Need for Speed 6: Hot Pursuit 2 (Windows)

If I could give a sub­ti­tle for this post, it would be "A dawn of a new era". But be­fore this post it nev­er oc­curred to me to have sub­ti­tles, and I don't feel like im­ple­ment­ing it for just this post... Any­way, an­oth­er fa­vorite NFS game, hav­ing the ti­tle Need for Speed: Hot Pur­suit 2 (or Need for Speed : Pour­suite in­fer­nale 2 in France), the 6th game in the se­ries... al­so where num­ber­ing starts to break down. It's HP2, to sig­ni­fy it is a spir­i­tu­al suc­ces­sor to NFS3 which had the sub­ti­tle of Hot Pur­suit, while be­ing the 6th main­line game in the se­ries.

Let's start with the in­tro as usu­al.

And, I have no idea what the de­vs were smok­ing when they made this. The pos­i­tive as­pects are: 30 FPS (MCO was al­ready 30 FPS, but NFS5 was still 15 FPS), and fi­nal­ly res­o­lu­tions larg­er than 320x240. Now, on­to the not so pos­i­tive ones. The first part of the in­tro, the EA lo­go, has a res­o­lu­tion of 720x496, with an as­pect ra­tio of 45:31. The clos­est com­mon as­pect ra­tio is 1.43:1 from the IMAX for­mat... but wait! The bot­tom 10 pix­els of this video is black, crop­ping it ends us up at 720x486 with 40:27, bring­ing us clos­er to 3:2 as­pect ra­tio. But in prac­tice, this doesn't mat­ter. The game just stretch­es the video (in­clud­ing the 10 pix­el bor­der at the bot­tom) to 800x600. When en­cod­ing I first want­ed to keep the orig­i­nal res­o­lu­tion and just set the as­pect ra­tio prop­er­ty, but of course it didn't work. You can ac­tu­al­ly store the as­pect ra­tio in two places, in the con­tain­er and in the video stream. Now since I have mul­ti­ple res­o­lu­tion videos in one file, con­tain­er won't work, so I have to use the video stream. FFmpeg han­dles this sit­u­a­tion pret­ty bad, but then I found out the ul­ti­mate ob­sta­cle: AV-1 (at least in FFmpeg) doesn't sup­port as­pect ra­tio in­fo, and con­tain­er in­fo is not good for me. So in the end I just did what the game does, and rescaled the in­tro to 800x600 (640x480 in LQ).

Then we get a load­ing screen, ex­cept with­out a load­ing text. You can't skip it, it will just dis­ap­pear af­ter a while. Then you get to the ac­tu­al in­tro, with a res­o­lu­tion of 640x448, with an as­pect ra­tio of 10:7, al­most match­ing IMAX's 1.43:1 ra­tio ex­act­ly. But it still doesn't mat­ter, be­cause the game al­so stretch­es this to 800x600, but it's worse than the lo­go. It's ac­tu­al­ly al­most a widescreen video let­ter­boxed, from 640x335 to 640x448, then stretched to 800x600. So the fi­nal as­pect ra­tio is about 1.783:1, pret­ty close to 16:9. And why did I say al­most? At the be­gin­ning, the EA GAMES(TM) TRAX text ex­tends be­low the let­ter­boxed video. It's not a re­al widescreen video! ... Just why EA, why!? Any­way, I cropped the in­tro (since I al­so cropped MCO's), but I in­clud­ed an ex­tra 4 pix­els at the bot­tom, so the over­flown text is not cropped of. At first, I want­ed to add those 4 pix­els to both sides, so it would be sym­met­ric, but it made the video just a tiny bit taller than 16:9, and if you had opened it on a pleb mon­i­tor, you'd see black bor­ders on all four sides. With the cur­rent set­ting noth­ing is cut off, and the out­put video is ex­act­ly 16:9, so it should look OK even on 16:9 screens. The down­side is the video won't be ex­act­ly in the cen­ter of the screen, but a tiny lit­tle bit shift­ed up­wards. I hate this so much...

Now, about the con­tents. First, new year, so new EA lo­go again, with the Chal­lenge Every­thing catch­phrase. At least it's not Mi­cro­trans­ac­tion Every­thing. Yet. Un­like the pre­vi­ous lo­gos, this lo­go will stay with us for a while.

On­to the ac­tu­al in­tro, start­ing around 0:13, start­ing with a Fer­rari in an in­ter­sec­tion with traf­fic lights. Then you have a few ran­dom sam­ples from the up­com­ing in­tro, at 0:19, you can see the Lam­borgh­i­ni po­lice car with mir­rored li­cense plate... Al­so, we're back to the NFS2 theme with two cars rac­ing head-to-head, ex­cept we have some po­lice now. The track is made up as usu­al, but at least the gen­er­al theme now match­es the game. At 0:34, we see the red car tak­ing a short­cut—true, HP2 has short­cuts and mul­ti­ple pos­si­ble paths. Not as wild as NFS5's mul­ti path tracks, though. Road­block at 0:43, just as in NFS4's in­tro, it's way ex­ag­ger­at­ed. You usu­al­ly get like two po­lice cars park­ing, and none of those wood­en bar­ri­ers. Lies, lies every­where. And the big crash be­tween the po­lice cars af­ter­ward—I don't think you'll have more than 4 po­lice cars on screen at any point in the game. At 0:59, it goes hit­ting the poles at the side of the track again—but this time hit­ting them too! Every in­tro since NFS4 have poles like this, and none of the games. For fuck's sake! 1:09: work­ing mir­rors. Ha­ha, no, not in 2002 with DirectX 8. And bul­let time at 1:23. The game in­deed slows down time a bit and changes to an out­side cam­era when you go fly­ing long enough, but time nev­er ac­tu­al­ly stops. Al­so, no one told the 3D artists sun­light won't make such hard shad­ows!? Then the lo­go fades in, ex­cept the ™ mark. That just pops in. Ap­par­ent­ly I've been writ­ing Need for Speed™ wrong all the time. What­ev­er.

The game#

Af­ter the in­tro, you end up in the main menu. As I hint­ed in the pre­vi­ous sec­tion, it's no longer in the glo­ri­ous 640x480 res­o­lu­tion, but in the meh 800x600. Who used it any­way? 640x480, 1024x768, 1280x1024, etc. I get, but 800x600? Why? Al­so, you'll get your stan­dard (Win­dows) cur­sor in the menu. I think the first and last NFS game to do it. At least it won't lag.

Any­way, in con­trast to NFS4 and 5, 6/HP2 most­ly goes back to the "clas­sic" Need for Speed for­mu­la. In­stead of the elab­o­rate ca­reer modes, you have two modes called Hot Pur­suit and Cham­pi­onship, but they're more like chal­lenge trees than ac­tu­al ca­reer modes. No more non-restartable races, pay­ing for­tunes on re­pairs (on­ly vi­su­al dam­ages in this game), non-re­peat­able events. Plus these modes are pret­ty sim­i­lar, the on­ly dif­fer­ence is Hot Pur­suit has po­lice, while Cham­pi­onship doesn't.

How you un­lock cars and tracks were al­so changed. In pre­vi­ous games, ex­cept NFS3 and 4, you didn't even see in the menus any­where you have un­lock­able items, you on­ly learned about their ex­is­tence af­ter you un­locked them. And even in 3/4, just see­ing Bonus in the car list didn't help you much fig­ur­ing out the com­plete­ly ar­bi­trary un­lock rules. Here, it's com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent. You have NFS points as a kind of cur­ren­cy, and you can un­lock cars and tracks us­ing them. You can see all cars and tracks from the be­gin­ning, you can un­lock (or not) them in any or­der. As far as I can see, "pur­chas­es" are fi­nal though, but you can make more mon­ey any time. To earn points, all you have to do is fin­ish a race, you'll get points based on your po­si­tion, laps led, times es­caped from po­lice, and dif­fi­cul­ty. The on­ly thing the above-men­tioned "ca­reer" modes are do­ing is giv­ing you some bonus points if you achieve the ob­jec­tives. (You can achieve a medal on­ly once, though, restart­ing an event where you al­ready got the gold will re­sult in a very help­ful "You failed to im­prove your medal stand­ing. Please try again." mes­sage, see video be­low. You can't get bet­ter than gold you dip­shit!) You don't even get an ex­tra re­ward for com­plet­ing the fi­nal chal­lenge, and in prin­ci­ple you don't even have to com­plete any chal­lenge to un­lock every­thing in the game. The on­ly ad­van­tage these chal­lenges give you, be­side some ex­tra mon­ey, is you don't need to un­lock the cars/tracks you want to use. (Isn't it iron­ic? The mode which is the main source of mon­ey is the on­ly mode where you don't need mon­ey at all.)

Be­side these non-ca­reer modes, you have Sin­gle Chal­lenge where you can set up all the pa­ra­me­ters to the race to your lik­ing. I didn't check Mul­ti­play­er, not sure if it works at all, as it re­lied on GameSpy. Di­rect IP con­nec­tions could prob­a­bly still work. Fi­nal­ly, you have a very handy but­ton on the main menu, called Quick Race. Click­ing on it will start a sin­gle race on a ran­dom­ly se­lect­ed (and un­locked) track and car (2 laps, un­less sprint race). My main prob­lem with this mode is you can't set dif­fi­cul­ty, I think it will al­ways use easy dif­fi­cul­ty, and the op­po­nents are piss poor there.

Both in the chal­lenge tree modes, and in sin­gle chal­lenge mode, you have a few dif­fer­ent race types. Most types are avail­able at both places, the dif­fer­ence is in chal­lenge modes you can on­ly se­lect your car from a pre­de­fined list, while in sin­gle chal­lenge mode you can set all pa­ra­me­ters.

Sin­gle Race: a sin­gle race on a se­lect­ed track, with or with­out po­lice and traf­fic. You can race against one op­po­nent or full grid (it means 5 in sin­gle chal­lenge, in chal­lenges you some­times have dif­fer­ent num­bers) (and no, you can't se­lect ze­ro).

Be the Cop: you're the cop now, and you have to stop speed­ing ve­hi­cles. Com­pared to NFS3/4, your job is much eas­i­er, each car has a health bar, and you have to de­crease it to ze­ro by crash­ing in­to the car a few times. It's weird as on­ly the rac­ers have health (and on­ly in this mode), and not you. In ad­di­tion, you have the as­sists from NFS4. Call­ing for back­up is com­plete­ly use­less, road­block and chop­per can help if you're re­al lucky, but most of the times they won't help at all. When do­ing a Hot Pur­suit mode (where these kinds of chal­lenges are called "Quo­ta") you have a lim­it of ar­rest you have to make to get the medal, in sin­gle chal­lenge you just have to ar­rest as many dri­vers as pos­si­ble (no win con­di­tion...) Not avail­able in Cham­pi­onship, of course.

Lap Knock­out: the new style knock­out from NFS5—each lap, the last rac­er is elim­i­nat­ed. But un­like NFS5, elim­i­nat­ed play­ers don't re­main on the track. Al­so, in sin­gle chal­lenge mode, you can se­lect the num­ber of op­po­nents be­tween 1 and 5, not just 1 or full grid as with sin­gle race.

(Mods used: track: Re­al­is­tic Park­land 3.0, car: Toy­ota Supra)

Tour­na­ment: a se­ries of races, col­lect points, at the end the rac­er with the most points win. The first place get 8 points, the sec­ond 7, etc. In sin­gle chal­lenge mode, you can se­lect up to 8 races, sim­i­lar to how it looked like in NFS5.

Free Run: on­ly avail­able in sin­gle chal­lenge mode. You can tog­gle traf­fic on/off and se­lect a car and track. No po­lice, no op­po­nents, no goal. On cir­cuits, you can make as many laps as you want, all you get is a best lap timer. On point-to-point tracks, the race ends when you reach the fin­ish.

Time Tri­al: on­ly avail­able in chal­lenges. In Hot Pur­suit, these are called De­liv­ery (or Point-to-Point on the in­fo card), while in Cham­pi­onship, they are called Time Tri­als (or a shout­ing TIME TRIAL on the in­fo card). Just a sin­gle race on a track with­out op­po­nents (you have po­lice in Hot Pur­suit), and the best lap counts.

Af­ter the game modes, let's look at the track se­lec­tion. Like NFS5, there are point-to-point and cir­cuit tracks, but the point-to-point tracks are no longer the ma­jor­i­ty (⅔ cir­cuit and ⅓ point-to-point). Like in NFS3, you have mul­ti­ple tracks tak­ing place in one lo­ca­tion, but now you have 3 tracks at each lo­ca­tion (2 cir­cuits and 1 point-to-point). There are 4 lo­ca­tions in this game (so 12 tracks in to­tal): Alpine, some­where in the moun­tains of US, Med­it (prob­a­bly short of Mediter­ranean, I'm quot­ing the di­rec­to­ry names of the tracks, these names don't di­rect­ly ap­pear on the track se­lect screen), some Greek­ish lo­ca­tion, Park­land, an­oth­er USA lo­ca­tion some­where around the shores, and Trop­ics, some trop­i­cal is­land. So we're kin­da back to the race around the world theme, but with an­oth­er Amer­i­ca fo­cus again. Each track can be played for­ward or back­ward, and op­tion­al­ly mir­rored, but un­like pre­vi­ous NFS games, you have to un­lock these vari­a­tions sep­a­rate­ly, and at the be­gin­ning you on­ly have a few for­ward non-mir­rored tracks un­locked. But at least you can have odd num­ber of laps...

On tracks, you have lengthy short­cuts like in NFS5, but they're not marked on the map. Al­so don't ex­pect the mul­ti path mad­ness you had on Au­vg­some­thing. And I like the trop­ics lo­ca­tion, es­pe­cial­ly where you have la­va flow­ing un­der a bridge. It's just so stu­pid, some­thing we don't have much late­ly. Al­so, you have track pre­sen­ta­tions back—kin­da. Au­dio on­ly, and just a gen­er­al de­scrip­tion of the track, like in NFS1–2, with bare­ly any in­for­ma­tion to help you race the track. Sigh. What­ev­er...

On the cars front, you have a huge se­lec­tion of ve­hi­cles. If I can trust wikia, there are 23 cars in the game, 9 of them has a po­lice vari­ant (plus a 10th Ford Crown Vic­to­ria as a stan­dard pa­trol car). 21 of the cars al­so have an NFS edi­tion, be­ing a bit tuned ver­sion of the base cars with a unique paintjob, un­lock­able for even more mon­ey. Now, the worse news: car cus­tomiza­tion is back to NFS2 lev­els, all you can do is se­lect from a few pre­de­fined col­ors. The cus­tom col­ors, tun­ing, nifty car show­case, slideshows, com­par­i­son graphs, etc. all gone. On­ly a short au­dio com­men­tary re­mains. Wel­come to the new era!...

Gameplay#

Af­ter you fi­nal­ly made up your fuck­ing mind and clicked on race, the race will be­gin. And I won­der where to start. Prob­a­bly the en­shit­ti­fi­ca­tion. HUD cus­tomiza­tion? You can se­lect whether you want to see speeds in MPH or KPH. And that's it. No non-ro­tat­ing map, be­cause it re­quires high­er than room tem­per­a­ture IQ to un­der­stand. No op­po­nent list, be­cause I guess they couldn't fig­ure out whether dis­tance is mea­sured in sec­onds or me­ters. No dig­i­tal/ana­log speedome­ter/tachome­ter op­tion, you get what the de­vs in their in­fi­nite wis­dom de­cid­ed. Move around HUD el­e­ments like in NFS3? Ha­ha­ha!

What else? You want to look left or right? Tough luck. You can look back but not side­ways, like in NFS3. But wait, the worst of­fend­er: no cock­pit view. We're back at bumper cam, like in NFS2, but the even worse part is we're not get­ting cock­pit back in NFS7. I don't think we ever get it back, be­sides the Shift spin-offs. And they prob­a­bly didn't even give a crap about the bumper cam ei­ther, as many cars have miss­ing speedome­ter back­grounds, and the di­als just float in the air. And if you look at your car from the out­side, you re­al­ize li­cense plates no longer show your name. You have gener­ic li­cense plates like ND 4 SPD, ND4SPD or NFS HP2.

Now, about the bet­ter parts. Han­dling, for sure. No more curl­ing sim­u­la­tor, like in NFS5, slid­ing in­to the wall doesn't slow you down tremen­dous­ly like in NFS4... so we're pret­ty much back to NFS3 lev­els of han­dling, with­out its weird­ness. Al­so, way less re­al­is­tic than NFS4/5 and more ar­cadey, but not as much as NFS2, for­tu­nate­ly.

About AI, if I wrote this post be­fore play­ing NFS5, I'd have writ­ten it's sub­stan­tial­ly bet­ter. Hav­ing played NFS5, though, I'd say, AI is most­ly on par with NFS5. Most of the time they can over­take you with­out crash­ing in­to you, but they still do stu­pid things oc­ca­sion­al­ly, es­pe­cial­ly when the po­lice is in­volved. What was se­vere­ly down­grad­ed is their dif­fi­cul­ty. The hard­est AI lev­el here is like medi­um in NFS5. Apart from mess­ing up the po­lice a few times on one event when start­ing out the game, I don't think I've had to restart any race while com­plet­ing the chal­lenges. Gold medal on first try every­where ex­cept one or two races. You prob­a­bly have to use a blind­fold if you want any chal­lenge here. Lack­lus­ter.

Oh, and po­lice. They're back and an­noy­ing as al­ways, they like to try and PIT you all the time. Al­so, it's like every po­lice car has a rock­et with an af­ter­burn­er in their trunk, but on­ly enough fu­el to use it once: even if you have the fastest car, they will eas­i­ly over­take you (even if they're so back they fall out of the min­imap), but then if you pass them again, they will nev­er re­cov­er. The po­lice scan­ner thingy is com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent, it no longer mea­sures the dis­tance of the near­est cop, I think it was sup­posed to be an evade me­ter, but it's more like a timer. When the pur­suit starts, it starts from full bar, then it slow­ly de­pletes. It doesn't mat­ter if the near­est cop is 2 cm away from you or at the oth­er end of the map, they will see you like they have x-ray binoc­u­lars and the bar will de­plete at a con­stant speed. This on­ly changes when reach­ing about ¼ of the bar, here if a cop is close, the bar turns red and stops. So, in short, you have to get far away from the cop to es­cape, but on­ly af­ter they have been chas­ing you for a while. This al­so means get­ting away from the po­lice when they start chas­ing you is point­less, as the rock­ets will let them catch up on you be­fore the bar runs out. On the oth­er hand, when the pur­suit was go­ing on for a mo­ment, it is some­times enough to get out of their vi­sion for a split sec­ond to give up. And man, they love to say shit like "this is too dan­ger­ous, I'm dis­con­tin­u­ing the pur­suit", re­mind­ed me of this meme (JXL (JPEG JXL), JPEG (orig)).

What hap­pens when you're un­lucky and they catch you? Game over. Un­like NFS3/4, you can't be tick­et­ed mul­ti­ple times, it's an in­stant bust, cut­ting your race short sud­den­ly. And while it's hard­er to get caught in HP2 than in 3/4 (there's a bit more lee­way in when you're con­sid­ered as stopped, and re­set is dis­abled here when a cop is too close in­stead of an au­to­mat­ic catch), it's still not too hard to get caught if you end up in an un­for­tu­nate sit­u­a­tion. Es­pe­cial­ly when the AI does some­thing stu­pid with you. On­ly one sug­ges­tion, don't stop when the po­lice is near. Just dri­ve in what­ev­er di­rec­tion the way is free—if said di­rec­tion is re­verse, go for it. Do­ing so will con­fuse the AI, and you'll be able to turn back (or just re­set your­self) a few sec­onds lat­er safe­ly. You'll lose a ton of time, but still bet­ter than an in­stant fail­ure, and with the AI in the game, you'll prob­a­bly still win if you don't to this too of­ten.

Spike strip is al­so weird, it's no longer an au­to­mat­ic tick­et/bust like in 3/4, you're al­lowed to con­tin­ue, but... There's a but... Your car will grad­u­al­ly lose speed, un­til it stops com­plete­ly. So un­less you man­age to hit the spike strip 10 m be­fore the fin­ish line, your race ends. On the oth­er hand, the ex­plo­sive bar­rels dropped from the chop­per is not fa­tal, it will just send your car fly­ing in the air...

(Mods used: car: Mit­subishi Lancer Evo­lu­tion VII)

Oh, and you have lit­tle videos when you're bust­ed, in­stead of just a mo­tion­less po­lice doll stand­ing next to your car like in 3/4.

On the mu­sic front, I'm a bit torn. The game most­ly changed to li­censed mu­sic, with on­ly a few of the old names re­main­ing. 3 tracks from Matt Ra­gan, con­tribut­ing a few rock mu­sic to NFS3 and MCO, and one (1) track from Rom di Prisco (for some rea­son on­ly cred­it­ed as ROM). I'm a bit sad to see the old artists go with their unique tracks (es­pe­cial­ly the tech­no ones), on the oth­er hand, the new artists aren't bad ei­ther. Cer­tain­ly not the main­stream pop crap you have in some new­er ver­sions.

Which re­minds me of the band Hot Ac­tion Cop, al­so ap­pear­ing in the in­tro video above. When I first heard them in game, I thought the name is some alias EA had for their in­ter­nal mu­si­cians mak­ing some mu­sic for this NFS. I mean, cop, singing about cars, etc. Then brows­ing this fine site, I re­al­ized they're a re­al band, and when clicked on one of their songs and the lyrics ap­peared... Wait a minute, this is some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent than what you have in game. They prac­ti­cal­ly raped rewrote the song from scratch to make it "fam­i­ly friend­ly". I mean, I get if, what re­mains of the fol­low­ing snip­pet if you throw out every­thing ques­tion­able?

She got the pow­er of the hoochie
I got the fever for the fla­va of the coochie
And did I men­tion, hey, pay at­ten­tion
Gonna take that booty to the nudie di­men­sion

And al­so a case, I have to ad­mit, where the cen­sored song is not nec­es­sar­i­ly worse than the orig­i­nal. But I might be bi­ased here, for a long time I on­ly heard the HP2 ver­sion.

When you fin­ish a race, you get a menu where you can restart the race, view the re­play or quit. Re­play func­tion­al­i­ty is nerfed, you can on­ly watch the re­play when fin­ish­ing the race, you can't save it. What's the point? And there's a bug with the end race but­ton, if you push the en­ter key, it will al­so reg­is­ter the en­ter key re­turn­ing to the main menu. In case you played quick race, the quick race but­ton will be se­lect­ed ini­tial­ly, and the ex­tra key press will cause HP2 to start an­oth­er quick race. In­ter­est­ing­ly, dur­ing the game, the di­a­log where you have the end race but­ton is the on­ly one where you can use the mouse. Co­in­ci­dence?

JXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNG

But de­spite all these short­com­ings, this game is still one of my fa­vorite en­tries in the se­ries, some­where af­ter NFS3 and Un­der­ground 2.

Mods#

Since I al­so played a lot of HP2 in the past, I checked out the mods, but the state is pret­ty bad here. Re­gard­ing tracks, I on­ly saw tex­ture mods, and not too many high qual­i­ty ones. Re­al­is­tic Park­land 3.0 is prob­a­bly the on­ly re­cent en­try worth men­tion­ing. It re­places tex­tures with high­er res­o­lu­tion ones, it doesn't look too bad, ex­cept the light­ing. It's like you turned off light­ing and look­ing at a full­bright ren­der, even though there is some shad­ing go­ing on. There are some stu­pid mods too, like what hap­pens when a vol­cano erupts, but the ter­rain doesn't change at all.

Car mod­ding is al­so worse, you can't add new cars to the game, on­ly re­place ex­ist­ing ones, with all their short­com­ings (like po­lice ra­dio still re­fer­ring to the orig­i­nal car, and even chang­ing the name of the car in menu is prob­lem­at­ic). And since there's no cock­pit view, no hood view, no cus­tomiza­tion to make it worth look­ing at the cars in the menus, there is not much point in mod­ding cars to be hon­est...

Technical shit#

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

Fas­ten your seat­belts, I think. First things first, this game has a more-or-less new en­gine, so the joy­stick shenani­gans of the old­er NFS ver­sions with new Wine ver­sions no longer ap­ply (you have a brand new set in­stead). I did the test the game Wine 9.22 now, if you have a dif­fer­ent ver­sion, your mileage may vary.

To in­stall the game, you have ba­si­cal­ly two op­tions, I'm start­ing with the "of­fi­cial" way. Cre­ate a new WINEPREFIX, prob­a­bly set it to em­u­late a vir­tu­al desk­top (and maybe to WinXP com­pat­i­bil­i­ty), then start the in­staller. If noth­ing hap­pens, you prob­a­bly start­ed the in­staller from a dif­fer­ent work­ing di­rec­to­ry than the CD's root dir. The in­staller is crap, get over it. One way to solve this is to cd there, and start it as wine ./setup.exe. Or, if you don't want to cd, you can al­so run:

wine start /unix /path/to/setup.exe

When it asks for the se­r­i­al, Ctrl-V on­ly pastes in­to the first text box. If you try to work around it with xdotool type, it will en­ter the dash­es too in­to the box­es...

JXL PNG

Then when you get to the ac­tu­al in­stall part, you'll have no progress dis­play. Wine will spam the con­soles with mes­sages like this:

01b4:fixme:file:CopyFileExW LPPROGRESS_ROUTINE is not supported
01b4:fixme:file:CopyFileExW cancel_ptr is not supported

Just what I ex­pect­ed from Wine...

Any­way, af­ter fin­ish­ing, you should get and in­stall Patch 242. If you cracked the game be­fore it will com­plain, but it doesn't re­al­ly mat­ter as you'll need to re­place the exe af­ter­ward with a no-CD crack. You'll need to crack even if you had a le­git copy, since SafeDisc rootk­it no longer works on any mod­ernish Win­dows ver­sion, and nev­er worked un­der Wine.

So, um, what's the al­ter­na­tive? Turns out the no-CD crack makes the game pret­ty much portable, it doesn't re­quire the gazil­lions of reg­istry set­tings. On­ly the patch in­staller needs those reg­istry keys. So what now? First, I made a tar­ball from the files the patch patch­es, so you can just ex­tract it. Or you can just ig­nore it, it on­ly ex­tracts three things: the ex­e­cutable, but you'll have to re­place it with the crack any­way, some readme file which you can ig­nore, and up­dat­ed ini files for the con­trollers, al­so not too im­por­tant un­less you're us­ing a con­troller from 2002. So if you want to go this way, you can just copy the fol­low­ing files from a CD to a ran­dom di­rec­to­ry:

• actors
• ai
• audio
• cars
• controllers
• drvmgt.dll
• eagl
• frontend
• movies
• particle
• text
• tracks
• win2khook.dll

or from shell us­ing the cas­ing I hap­pen to have on the CD:

cp -r --no-preserve=mode $CD_MOUNT/{actors,AI,audio,Cars,Controllers,DrvMgt.dll,EAGL,FrontEnd,movies,Particle,Text,tracks,Win2kHook.dll} $TARGET

Then copy over the patch and the crack. Con­grat­u­la­tions, you should have a ba­sic ver­sion of the game. Run it from the game's di­rec­to­ry to run (ei­ther cd in­to it or use the start /unix trick). If you're start­ing the game for the 3rd or more time, you might wish to add the -nofrustration flag to skip the an­noy­ing in­tro. And un­like pre­vi­ous games, EA lo­go is no longer skip­pable nor­mal­ly! There's progress for you.

If you run it with WineD3D, it will spam the con­sole with a lot of er­rors about un­sup­port­ed op­er­a­tions. I think in the past I had more se­vere prob­lems with WineD3D, since I went my way out to get D8VK for this game. For­tu­nate­ly, new­er DXVK ver­sions in­clude DirectX 8 sup­port, so un­less you're us­ing an old Wine ver­sion, DXVK should suit you bet­ter.

Even though, we're not done here. This game is weird. It has no V-sync, no FPS lim­iter, but ac­cord­ing to PCGW, physics is lim­it­ed to 60 FPS. In my ex­pe­ri­ence, it has prob­lems reach­ing even that, so still ex­pect stut­ter­ing (es­pe­cial­ly with more than 0 AI op­po­nent) while still ren­der­ing the game at 500+ FPS. Ren­der­ing the ex­act same frame again and again. What the ac­tu­al fuck­ing fuck is this piece of shit?! Any­way, if you can, close any pro­gram you don't nec­es­sar­i­ly need (com­pos­i­tor, web­brows­er, OBS stu­dio, etc.), this game seems pret­ty sen­si­tive to ran­dom back­ground process­es some­times need­ing CPU. Even if on a dif­fer­ent core, as since the ad­vent of hy­per­thread­ing and fre­quen­cy boost, cores are not re­al­ly in­de­pen­dent. On the Wine side of things, put dxvk.conf next to the game ex­e­cutable, and there you can try two things. d3d9.presentInterval = 1 is sup­posed to en­able V-sync, but in my ex­pe­ri­ence it made the game even chop­pi­er. An al­ter­na­tive is to set d3d9.maxFrameRate some­thing to 120 or 240, which seemed to re­turn the chop­pi­ness to the base game for me, while not fry­ing the GPU.

Widescreen patch#

This NFS, like every NFS be­fore, on­ly sup­ports 4:3 res­o­lu­tions. But it's bug­gy, and you might ac­tu­al­ly be able to se­lect some non-4:3 res­o­lu­tions, but the game will just stretch the 4:3 im­age. So, if you want to use the game on widescreen res­o­lu­tions, you'll have to get hp2wsfix. There's a workaround for Wine users in the readme, al­so men­tion­ing the game will crash at first. While it was true in the past, with Wine 9.22 the workaround is no longer need­ed (nor does the crash hap­pen). You just have to add d3d8 to the DLL over­rides if you're not us­ing DXVK (setup_dxvk.sh al­ready does it). Al­so in global.ini, make sure you set UseD3D8to9=0. The widescreen patch's DirectX 8 to 9 trans­la­tor is quite bug­gy un­der DXVK:

JXL PNG

I al­so rec­om­mend open­ing scripts/HP2WSFix.ini and set­ting SaveDir=save, so the game will store your saves in a di­rec­to­ry called save next to the exe, in­stead of some ob­scure lo­ca­tion un­der your vir­tu­al Win­dows' in­stall's doc­u­ments fold­er. You can al­so mess around with the oth­er set­tings, you can prob­a­bly set DisableLetterboxing=1 on widescreen res­o­lu­tions. (Fun fact, old games some­times had widescreen mode, and abil­i­ty to ren­der to a small­er win­dow, to speed up ren­der­ing in case you had a weak­er PC. Here, it just ren­ders the whole im­age nor­mal­ly, then puts a widescreen tex­ture on top of it, hid­ing parts of the im­age. What is this pa­jeet shit?!) FixHUD sets how to han­dle the 2D parts of the game, it can be stretched, 4:3 cen­tered, and try­ing to do some­thing mean­ing­ful. In the lat­ter case, you can move some HUD el­e­ments around by edit­ing the ini file. Not as nice as NFS3's built in HUD ed­i­tor, but bet­ter than noth­ing. For some rea­son FixHUD=2 moves the cop me­ter un­der your speedome­ter, but you can fix it. My con­fig used is al­so avail­able.

Part of this project (but not the down­load­able bi­na­ry, you have to get the NFSHP2 HD Font Pack fold­er from the git re­po) is a mod to add HD fonts to the game. I rec­om­mend get­ting it, as HP2's font is a bit low res­o­lu­tion, and looks pret­ty bad at places (es­pe­cial­ly the HUD dur­ing race). Plus I al­so rec­om­mend fol­low­ing the "re­name MicroSquare72b.ffn to Arial72b.ffn" part of the readme, Mi­cro Square font looks so much nicer than Ar­i­al.

And now, com­par­i­son time! First, the orig­i­nal game, then widescreen patch with HD fonts and the three pos­si­ble FixHUD val­ues.

JXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNG

With FixHUD=2, the main menu but­tons are in the 4:3 size in the cen­ter of the screen, while the back­ground is stretched. Sounds like a good com­pro­mise, but then if you se­lect Hot Pur­suit or Cham­pi­onship:

JXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNG

The on­ly thing not stretch­er are the texts. And track or car se­lec­tion isn't bet­ter ei­ther:

JXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNG

JXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNG

So far, FixHUD=1 looks the best (which is ac­tu­al­ly just what the orig­i­nal game ren­ders, just scaled up), 2 is just way too bug­gy. But ingame, things change:

JXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNG

Here both orig­i­nal and FixHUD=0 just stretch­es the HUD, while with FixHUD=1 the black bars look su­per weird, so you're stuck with FixHUD=2 and maybe DisableLetterboxing=1 (last im­age).

JXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNG

Com­par­ing the first two im­ages you can see the un­patched game stretch­es even the ren­dered 3D im­age, not just the HUD. Al­so note the aw­ful lap counter and count­down. FixHUD=1 is not too bad here, but un­for­tu­nate­ly it's im­pos­si­ble to cus­tomize the HUD with this set­ting. The last im­age is my cus­tomized HUD, moved HUD el­e­ments to the side of the screen a lit­tle. Al­so note how this is the on­ly im­age where the rear-view mir­ror is in the mid­dle...

Surround sound#

This game has sur­round sound sup­port, but don't ex­pect it to be bug free. First, you'll need DSOAL like with NFS4, un­pack the DLLs to the game fold­er, add dsound to the DLL over­rides and ed­it alsoft.ini (at least set channels cor­rect­ly). If you did this cor­rect­ly, you can se­lect "D3D / EAX" un­der au­dio set­tings, then en­joy sur­round sound. Un­til you ex­it the game. Well, the game is a bit gay here, chang­ing the set­tings doesn't ac­tu­al­ly save it un­til you click on up­date in the pro­file set­tings screen or fin­ish­ing a race—but even if you do it, all you achieve is af­ter restart­ing you'll see the "D3D / EAX" un­der au­dio set­tings. But it will be just plain stereo. You have to change D3D to mono/stereo, then back to D3D to have sur­round, un­til you ex­it. ┻━┻︵ \(°□°)/ ︵ ┻━┻ This game was made in 2002, why does it look like it re­ceived the amount of test­ing an av­er­age 2024 soft­ware does?!

Controllers#

I left the worst part last, and it has two parts, the game and Wine. Let's start with the game. If you use a DS4 (or some­thing sim­i­lar), and you try to as­sign ac­cel­er­ate and brake to the trig­ger but­tons, it won't work. Un­like pre­vi­ous NFS ver­sions, this on­ly sup­port con­troller ax­es where the neu­tral state is in the mid­dle (i.e. -1..1 ax­es with 0 as a neu­tral state, not 0..1 ax­es). The patch readme even men­tions one kind of steer­ing wheel where you have se­lect com­bined ax­es for ac­cel­er­a­tion/break. A car game which doesn't sup­port any steer­ing wheels but the cheap­est Chi­nese crap with com­bined ax­es. Se­ri­ous­ly WTF. PCGW has some workaround specif­i­cal­ly for DS4, I didn't try it, be­cause 1. when I first played NFS6 on Lin­ux I didn't know about it and I found a dif­fer­ent workaround, and 2. it won't solve the Wine bugs.

So back to Wine. While NFS6, be­ing a new en­gine, doesn't share the old­er NFSs' in­abil­i­ty to work with the new Wine ver­sions... but it doesn't mean there is a sin­gle Wine ver­sion af­ter 6.19 where con­troller sup­port is not com­plete­ly bro­ken. But us­ing 9.22, if I se­lect my DS4 in joy.cpl, the trig­ger but­tons are back, even though I patched it out from ker­nel. The touch­pad al­so func­tions as a but­ton! WTF are you do­ing Wine?! Can't you just open a joy­stick de­vice with­out try­ing to be a smar­tass and fuck­ing up every­thing!? And no rum­ble sup­port. I guess Wine just re­al­izes it's a DS4 con­troller, and by­pass­es the ker­nel dri­ver, and just tries to im­ple­ment DS4's pro­to­col on its own, bug­gy. I mean, delet­ing the cor­re­spond­ing /dev/hidraw* file means wine will no longer rec­og­nize DS4, even if I se­lect "Dis­able hidraw" in joy.cpl. It's so fuck­ing un­be­liev­ably bro­ken it's hi­lar­i­ous.

I tried search­ing for some in­put remap­ping soft­ware for Lin­ux, but they were all ei­ther way too ba­sic (on­ly sup­port­ing KBM), re­quir­ing GTK3+ garbage, or both. There's some evdev pack­age for python, maybe I could have used it, but I'd rather kill my­self than to code in that sig­nif­i­cant white space abom­i­na­tion of pro­gram­ming lan­guage. So in the end, I did what I did with NFS3, and fixed the prob­lem by my­self. Let me in­tro­duce you to in­putor (mir­ror), for a lack of bet­ter name. It's a Lua li­brary to read evdev in­puts and cre­ate uin­put de­vices, plus a few helper func­tions to help you when you just want to proxy events. With this, I made a vir­tu­al gamepad, where the trig­ger ax­es are mapped to 0..1 while hav­ing a -1..1 range (but it will nev­er go neg­a­tive). Com­plete bull­shit, but this is what HP2 en­gine wants. And what's the best? Just by giv­ing it a dif­fer­ent de­vice id, so Wine won't try to use hidraw, sud­den­ly you al­so have rum­ble sup­port. I don't have a large enough ta­ble flip emo­ji for this! Any­way, do­ing this al­lows you to fi­nal­ly map your ax­es in a way they will work...

JXL PNGJXL PNG

if you're lucky. It might hap­pen you do this, start a race, and you no­tice your car doesn't ac­cel­er­ate even if you press the gas, but goes in­to full re­verse even with­out press­ing the brake. Re­set­ting the con­troller in set­tings and re­bind­ing some­times works. What I found to work usu­al­ly is to go in­to dead zone set­tings, and give the two thumb ax­es a lit­tle dead zone. Most of the times it fix­es things. Even if you lat­er set dead zone back to ze­ro. This game is a fuck­ing farce. Oh, and while you're at the dead zone set­tings, if you set look back to the stick like I did, give it a (larg­er) dead zone. Even though stick is ana­log, look back is bi­na­ry, and the con­ver­sion be­tween ana­log ax­es and bi­na­ry but­tons seem to be value != 0.0, and thus you'll look back even when you don't want. Pre­vi­ous NFS ver­sions han­dled this bet­ter.

Oh, and a bonus. When you start the game with an un­known con­troller con­nect­ed (and by un­known I mean a con­troller not on the list of about 43 con­trollers ex­plic­it­ly sup­port­ed by the game), you'll get a warn­ing at start­up about your con­troller not rec­og­nized by the game, please check the set­tings. Cool. Ex­cept you get this warn­ing EVERY FUCKING TIME you start the game. Even af­ter cus­tomiz­ing bind­ing, dead zone, what­ev­er. Adding a boolean did_user_see_controller_warning vari­able to the save file was too much to ask, I guess. As usu­al, ship­ping the game on time was more im­por­tant to EA ex­ecs than hav­ing a us­able game. If you're fuck­ing tired of this, open controllers/definitions.ini, add a new joystick N sec­tion, where N is the num­ber used in the last sec­tion plus 1, name should be set to the name the con­troller ap­pears in game. Not sure about the rest, I just copy-past­ed joystick 0's (defaultPad) oth­er op­tions here. Prob­a­bly this is where I could have fixed the DS4 con­troller crap by ad­just­ing the ax­es's con­fig, if Wine would ac­tu­al­ly have a work­ing con­troller sup­port.

Misc#

If you play the game, even on max­i­mum world de­tail, you might no­tice wa­ter­falls just pop on­to the screen as you ap­proach them (most no­tice­able on the trop­i­cal lo­ca­tion). Just fol­low PCGW's rec­om­men­da­tion, ed­it eagl/lod.ini, and in­crease worldParticle lev­els. PCGW notes you can go up to 999, I went with low­er val­ues though, and they seemed to work for me:

worldParticle.farFadeIn=525.0
worldParticle.farFadeOut=550.0

PCGW al­so men­tions fog not avail­able with mod­ern sys­tems, and I kin­da wish I had looked in­to it ear­li­er. As such, videos and pic­tures in this post lack fog, but you can ac­tu­al­ly fix them if you want. The "of­fi­cial" workaround, en­abling d3d8to9, as men­tioned above, doesn't work well. A github is­sue com­ment hints at what na­tive DLLs (d3dcompiler_43 and d3dx9_43) you need to get from winetricks to fix d3d8to9. I didn't try this, but in­stead used a sec­ond workaround men­tioned in a dif­fer­ent com­ment, which in­volves patch­ing D8VK. Ex­cept they couldn't pro­vide a re­al patch file, just some tex­tu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what you have to do, so I turned it in­to a patch for ver­sion 2.5.1 you can just drop in /etc/portage/patches/app-emulation/dxvk if you're on Gen­too and re­build dxvk:

--- dxvk-2.5.1/src/d3d8/d3d8_device.cpp.orig	2024-12-23 16:08:29.630089485 +0100
+++ dxvk-2.5.1/src/d3d8/d3d8_device.cpp	2024-12-23 16:08:53.127088740 +0100
@@ -1572,6 +1572,12 @@
       default:
         break;

+      case D3DRS_FOGDENSITY:
+        // if D3DRS_FOGDENSITY is set to a nonzero value, use D3DFOG_EXP2
+        if (Value)
+          GetD3D9()->SetRenderState(d3d9::D3DRS_FOGTABLEMODE, d3d9::D3DFOG_EXP2);
+        break;
+
       // TODO: D3DRS_LINEPATTERN - vkCmdSetLineRasterizationModeEXT
       case D3DRS_LINEPATTERN: {
         [[maybe_unused]]

I found the fog to be most no­tice­able in the forests of the Park­land map. For ex­am­ple, com­par­i­son from the start of Na­tion­al For­est track, with­out and with fog:

JXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNGJXL PNG

A trip down the memory lane#

Some­time back in 2010, I had a weird idea of mak­ing a bunch of record­ing of me play­ing HP2 with Fraps, then put them in­to Adobe Pre­miere and make some videos. I guess I want­ed to up­load them to some blog or Jew­tube, but I nev­er did it. These videos were just ly­ing around on my HDD, wait­ing for me to do some­thing with them. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, back then I had an idea of con­vert­ing them to the state-of-the-open­source-art as of then video codec, name­ly The­o­ra, in pret­ty crap qual­i­ty, and throw­ing the orig­i­nal ren­der out. For­tu­nate­ly I found the orig­i­nal Fraps record­ings and the Pre­miere project, but get­ting a bet­ter qual­i­ty video out of them wasn't that easy. First, I had to soon re­al­ize I made Fraps cap­tures at 25 FPS, so say good­bye to flu­id mo­tions. I al­so run the game at this point most­ly at 4:3 res­o­lu­tions, since there was prob­a­bly no widescreen patch for HP2 back then (hp2wsfix had its first re­lease in 2019), ex­cept one case when I ran the game at a widescreen res­o­lu­tion, stretch­ing every­thing. And here comes said video, orig­i­nal­ly record­ed in the glo­ri­ous 1440x900 res­o­lu­tion, where I didn't have to mess around with Pre­miere, since it was eas­i­er to recre­ate it with FFmpeg (plus I had to fix the as­pect ra­tio any­way, back in 2010 I con­vert­ed it to 16:9, when it should be some­thing more like 2.1:1):

Back in the time, I saved this video as overtake.ogv, so I guess it was meant to show how to over­take in this game. But there's not much to show, AI is re­al lack­lus­ter in this game, to not win in this game you ei­ther have to be re­al un­lucky with the po­lice, or lose on pur­pose.

The rest of the videos wasn't so easy, I need­ed to get a work­ing Adobe Pre­miere CS5. I did this months ago, so some de­tails might be off, but the gist was:

>get adobe pre­miere cs5 from archive.org (8.3GB down­load!), in­stall in win7 VM
>try to open project, get cryp­tic er­ror: "This project con­tained a se­quence that could not be opened. No se­quence pre­view pre­set file or codec could be as­so­ci­at­ed with this se­quence type."
>search in­ter­net, most­ly use­less ad­vice, what works is to im­port from the menu in­stead of open­ing it
>wtf.jpg
>look around the im­port­ed project, oh I al­so need af­ter ef­fects
>start over, get the full cre­ative suite in­stead (on­ly 13.1GB!)
>un­like the nor­mal adobe pre­miere cs5, the adobe pre­miere in adobe cs5 can open the project file...
>in the mean­time I con­vert­ed the fraps files to loss­less h264, so it takes less space. of course adobe garbage can't open it
>mess around with video codecs, in­stall ffd­show, etc, noth­ing works
>give up, just con­vert every­thing to huffyuv, and don't care about file­size
>fi­nal­ly it opens and plays back the video
>at the start the font is bad and boxart is miss­ing
>find DejaVu font for win­dows, retry
>boxart is still miss­ing
>open the ti­tle ed­i­tor, it shows the file as miss­ing
>re­tard­ed pre­miere, when you open a project and it can't find a file, it'll ask for its lo­ca­tion, ex­cept when it's a file in­side a ti­tle
>all you get is a tiny lit­tle ! sign in the low­er right cor­ner of the screen, and even that on­ly if you scroll the time­line so the ti­tle is vis­i­ble!!!
>table­flip
>man­u­al­ly fix all the ti­tles...
>every­thing looks ok
>wait a minute, why doesn't the af­ter ef­fects part have sound?
>open the af­ter ef­fects project, it says no quick­time in­stalled, what­ev­er
>video loads, but why no sound?
>try lot of things, noth­ing work
>maybe I need that quick­time af­ter all?
>in that fuck­ing 13.1GB they put on 2 DVDs, they couldn't in­clude a fuck­ing 40MB quick­time in­staller that is re­quired by their fuck­ing soft­ware
>ok, find an old quick­time ver­sion that still sup­ports win7
>good news, ap­ple dropped win­dows sup­port many years ago, so the last ver­sion still sup­ports win7
>in­stall quick­time, retry
>IT HAS SOUND
>fuck­ing adobe af­ter ef­fects can't load a fuck­ing PCM 16-bit stereo au­dio track with­out a fuck­ing quick­time bloat
>adobe pre­miere, a soft­ware in the same fuck­ing bun­dle from the same fuck­ing com­pa­ny some­how man­ages to do this feat with­out a fuck­ing quick­time de­pen­den­cy
>by the way, even win98 could do it out of the box
>fi­nal­ly every­thing works, try to ex­port it
>don't ex­pect it to be able to ex­port loss­less h264
>af­ter some mess­ing around fi­nal­ly man­age to ex­port them to huge rgb huffyuv files
>move those videos back to lin­ux and en­code it to loss­less h264 with ffm­peg and throw this dump­ster fire vm out

I fuck­ing hate pro­pri­etary soft­ware. Fuck­ing garbage, all of them, no ex­cep­tions.

Any­way, back to the ac­tu­al videos. First one is, guess what, about the in­tro video. Looks like I had a thing about un­re­al­is­tic in­tro videos even back then.

And non-ex­is­tent dri­ving skills, same as ever. Next is a small video of the be the cop mode:

As I men­tioned above, just ram the dri­vers a few times, and they're done. Fi­nal­ly, a video I sim­ply called mix, an as­sort­ment of ran­dom videos (and a slight epilep­sy warn­ing) put in­to one.

If you want to ask why am I do­ing the 360s in the dirt in­stead of the road, the an­swer is I was lame and could on­ly do it there. But I don't know why did I at­tribute my lack of dri­ving skills to game glitch­es... (And I'm not talk­ing about the clip­ping through wall around 1:42, it's an an­noy­ing bug of the game) I al­so don't know where did I get all these bust­ed videos, did I get bust­ed on pur­pose? For some rea­son, I have a feel­ing the an­swer is no...