev­er has traf­fic in ca­reer mode, but in quick race you can en­able it, some­times with hi­lar­i­ous re­sults (see around 0:25, but it's not lim­it­ed to this sin­gle track). Al­so, on­ly in sin­gle­play­er mode, you can have mir­rored tracks (and it al­so mir­rors your look left/right but­tons!). You can al­so see the nerfed re­set in ac­tion. If your car is re­set (ei­ther by you push­ing the but­ton, or just let­ting the game re­set you af­ter rolling over), at first, noth­ing will hap­pen. You can press the gas, or what­ev­er you want, you'll be forced in­to spec­ta­tor mode. Then af­ter wait­ing for hours, fi­nal­ly your car comes to life and starts rolling. So yeah, don't press re­set when you don't ab­solute­ly need it. (But un­like pre­vi­ous NFSs, if you roll over, but still land on your wheels, some­times you still need to re­set.)

Then at 1:36, the an­nounc­er says "that's your first lap." Sor­ry? You meant that was your first lap, no? Sure, even NFS4's "high rate of speed" drove me in­sane (and I'm not alone!), but they were po­lice of­fi­cers, we can't ex­pect them to have high­er than room tem­per­a­ture IQ, but at least NFS4 an­nounced the lap I just start­ed, not the one I fin­ished. On the oth­er hand, this NFS has a tru­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary new fea­ture, still man­ag­ing to fill the heart of fans with awe to these days, and forc­ing them go on their knees while be­ing be­hold­en with this tru­ly mar­velous en­gi­neer­ing per­for­mance: odd num­ber of laps. Yes! You can have 3 lap races! Or 5. Or, wait for it... even one! OMFG!!! 6 years af­ter the orig­i­nal NFS was re­leased!! Aaah­hh! ... Sor­ry, I just came (JXL, JPEG).

About the tracks, I'm not a fan them ei­ther. Pos­i­tive things first, no more half-assed dark races like in NFS3. On the oth­er hand, you no longer have se­lec­table day and night, each track is on­ly avail­able on­ly in day or on­ly in night set­ting, de­pend­ing on the track. Your lights are still on­ly do­ing any­thing on night tracks, and there are a few tracks (Alps, Au­to­bahn), which can get pret­ty dark (for fuck's sake, Au­to­bahn has street­lights on), but you still can't use your lights.

The short­cuts known from NFS2–4 are still here, maybe even a bit more, and now they're (most­ly) shown on the map. But the de­vel­op­ers didn't stop there, some tracks have many al­ter­nate routes, and it can quick­ly be­come a clus­ter­fuck, es­pe­cial­ly when al­ter­nate routes cross (most­ly Cor­si­ca and Au­vg­some­thing). They're so long they don't even fit on your min­imap! Al­so, most of the sprint tracks feel like, there's some­thing in­ter­est­ing in the mid­dle, then some gener­ic en­vi­ron­ment with a bunch of curves copy-past­ed all over the place. Like late in the de­vel­op­ment, a man­ag­er stormed in, and shout­ed: the tracks are too short! Make them longer! And the de­vel­op­ers had to do some­thing quick. Es­pe­cial­ly an­noy­ing around the end of the tracks, you don't know when it's go­ing to end among the 100 sim­i­lar-look­ing turns, and the min­imap for some rea­son doesn't show the fin­ish line. I'd say 2:10–2:46 is such filler part in the video be­low, grad­u­al­ly get­ting more and more an­noy­ing:

Al­so be care­ful around the edges of the tracks, the bush­es some­times hide bare­ly vis­i­ble rocks, and if you hit them... ouch! The car makes weird moves dur­ing the count­down. Alps track is like, sun is shin­ing, green grass and most­ly green trees in nor­mal hilly track, so it's ear­ly au­tumn at most, then you go in­to a short tun­nel, and on the oth­er side it's dark, snow­ing, and every­thing is cov­ered in snow. Not as bad as the lat­er NFS game where you start a race in a desert and fin­ish 5 min­utes lat­er in a snow cov­ered moun­tain, but still.

Pause menu is WTF. First, you can open it with the es­cape key, but not close it. You still have the race again but­ton in evo­lu­tion mode, but click­ing it does noth­ing. The set­tings op­tions were com­plete­ly re­moved, if you want to change any­thing (sound vol­ume, HUD lay­out, etc.), you have to ex­it the race and go back to set­tings... (You can quit, it's no longer a for­feit like in NFS4, but your car's dam­age re­main). At the end of the race, you can quit the re­play with the Esc key, but if you press it af­ter cross­ing the fin­ish line but be­fore the "Esc to ex­it" mes­sage ap­pears, it'll count as if you ex­it­ed dur­ing the race. Might be use­ful to save your­self in the last minute from a race you didn't want to fin­ish, or cause you grief if you want­ed to fin­ish nor­mal­ly, but you pressed the but­ton a lit­tle too ear­ly, and so you thrashed your race.

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Want a short con­clu­sion? I'm fuck­ing glad EA nev­er made an NFS like this again.

Technical shit#

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

If you read my pre­vi­ous NFS ar­ti­cles, you prob­a­bly know what to ex­pect here. First, I'm do­ing my tests us­ing wine 6.19. I didn't even both­er test­ing with a new­er ver­sion, it's still the same game en­gine, so I doubt any­thing changed. Cre­ate a new WINEPREFIX, run wine control joy.cpl and dis­able not need­ed con­trollers, and al­so run winetricks csmt=off un­less you want a slideshow.

Then grab the mod­ern patch. How­ev­er, un­like pre­vi­ous ver­sions, it lacks a de­scrip­tion of how to in­stall it. It just says ex­tract in­to your game root. What game root? Do I have to run that hor­ri­ble abom­i­na­tion in­staller?

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Yes, as the note says, you have to type in the spaces too, and no, you can't copy the se­r­i­al from the text box. For­tu­nate­ly, you don't have to do it. What you need to do is copy these files and di­rec­to­ries from the CD: gamedata, fedata, fe.txt, mrbupd.dll. No need to mess with the reg­istry with the mod­ern patch. But of course, it's Win­dows, so file­name cas­ing will be all over the place. At this point I start­ed giv­ing up and put every­thing on­to a ciopfs mount, but you can down­case every­thing with a script too. Then un­pack mod­ern patch (pass­word is NFS) and over­write things. Run config.exe to con­fig­ure things.

I se­lect­ed the OpenGL back­end as with NFS2, run the game—and end­ed up with the same 1x1 pix­el win­dow as with NFS3. Huh? Get­ting a bit an­noyed, I browsed through the avail­able back­ends.

• dx7: the original renderer. Seems working, but the menu is forced to 640x480, so pretty bad.
• nglide: the same Glide wrapper as before. Selecting this, however, crashed the game on launch. Upon some testing, I found out forcing it to use desktop resolution is the culprit, if you enter your actual resolution, it will work. But in the settings I couldn't select non-4:3 resolutions, so still not ideal.
• opengl1 and opengl3: so back at OpenGL. Learning from nglide, disabling forcing resolution works, but entering the resolution doesn't (same result as in NFS3, square window). Getting somewhat desperate, I checked windowed mode—and wait a minute, the window is resizable (while ignoring the force size setting)! And it actually works correctly. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

So a plan formed. Do not em­u­late a vir­tu­al desk­top in­side wine, and in­stead just fullscreen the win­dow. Which didn't work too well, since switch­ing be­tween the menu's fixed 640x480 res­o­lu­tion and the game's widescreen res­o­lu­tion force­ful­ly re­sizes the win­dow. No prob­lem, I'm us­ing awe­some, though, so...

local function client_geometry_requests(c, context, hints)
  if c.class == "nfs5.exe" then
    c.fullscreen = true
    return
  end

  -- any extra logic you have
  c:geometry(hints)
end

if awful.ewmh.client_geometry_requests then
  client.disconnect_signal("request::geometry", awful.ewmh.client_geometry_requests)
end
client.connect_signal("request::geometry", client_geometry_requests)

(I want­ed to use rules at first, but they didn't work, I guess be­cause it re­sizes the win­dow in­stead of recre­at­ing it.) Al­so, more rea­son to not use Way­land un­til it gets a win­dow man­ag­er.

Af­ter mak­ing a new pro­file (be­cause as you can't ex­it the game with­out a pro­file, you can't change the set­tings ei­ther), go to graph­ics set­tings, and se­lect a res­o­lu­tion with the cor­rect as­pect ra­tio. You don't have to se­lect your ac­tu­al res­o­lu­tion, or more ex­act­ly, you prob­a­bly shouldn't se­lect your ac­tu­al res­o­lu­tion. The prob­lem is, un­like NFS3 and 4, NFS5 doesn't scale the HUD with the res­o­lu­tion, so as you in­crease the res­o­lu­tion, HUD el­e­ments will be­come small­er. At 1920x1200 the rearview mir­ror were al­ready ridicu­lous­ly small, at 4K res­o­lu­tions it's prob­a­bly un­read­able. I went with 1280x800, the HD-ready res­o­lu­tion in 16:10 to match my mon­i­tor.

There's al­so a SilentPatch for NFS5, but the on­ly im­por­tant change here seems to be "Locked all game threads to one core, while al­low­ing work­er threads to use any CPU cores". I tried this patch, it seemed to work at first, but as I pro­gressed through evo­lu­tion, the game start­ed to lock up when start­ing a new race. At first rarely, then more of­ten, and by the time I got to mod­ern era, al­most every 2-3rd race. It hap­pened mul­ti­ple times it locked up dur­ing load, I killed and restart­ed the game, then it locked up again. (Maybe it de­pends on the num­ber of cars I have in the garage? I guess most peo­ple don't try to col­lect all the avail­able cars...) Af­ter get­ting fed up with this, as a test I dis­abled SilentPatch, and I had ze­ro lock­ups since then. Not sure how much of a neg­a­tive con­se­quence it had on per­for­mance, but at least the game was run­ning sta­ble af­ter it. One note, if you have con­trollers, dis­abling (and maybe en­abling) SilentPatch some­how changes key­bind­ings, and you'll have to re­bind them. The worst is, in the set­tings screen, it will still show the (cor­rect) bind­ings, but it won't ac­tu­al­ly work un­til you re­bind all of them.

Au­dio-wise, still no Dol­by Sur­round©®™ and D3D/EAX sup­port was re­moved. I tried DSOAL, but all it did was to up­mix stereo to 5.1 by OpenAL soft in­stead of PipeWire. There's some 3D au­dio op­tion in the set­tings screen, but I have no fuck­ing idea what it does, it still out­puts stereo au­dio.

One fi­nal trick I start­ed us­ing here is git­watch. Since the game au­tosaves like crazy, and there's no way to go back. I cre­at­ed a git re­po in my savedata fold­er, and start­ed gitwatch.sh -s 1 . in it. This will watch it for changes, and au­to­mat­i­cal­ly cre­ate a git com­mit 1 sec­ond af­ter it. I used some­thing like this when I played (I think) Test Dri­ve Un­lim­it­ed many years ago (but at that time still on Win­dows), but I made a lit­tle ad­di­tion now. One prob­lem with this ap­proach is all com­mit mes­sages will look like Scripted auto-commit on change ($DATE) by gitwatch.sh with $DATE re­placed by the com­mit time. Not too use­ful to fig­ure out what hap­pened, and NFS5's saveg­ames are just bi­na­ry blobs, so the diff isn't use­ful ei­ther. So this time I did a lit­tle ex­tra, a script us­ing zenity (which is sym­linked to qarma on my ma­chine, be­cause I don't want Gnome 3+ crap, but I can't re­mem­ber the clone's name, and I think kdialog's com­man­d­line was longer) to ask for a com­mit mes­sage and amend the last com­mit. I bound it to a key­board short­cut, and I could just in­voke it any time some­thing in­ter­est­ing hap­pened. I'll still have a lot of au­to-com­mits, but at least there's some hope of find­ing a state I need. Al­so the game on­ly re­al­ly saves when start­ing a race and ex­it­ing, so most of the time the mes­sage ac­tu­al­ly went to the pre­vi­ous com­mit than I in­tend­ed. A bit an­noy­ing, but I didn't have to go back in his­to­ry too much.