Warning! Your devicePixelRatio is not 1 and you have JavaScript disabled!
(Or if this message is not in a red box, your browser doesn't even support basic CSS and you can probably safely ignore this warning.
You'll encounter way more suboptimal things in that case...)
Since HTML is as braindead as it can get, pixel graphics might look off without javashit workarounds.
Try to get a non-HiDPI screen or enable javashit for best results.
Need for Speed 5: Porsche Unleashed (PlayStation)
Created: 1769956313 (2026-02-01T14:31:53Z), 6476 words, ~27 minutes
Tags: review, western, ea, nfs, racing
This post is part of series nfs: 1, 2, 3:HP (W, PS), 4:HS (W, PS, CE), 5:PU (W, PS), MCO, 6:HP2
(Source)
Finally, the PlayStation version of NFS5.
Honestly, on of the main reasons I started looking into the console versions is because I read NFS5 is quite different on console.
And while there have been differences between Windows and PS version of NFS3/
As usual, let's start with the intro, but this time I'm not putting a video here. It's exactly the same as the Windows version, the EA logo, the same mixed aspect ratio, how the guy drops the flashlight on the floor without turning it off and wasting the precious battery, everything. The only difference is the the following image stuffed between the EA logo and the actual intro.
(And this is just a screenshot, I couldn't bother extracting whatever weird format this game stores the images in.
It's a completely different engine than the previous games, and there is very little info about it on the net.
Also this image has an aspect ratio of about 1.pHYs chunk to encode this, but almost no software support it, and even when supported, it's plain wrong in some cases.)
Apparently, the Windows version wasn't licensed from Porsche.
Eh, I mean, "Dr . Ing. h.
Now, a bunch of corrections to what I wrote about the intro for the Windows version. In the PS version, you drive in casual clothes, even as a test driver. 0:23: Another PS thing, some test drive tracks have cones at the side of the track, so you can get a penalty if you hit them. 0:50: There's a race track in the PS version, with actual somewhat working pit lane. 1:11: Police is more prevalent in PlayStation version than in Windows, even if only just a tiny little bit. But about the same level of stupidness as in the Windows version or in the intro. Yeah, the intro was definitely made for the PS version.
After the intro, you end up in the main menu, and it's immediately clear it's a completely different game, completely different artwork and soundtrack. While there's some overlap between the Windows and PS version's soundtrack, you'll find a quite a few new tracks here, and most of them are bad. But the actual menu items in the main menu will sound familiar, from left to right you have credits, factory driver, quick races, evolution, video showcase, options.
Technical shit#
Before I could jump into the game, some technical shit as always. I used the same DuckStation as with NFS3/4, but my config needed a bit of tweaking. First, you can't overclock this game like the previous versions, even with 1000% overclock, I was stuck around 40 FPS. Without overclock? 34–35 FPS. But somehow, with overclocking the whole game felt like it's running faster, and car handling became harder. So in the end I just played without overclocking.
But this wasn't enough, as I tried playing I was getting random crashes. Sometimes I just got random garbage on the screen, sometimes black screen and a complete lockup (including DuckStation's OSD, yikes), but in any case it became unplayable until a console reset.
After messing around a lot with the options, I figured out it is caused by a combination of 3 options: rendering at not native resolution, enabling widescreen hack and enabling PGXP (more exactly Culling Correction inside PGXP). Now, native resolution on a HD screen looks like a blurry mess, especially if it's stretched to widescreen. Enabling PGXP without Culling Correction makes a pretty glitchy graphics, honestly disabling PGXP completely makes a better experience. Then widescreen hack. After fucking around with a bit, I noticed it depends on how wide you go. With my 32:9 screen, it was crashing about every second race. Going back to 16:10, it crashes about every tenth race (or maybe even less). So in the end I went with playing on the 16:10 screen, as this seemed the best compromise, even though this game actually (more-or-less) works with ultrawide! No missing geometry party at the sides of the screen (instead you have flickering geometry in front of you in the distance). I'm a sad panda.
Anyway, I'm going through all the options I set in DuckStation again:
- BIOS: enable Fast Boot to skip the horrible PlayStation boot logo.
- Console: disable Clock Speed Control (Overclocking). Feel free to set Read Speedup and Seek Speedup to 10x, they seemed to work. Leave the rest on default.
- Graphics: I used the Vulkan renderer, but it probably doesn't matter much. Under Rendering, Internal Resolution to Automatic, Down-Sampling to Disabled, Texture Filtering to your liking (I went with Nearest-Neighbor), Crop to All Borders, Scaling to your liking (I went with Bilinear (Smooth). I checked True Color Rendering, PGXP Geometry Coorection, Force 4:3 For FMVs, Disable Interlacing, FMV Chroma Smoothing. If you want widescreen, set Aspect Ratio to Stretch to Fill and check Widescreen Rendering, otherwise set Aspect Ratio to Auto (Game Native).
- Graphics/Advanced: here I enabled True Color Debanding. While trying to fix lockups I enabled Software Renderer Readbacks, but I don't think it helped. Rest can stay on default.
- Graphics/PGXP: you can disable Culling Correction here to gain some stability, but the results will be pretty bad. Leave the rest on the defaults, changing them didn't seem to help here.
Also, in game clock. Before the PocketPC edition, but here I noticed a discrepancy after the first video recording, so I had to go back and check every previous NFS game:
- NFS1: only a single video, it reaches the finish line at around 1:18.
092, in game race clock at 2:32. 0. But it's not a whole race, it starts at 1:04. 5, so total in-game length is 1:27. 5. The clock runs about 12% faster than real time. - NFS2: last video, race starts at 0:14.
816, ends at 5:56. 216, so length is 5:41. 400. The in-game clock reports total time as 5:41. 28, they're roughly in sync (about 0. 04% slower, at this point I'd have to consider the inaccuracies of the recording software and the manual measurement). - NFS3: cones video race length 4:38.
066, in game clock 4:38. 06, still in sync. - NFS3PS, first the vita video: length 4:56.
633, in-game clock 4:55. 09, it's a bit bigger difference (about 0. 5% slower), but still roughly in sync. With the DuckStation video, it's 4:42. 484 and 4:42. 53. Back to below 0. 1% difference. - NFS4: only recordings here, so I went with the first replay.
Video length 8:55.
383, in-game counter 2:21. 25 + 2:14. 43 + 2:07. 00 + 2:12. 56 = 8:55. 24. Alright, still in sync. - NFS4PS: race video 3:45.
553, in-game clock 3:45. 50, in sync. - NFS4CE: any measurements here probably doesn't make any sense, since the clock depends on the CPU speed, but anyway.
Video length 3:33.
350, in-game counter 4:29. 80, or in-game clock runs about 26. 5% faster. Not a subtle difference. - NFS5: Sophie race, video 3:26.
821, in-game 3:26. 81, back in sync. - MCO: video 3:15.
066, in-game 3:11. 96. So 1. 6% slower, but take into account this was recorded on a different computer. - NFS6: knockout video length 5:18.
364, in-game clock 5:15. 90. Borderline, 0. 8% slower than real time.
So, how does this game hold up to it?
A little spoiler, but in the first factory driver video below, the race length is 1:16.
I'm also going to write a few words about the in-game settings.
Under display options you have screen format, you can set it to standard screen or wide screen.
I'm guessing standard means 4:3 and wide 16:9, but the problem is I had to set it to wide screen, because standard looked stretched, but widescreen hack is supposed to work independently of this: with 4:3 rendering without widescreen hack, and 16:10 rendering with widescreen hack, objects seem to have the same size.
Also, in every setting menu you can exit with the △, but in a random subset of them it doesn't save, and you have to use × there.
(This is in the original layout.
To keep my sanity I rebind ○ to ×, × to △, and △ to ○, so I can accept/
Under audio settings, you have a music play mode, which defaults to linear play. What it means, is at the start of the race, it will start from the first track in the race tunes playlist, and go through it in order. So unless you want to listen to the same 1–2 songs every time, change it to random play. Seriously, what's the point of this feature, why would anyone without a serious brain damage want to listen to the same 10% of the game soundtrack all the time?!
Under controls settings, you can remap buttons again!
I have no idea why was it missing from NFS4.
But... it's worse than NFS3.
If you want analog acceleration/
There's one thing which is missing from the options, though.
Switching from ameritard units to metric.
First I thought this might be a limitation of the US release of the game, so I also checked the European version, but no, no km/
Factory driver#
Just like with the Windows version, I started with the factory driver here too. Not having to worry about finance makes it a gentler start to the game.
I didn't even start the mode and I already ran into a problem. For some goddamn reason, user names can't contain numbers, only ASCII uppercase letters, limited to 5 characters. But for some reason, in quick race, your name defaults to "PLAY1". But if you change it, you can't type a number here either. So the numbers are in the font, and in savegame names you can have numbers, only in player names not. What the actual fucking fuck you terminally retarded idiots. So no U3, Uthree or anything. In the end I went with UE, since E looks like a mirrored 3. Reverse 1337 speak FTW.
There's no auto save in the PlayStation version, but what's even better, after completing an assignment, you can save in a new slot! So while the factory driver is still as linear as in the Windows version, at least you can have saves before the interesting assignments if you want to replay them (well, until you run out of storage on the pretty small PS1 memory card). Second, it's much shorter. The Windows version has 33 assignments, the PlayStation version only 12. At it lacks the most annoying missions where you have to do 360s, reverse, and other crap. Just some slalom and races. This already makes this mode way more bearable, even if some assignments can still give you a hard time, especially if you just jumped into the game. Handling is nothing like what you have in the Windows version.
Assignments can be classified into two categories: go through the checkpoints and don't hit the cones, and go through the checkpoints and don't hit anything. In both cases, hitting a forbidden object causes you a one second penalty. There's no "don't scratch her" type of missions here, and hitting stuff and accepting the penalty is in many cases faster than doing it normally.
As you can probably guess from the video, neither a rear-view mirror, nor cockpit camera here. Not even the buggy cheat way from NFS4. All while they went the extra mile in the Windows version to have detailed cockpits. Is every console release of a game are made for retards?
By the way, did you notice where did I collect 6 seconds penalty, besides when I rear ended that blue vehicle at 1:11? Me neither, so I had to watch the video very carefully. At 0:20, going over the bridge gives me 2 seconds penalty. Yes, apparently making contact with the ground is also penalty worthy. Then at 1:08, uneven road surface gives me another 1 second penalty. The last two seconds are given me by the cones at the end of the course at 1:21, but you have to pause the video at the right moment to see it (pause video and click here if you have JavaScript). Honestly, I didn't understand this assignment. The last arrow points at the right, suggesting you have to go right, but there's nothing to the right. The only way I could finish this assignment is by going over the cones. I didn't even notice they give me penalty until I made this video and analyzed it frame by frame. But it still gave me a record. I mean, in factory driver, 99% of the time you either fail or set up a new record.
And after the Windows version, I'm going to include the video of me completing the last mission. Supposedly it's still against Sophia, but no race here, just a course with shitloads of cones. And it was pretty tight, as you can see, since the timer doesn't start until I reach the first arrow, I gave myself some extra speed to help me. And if you look at the clock when I finish, I needed it.
(I can't help but imagine Dieter saying "you are now ready to pilot the 911 GT1 open brackets race close brackets" in a thick German accent.)
Not my best lap around the race track. I could probably complete it way better now, but I have PTSD from the race track after finishing evolution mode...
Evolution#
Evolution mode is also pretty different, and probably in a good way. First, just like the factory driver mode, there's no autosave here either, so feel free to fuck around, if things doesn't work out, you can reload your save and try again. And you want to be able to do it, because the game doesn't play fair with you. Second, you have no year progression here, only eras. You start in the classic era, and you have access to every car and event in the classic era. It also means, your first car can be a used car. Makes much more sense. Also no more forced progression like in the Windows version. Each era has 3 tournaments, you have to complete all 3 to advance to the next era, but it doesn't happen automatically. You have an advance era button in the menu, you have to select it to continue. This also means there's only 3 point of no returns in the PlayStation version. I got my gitwatch script from the Windows version when I started the game, expecting the same level of bullshit in this version, but in the end I didn't have to use it, I could save everything on a single PlayStation memory card (even if it used up 100% of it).
So about how evolution mode works here. In each era you have cars categorized into 4 classes, 3, 2, 1 and race, going from worst to best. Just like in the Windows version you can buy them either new or used, used ones always have damage. However unlike the Windows version you can't really make money by buying used cars and repairing them, you'll get back less money than you spend on buying the car and repairing it. So you'll have to race to make money (how outrageous in a driving game!).
Races are categorized into three types. The first one is the already mentioned tournaments, there's one tournament for each of class 1, 2 and 3 in each era, so you'll need at least one car in each class. Tournaments are multi stage events, where you have to do 3–5 races and collect points. The latter is weird. Before each race, you can select if you want to enter the advanced or novice session. In the advanced session, the first one gets 10 points, 2nd 6 points, 3rd 4 points, and the 4th 2 points (and you only have 4 player races, so 2 points is guaranteed). In the novice session the points earned are 6, 5, 4, 3 respectively. So yeah, the last in the novice session gets more points than the last in the advanced, while the first and second gets less. While at the same time, the money you receive for finishing at specific positions are the same in both session. But the weird part is, these two sessions are only racing separately, they'll have a single leader board after the race. So if you want to win the tournament, you gotta join the advanced sessions, because with 6 points per race you won't win. After you finish the 3 tournaments you can advance to the next era, but just like in the Windows version, this means you won't be able to access the previous era's tournaments anymore.
Next one is weekend races. Unlike the Windows version, they are single events (so no point collecting), no traffic anywhere, and they're unlocked along with the era, you don't have to finish the era first. But like in the Windows version, they don't expire when finishing the era, so you can repeat them as much as you want. However they have much tighter entry conditions, restricted to (the variants of) a single model. Classic era has two weekend races, golden and modern 4.
Finally, circuit racing. Windows version doesn't have this, but it's pretty much the same as weekend races, except with race cars on race tracks. There's a circuit racing event for each race class car in the game, 550 Spyder in the classic era, 917 K in the golden era, and GT3-2-1 in the modern era.
A new feature here (compared to any previous NFS game is) the ability to have a qualification race (in all modes). Two laps on the track you race, only the lap times count. Finally a way to not start from the last place! Unfortunately, usually it's a waste of time, you can easily overtake the opponents at the start, and save 5 minutes of your life from doing pointless things. It can maybe be used to practice an unknown track, but tournaments are rather easy, and the other two you can just restart by reloading a save. You might think it can help on more difficult races, but in my experience if you can win the qualification, you can win the race starting from the last place too, and if you can't win the qualification, it won't help you much.
Speaking about difficulty, tournaments, except for the last 1-2 in modern era, are pretty easy. Sometimes ridiculously easy. I mean, look at this video, me trying a random race in golden era, I start with a beat up car, crash into every wall, and still win the race (and get a track record).
Now, the weekend races are a different beast.
Tournaments difficulty gradually increases from the beginning of the game to the end, but then it looks like the first weekend race is after the last tournament.
Then they got harder and harder, the modern era weekend races can get insane already, but it's not the end!
Circuit races start where weekend races are left off.
Also track records are complete bullshit, be prepared to hear things like "You did a new course and lap record! You placed fourth." in weekend/
And handling is a bitch. The Windows version is a curling simulator, the PS version is not. You have grip here, you can corner pretty good—until you get fast enough cars where you have to brake. And things break down there. With faster cars in this game, it's like they accelerate faster than brake, and as you gain damage, it only gets worse. And as you lose your ability to brake (and somehow only braking seems to be really affected by damage), you'll end up in the walls even more often, making your situation even worse... Of course, you can start braking a kilometer before the turn, but if you do this, the AI will overtake you easily. What you have to do is slide into the corners, because unlike braking it actually works. It's just hard to pull it off consistently.
Then money. It's going to be a problem, especially around weekend races. They need specific models of a cars, you have to buy them for a lot of money, then race them once, and after racing your repair bill will be probably higher than whatever you won. Weekend races (except the first few) are a financial disaster. Tournaments usually have a positive balance, but they're rather long. So what you're left with are circuit races. They give you a lot of money if you win, and they're single races, but the AI is pretty though here. I needed quite a few tries before I could win in the golden era, and even more to do it consistently. And failure is a very bad option, you have to finish first or second if you want a positive money balance out of your race. Aka. save before entering the circuit, and reload if you're not in the top two. I don't know how many times I completed golden era's single circuit race to get enough money to buy everything. Then a few more times in modern era too, until I bought a GT1 to make a lot of money, then complete the easier races after it. The difficulty order of races and the order it makes sense to finish the game are completely different.
One more thing I have to go into is the car customization options, or more like the lack of it. Remember the excel spreadsheets in the Windows versions? Here you have a much shorter list of things you can customize or upgrade. You can change the car's color from a predefined list, and that's it. Exactly what you had in NFS3 (except it now costs money). No interior color, no race number, no upgrades, nothing. The only addition you have from NFS3 is the ridiculously expensive repair bills. Thanks, I guess.
There are some additions compared to the Windows version.
Each era has it's own set of background images, font (WTF), and music.
I just wish they didn't do it, especially the latter one.
According to racingsoundtracks.
The above mentioned racingsoundtracks.
But there's a nicer addition. Remember how I bitched about tracks not changing in 50 years in the Windows version? Well, not here! In evolution mode, tracks look a bit different in the classic, golden and modern era! And of course, I had to make a comparison of various locations in the game...
Yes, the change is not huge, but it's there, and noticeable. Mostly texture changes, and as you move forward in the time, the more trash at the sides of the road, which, unfortunately, is pretty annoying in this game. Unlike other NFS games, hitting a road sign hurts your speed a lot.
Finally the race track. There are three variants of the race track, and you can only access each variant in a specific era in try car mode, so I also included a screenshot from the first circuit racing race. I especially like here how classic era racetrack is like, put some down asphalt in the middle of a pasture, and scaffold some wooden fence around it to keep the cattle out, gradually rebuilt to resemble a modern race track.
And one rage worthy final remark. In the modern era, after completing all of the tournaments, I got a message about I can unlock the final reward video or whatever when I want. OK, there are still a few club and circuit races to take care of. Which requires me buying a bunch of cars, so I race the racetrack multiple times, to get enough money. Fast forward a few days, I finally finished every race in the evolution mode. So let's see the final video. I click on it... Oh shit, this is not the Windows version. I don't just get a lousy video, I get 10000000 money. More than 28 times what I can get from winning the last circuit race. I wouldn't had to race that fucking racetrack again and again! AAAAAAAA!
Quick Races and the rest#
There is a quick races mode in this game, instead of singleplayer mode from the Windows version, with a few submodes. First there is race, where you can select the number of laps, opponent difficulty, your car and a track. The latter selection is pretty awful, but I'll leave the rant for later. It's the bog standard single arcade race known from all previous NFS version, finish first to win.
There's a chase mode, where a single police car is chasing you, and you have to avoid getting caught by it before the time runs out. Something like the Getaway, Racer from the Windows NFS4. Wait, police chase? There's actually police chase in this game, even if exiled into a corner of the game? Yeah. I didn't play much with this mode, though, so I can't really comment on it, but from my few tries, police is really easy in this game.
Time battle is a weird one. It's a head-on-head race, where each player starts with X seconds, where X can be selected from 5, 10, 15 or 20 seconds. After the start of the race, everything looks like a normal race, until the first racer to reach the finish line, at this time the second racer's clock starts ticking down, until he goes through the finish line too. Whoever runs out of time first loses. So depending on how much you're in lead or behind, the race might be over in one lap, or drag on for a long time.
And finally, capture the flag. You start in a city, and you have to drive to a "flag" which is randomly placed somewhere on the map. And here comes the problem, this mode is freaking hard, even on the easiest difficulty setting. On the upper left corner you have a compass like thing showing you the direction of the flag, and the distance. But it's not a GPS, it just shows you the direction. Until you get close enough so you can see the location on the mini-map you don't even know where you're going. Except the AI. It knows where it has to go the moment the race starts, and if you or him picks up a flag, he immediately knows the new location, before you ever notice the flag was picked up. And on these maps, one wrong turn can easily cost your whole race.
At this point, I can't ignore the elephant in the room anymore, the tracks. The PlayStation version has a completely different set of tracks from the Windows version, but this is the smaller news. The Windows version has point-to-point and circuit tracks, and while there are some multi-route tracks, they're just shortcuts. Only a few missions in factory driver where you have to go from checkpoints to checkpoints on a track. Here, it's completely different. You have 5 locations (plus the racetrack as a somewhat special 6th location), and in each location you have multiple tracks. So, so far it's like NFS6, except you can also free roam! Unfortunately this feature of the game is criminally underused, it's only available in a few modes: chase and CTF mode in quick races, and try car in evolution mode. And the latter is a true free roam, you have no goals, except to avoid police, because if they catch you, you'll have to pay a fine.
So anyway, here's a video dump of me messing around in free roam, I mean, try car. The first location is somewhere in Germany (town signs are unreadable), some small town up in the hills in the winter. Brr, it's cold enough outside, I don't want more winter.
And it too has localized police! Well, to be honest, it only has localized police, this is not a game where you have options. And at the end of the video I stopped on purpose, to let the police catch me. To be honest, in every video except Japan, I had to help the police to catch me to not make the videos ridiculously long. Next location in our tour is France, another unspecified location, probably somewhere along the French Riviera (as there's a track called Riviera and it runs along the coast).
(Also check at 0:33 for a demonstration of the super physics engine of this game). The next location is the USA. The center of the world... well, used to be in the last century. It's probably somewhere in the central southern region, since outside the city all you have is a huge desert (and not dessert).
Let's move on to Scotland, a location probably based on Scotland.[citation needed] The police at least have the accent, and the cars drive on the wrong side of the road, so things mostly add up.
Yes, I can't get used to cars driving on the wrong side. And it looks like there's only a single policemen in whole Scotland. Plus you can see how weird night driving in this game is, you have no headlight. See around 0:27 for a demonstration on how light "works" in this game. Fortunately, you don't have to race in the night a lot in this game, unlike NFS4.
Then finally Japan, a location which only shows up in the modern era (and so you won't really race there in evolution mode). It has a city with huge skyscrapers, then some more rural part with traditional houses, which you only really find in museums these days... About the location, it's the only place with a readable sign, the police cars have 栃木県警察 written on their side, so it should be somewhere in Tochigi Prefecture, close to Tokyo. However, there's a problem with this. I found a subway entrance on the map, but according to the japanese wikipedia, there's only subway in Tokyo and Oosaka in Japan. They wanted to build one in Nagoya, but it was cancelled. But neither of these 3 locations are in Tochigi! Anyway, here's the video of me driving around, and running into a cop...
WHAAAAAT?! Seriously?! EVERY PREVIOUS NFS RELEASE WAS LOCALIZED IN JAPAN, AND YOU COULDN'T FIND A FUCKING VOICE ACTOR TO RECORD ABOUT 3 FUCKING LINES IN FUCKING JAPANESE SO THE FUCKING JAPANESE POLICE WOULD SPEAK JAPANESE INSTEAD OF FUCKING AMERICAN ENGLISH?!?!?!?! What the actual fucking fuck? English doesn't have enough swear words to describe what kind of idiots you are! (Interestingly, it looks like NFS5 on PS wasn't released in Japan. NFS Wiki says this is the first NFS title to not use the Over Drivin' name in Japan, but I looked at multiple PS1 databases, and I couldn't find any Japan release, neither under the name of Need for Speed nor Over Driver, and searching for Porsche only yields Porsche Challenge, a completely different game. Wikipedia led me to the archived Japanese site of the game, but it only seems to mention the Windows version of the game. Weird, usually Japan only get the console versions of the games.)
(And a random tidbit, since navigating all the menus in this game is slow, I made a save in DuckStation, so I can get back quickly to the location selection after recording the video. Turns out, this also made the game select the same random track every time.)
More bad things about tracks.
These new tracks somehow feel lower quality to me.
Especially around urban areas, they're just random right-angle turns connected by 5 meter long straights, all over the place.
They're boring and annoying, not fun.
The invisible walls from NFS1 are back (even if not as bad).
There are absolutely zero tracks presentations in this game, the only info you get about the tracks are their name.
This game, unlike anything before and for a long time after, has various times of the day you can race.
Daylight, dusk, night, maybe others.
Not just day or night like NFS3/
But I left the worst part at last.
I mentioned there are 5 locations in this game, and on each location you have multiple tracks, but in the quick races menu you can only select one track from each location.
Yeah.
Most tracks are evolution exclusive, where they have idiotic entry requirements.
You have a track which you like, but it's only available in a tournament/
Finally, some little used feature.
NFS2/
Conclusion#
I haven't written a conclusion section at my previous posts about console versions of the NFS games, because there it was (or at least I hope it was) pretty obvious the Windows version is superior in every regard to the console/