Need for Speed 5: Porsche Unleashed (Game Boy Advance)

JXL (JPEG JXL) (1.736 MiB) JPEG (1.931 MiB)

(Source)

In­san­i­ty train, here I come again! Yes, yes, not as in­sane as the PocketPC ver­sion of NFS4, but it def­i­nite­ly takes the sec­ond place among the games I re­viewed here un­til now. The year is 2004, and EA de­cid­ed to re­lease a Game Boy Ad­vance ver­sion of NFS5:PU, orig­i­nal­ly re­leased in 2000 for Win­dows and PlayStation. What can this 4 MiB beast of pro­vide us? (Yes, 4 MiB al­to­geth­er. The cov­er im­age above in JPG is al­most 2 MiB, half the game...) As al­ways, start with the in­tro "video", but to be hon­est it's more like a slideshow.

HQ (AV1) (1.592 MiB) MQ (VP9) (607.2 KiB) LQ (AV1) (286.1 KiB)

Yes, Game Boy Ad­vance was re­leased more than 6 years lat­er than PlayStation, but it still had in­fe­ri­or specs. Mo­bile gam­ing was a can­cer even back then. But back to the in­tro, it starts with a rather ug­ly copy­right screen, but at least un­like the PlayStation ver­sion, Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG is spelled cor­rect­ly, and this time it's patents, not Patents. THE RE­TARDS AT NIN­TEN­DO CAN'T STOP SCREAM­ING IN YOUR FACE, NEI­THER ON THE COPY­RIGHT SCREEN, NOR ON THE BOXART! Al­so note how the copy­right mes­sage men­tions 2003, while every source I could find says the game was re­leased in 2004. Af­ter the copy­right screen there's a DSI lo­go, then an Elec­tron­ic Arts text, be­cause I don't think sim­ply writ­ing a com­pa­ny name in a nor­mal font counts as a lo­go. The usu­al lo­go video is nowhere to be seen.

Af­ter the lo­gos, at 0:25 it asks the lan­guage you want to play the game in. Every. Fuck­ing. Time. And it's not be­cause the game can't save, it's just be­cause. Ap­par­ent­ly there are peo­ple whose job is to an­noy oth­er peo­ple as much as pos­si­ble. Af­ter­wards you get a NFS lo­go which re­sem­bles the Win­dows lo­go some­what, then you're thrown in­to the main menu. Yes, this game has a fetish for pink Porsches.

Gameplay#

I don't even know where to start. This game is based on the Win­dows ver­sion of NFS5, so it re­sem­bles it more, but it's so dumb­ed down, it's prac­ti­cal­ly a third game with the same name. You have two ma­jor game modes here, sin­gle play­er and evo­lu­tion (and mul­ti­play­er, but I can't play it alone). No­tice fac­to­ry dri­ver is miss­ing, hell yeah. But even evo­lu­tion mode is high­ly dif­fer­ent, to be hon­est it's prob­a­bly short­er to write what it is than try­ing to list the dif­fer­ences. It's a list of tour­na­ments, and you have to com­plete them in or­der us­ing one of the pro­vid­ed cars. That's it. No garage, no re­pair bills, heck, not even mon­ey. Your cus­tomiza­tion op­tions are the col­or of the car (which usu­al­ly de­faults to the ugli­est col­or in the game), and if you want man­u­al or au­to trans­mis­sion. You have to win a tour­na­ment to ad­vance to the next one, and once you ad­vanced, there's no go­ing back. You can't back even in the era, or more ex­act­ly, there are no years or eras to be­gin with. The on­ly things re­sem­bling the eras are the length of the tour­na­ments: in clas­sic era they con­sist of a sin­gle race, in gold­en era 2 races, and in mod­ern era 3 races. Oth­er­wise you just have a com­plete­ly lin­ear game­play. (And the worst thing, af­ter fin­ish­ing evo­lu­tion mode, you'll just get a con­grat­u­la­tions screen, and you can't do any­thing more, like the fac­to­ry dri­ver mode on Win­dows...)

JXL (18.18 KiB) PNG (18.69 KiB)JXL (14.96 KiB) PNG (16.24 KiB)JXL (26.08 KiB) PNG (30.95 KiB)

You have 5 pro­files or save slots in evo­lu­tion mode, and it au­to saves just like the Win­dows ver­sion. And if you're play­ing on a phys­i­cal GBA, the saves are stored on the game card, so you can't do any­thing about this bull­shit sys­tem. If you want to re­play a tour­na­ment, you have to restart the whole game from the be­gin­ning. Ridicu­lous. (Of course, if you're play­ing in an em­u­la­tor there are ways around it, like I did. Just watch out if you're us­ing mg­ba, it doesn't save your changes to the host file sys­tem un­til you ex­it mg­ba or do a save state.)

What about races? Let's start with a video.

HQ (AV1) (71.64 MiB) MQ (VP9) (22.13 MiB) LQ (AV1) (11.22 MiB)

(And manda­to­ry tim­ing analy­sis, post race sum­ma­ry shows 4:00.99. Mea­sur­ing the video length is a bit hard­er, since here the clock doesn't stop at the fin­ish line, and af­ter 4:00.98 it changes to 4:01.03, but the video length of the race is about 4:01.597. In game clock is 0.3% slow­er than re­al time, I say this is still in sync.)

Be­fore start, we get a map of the race. Al­ready bet­ter than the PlayStation ver­sion! The game has a few tracks from the Win­dows ver­sion, but they're very rough ap­prox­i­ma­tions. I mean, this is how the map of the Cor­si­ca map shown in the video above looks in the Win­dows ver­sion:

JXL (272.0 KiB) PNG (335.2 KiB)

Then a few sec­onds lat­er, more news await. Cock­pit cam­era! Well, the in­stru­ments doesn't work, and every car in this game has the same in­te­ri­or, but hey, still some­thing the 156 times as big PlayStation ver­sion doesn't have. Or the abil­i­ty to look at the left or right, GBA ver­sion has it. You can change the speed units to km/h (let's ig­nore the lack of slash)... ac­tu­al­ly no. While it has km/h, it on­ly has km/h. So on Win­dows, you can have both km/h and mph, on PlayStation on­ly mph and on Game Boy Ad­vance, on­ly km/h. Don't try to find log­ic where is none.

Now, on­to the worse parts. Sound qual­i­ty is pret­ty bad, but from what I've read on the in­ter­nets, most GBA games sound pret­ty crap. This game has a few mu­sic tracks from the Win­dows ver­sion, even though some­times you have to pay at­ten­tion to no­tice it. Like, the mu­sic used in the video above sounds this in the Win­dows ver­sion:

HQ (2.737 MiB) MQ (1.533 MiB) LQ (717.0 KiB)

The sec­ond prob­lem is, dri­ving your car. The low res­o­lu­tion makes it re­al­ly hard to tell what's go­ing on in front of you many times, ex­pect to crash in­to the walls many times just be­cause you don't see the wall com­ing. NFS4CE had hor­ri­ble con­trols, but there at least the track were clear­ly vis­i­ble. Here you have a lot of times when the road, the hous­es and the walls around the track all have just a slight­ly dif­fer­ent shade of the same yel­low­ish-gray­ish col­or. A very bad idea when you have a whop­ping 240x160 res­o­lu­tion and no shad­ing. One thing I fig­ured out what helps some­what if you're play­ing it in an em­u­la­tor: no mat­ter how tempt­ing it might be to put the em­u­la­tor fullscreen on your big dis­play, don't do it! This GBA thing in RL has a 7.3 cm (2.9 inch), or about 6x4 cm screen. It's tiny! A smart phone with twice the di­ag­o­nal screen size is con­sid­ered small these days... So the game was de­signed so you'll see the whole pic­ture all the time, which is not true if you have a large mon­i­tor. And since GBA has no HW 3D, em­u­la­tors just up­scale the ren­dered 2D im­age. 3x–4x scale is what worked best for me on ~HD res­o­lu­tions.

There are some "nav­i­ga­tion" ar­rows at the top of the screen, but they're use­less. First, when they ap­pear it means the turn is any­where be­tween the next 5 cen­time­ters and 5 kilo­me­ters. Sec­ond, the col­or and shape are prob­a­bly sup­posed to rep­re­sent the sever­i­ty of the bends, but in re­al­i­ty it's all over the place. Some­times those red turns are more gen­tle than the gen­tlest yel­low turns. Some­times you have a gen­tle right turn then a im­me­di­ate­ly af­ter a hard­er left, and this time you on­ly get to see the left turn's in­di­ca­tor when it's al­ready too late. In short, it doesn't help you much.

An­oth­er prob­lem with the game, is physics. If you crash in­to some­thing, you just bounce back. This makes push­ing the op­po­nents from be­hind a very bad idea, as it will just slow you down a lot while speed them up. It al­so means you need some get­ting used to how to cor­ner. And the an­swer is ac­tu­al­ly way sim­pler than I ex­pect­ed: don't break. Don't break any­where ex­cept a few 90° turns on the maps, just let the car bounce back from the wall on the side of the road. And while I'm at the top­ic of walls, this game is full of hid­den walls like the orig­i­nal NFS, ex­cept with­out the huge penal­ties of hit­ting them. So go ahead, play it like a pin­ball game!

Be­low is a nice demon­stra­tion of this, us­ing the Mo­by Dick car, which has a pe­cu­liar bug. If you change to man­u­al gears, and leave it in gear 1, it will keep ac­cel­er­at­ing in­fi­nite­ly (or at least un­til you hit some­thing). One prob­lem is if you en­able man­u­al gears, be­cause GBA on­ly has a few but­tons, you lose the abil­i­ty to look around, as the but­tons used to look around be­come gear shift but­tons. The big­ger prob­lem is I couldn't find a way to re­verse. With au­to­mat­ic trans­mis­sion, you just press break, and even­tu­al­ly it will re­verse like in any oth­er game. With man­u­al, break just means break, but you can't switch to re­verse gears ei­ther, or at least I didn't fig­ure it out how. I can go from 1 up to 4, then back to 1, but there seems no way to change to re­verse. Don't fuck up the race and plant your car in­to the wall head on, be­cause then you're fucked, as you can't re­verse, and there's no re­set but­ton ei­ther. Al­so, af­ter fin­ish­ing a race you can't restart it, but dur­ing the race you can ex­it it, and start it again, to ef­fec­tive­ly restart the game. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

HQ (AV1) (71.09 MiB) MQ (VP9) (25.14 MiB) LQ (AV1) (10.43 MiB)

About sin­gle play­er, I won't write much as I on­ly checked this mode su­per­fi­cial­ly. You have quick race, quick knock­out and knock­out, and they're ba­si­cal­ly the same as the Win­dows ver­sion. You can se­lect your car, the track, con­di­tions, ex­cept the num­ber of laps on the Mona­co track... al­ready more op­tions than what the PlayStation ver­sion has. Quick knock­out can on­ly be done on the Mona­co track, as this ver­sion on­ly has a sin­gle Mona­co track. In knock­out mode, you have a full spread­sheet to ed­it the tracks and the con­di­tions (and lap count, for some un­ex­plain­able rea­sons). Much im­prove, so amaze, wow. The on­ly weird fea­ture I found here is if in knock­out mode you set op­po­nent cars to ran­dom, it will ac­tu­al­ly ran­dom­ize op­po­nent cars be­fore each race. So for ex­am­ple if in the race be­fore the last you came in sec­ond be­hind a good car, on the last race there's a high chance you'll race against a bad car.

JXL (14.11 KiB) PNG (14.79 KiB)JXL (18.14 KiB) PNG (18.91 KiB)JXL (19.06 KiB) PNG (19.51 KiB)JXL (18.59 KiB) PNG (19.16 KiB)JXL (13.68 KiB) PNG (14.40 KiB)

Technical shit#

Pret­ty sim­ple, de­spite I nev­er tried to em­u­late GBA be­fore. Em­u­la­tion Gen­er­al Wi­ki rec­om­mend­ed me mg­ba, so I tried it. First time I launched it, I on­ly got a black screen though. mGBA FAQ rec­om­mend­ed me to change top OpenGL 1.0 ren­der­er which worked, but seemed less than ide­al, and al­so meant I can't use shaders. Mess­ing around I re­al­ized this is on­ly bro­ken with the QT GUI, the SDL (CLI) ver­sion works fine, but then I need a con­fig file and this soft­ware doesn't seem to doc­u­ment any­where how the con­fig file should look like. Then I checked the USE flags and I re­al­ized it doesn't like the com­bi­na­tion of QT GUI with gles2 but with­out gles3 USE-flag. Re­mov­ing the gles2 USE-flag fixed the black screen, but al­so made the shaders menu com­plete­ly dis­ap­pear—I guess in this case it was built on­ly with OpenGL 1 sup­port. En­abling gles3 USE-flag al­so fixed the prob­lem, while be­ing able to use shaders. So on Gen­too, if you get a black screen, check your OpenGL re­lat­ed USE-flags.

Then in mg­ba, un­der Tools->Set­tings, I've changed a few set­tings. Au­dio/Video: I've set sam­ple rate to 48 kHz, be­cause PipeWire (with my con­fig, but prob­a­bly it's the de­fault these days) would re­sam­ple every­thing to 48 kHz any­way. If you mix to a dif­fer­ent sam­ple rate, change ac­cord­ing­ly. Game­play: click Na­tive un­der FPS tar­get (for some rea­son it de­faults to 60, which means it will speed up the game a lit­tle). Un­der shaders you can load some of the built-in shaders. I've on­ly re­al­ly looked at gbc-colors.shader, which is sup­posed to make the col­ors more like on the orig­i­nal GBA, but it just made col­ors more washed out (even though it makes the car's col­ors look less ridicu­lous!), and it was al­ready hard enough to see the cor­ners, so in the end I didn't end up us­ing any shaders. It was worth spend­ing a lot of time on fig­ur­ing out how to get them work­ing, right?!

JXL (17.86 KiB) PNG (17.66 KiB)JXL (12.90 KiB) PNG (13.06 KiB)

Conclusion#

I'd say, that's it for clas­sic NFS games. I haven't checked out the PlayStation ver­sion of NFS2 (or the non-SE ver­sion on Win­dows), but from what I've read on the net, the PS ver­sion is es­sen­tial­ly the same as the non-SE Win­dows ver­sion, and the SE ver­sion is more-or-less just NFS2 with some ad­di­tions. I don't feel like there's a lot of val­ue check­ing these ver­sions out, but I might if I have too much free time (un­like­ly). Now, NFS1 on the oth­er hand has a lot of vari­a­tions on var­i­ous con­soles and high­ly mod­i­fied Japan­ese re­leas­es, but hon­est­ly I don't feel like touch­ing it again. And I don't re­al­ly con­sid­er NFS6:HP2 to be part of the clas­sic NFS games (no longer de­vel­oped by EA Cana­da, no cock­pit cam even in the Win­dows ver­sion, menus are no longer 640x480, mul­ti­ple tracks on a lo­ca­tion for re­al now as a prepa­ra­tion for open world, etc.).