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.

HQ (AV1) (35.02 MiB) MQ (VP9) (9.841 MiB) LQ (AV1) (3.041 MiB)

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.

HQ (AV1) (950.5 MiB) MQ (VP9) (316.9 MiB) LQ (AV1) (36.89 MiB)

(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...

HQ (AV1) (2.419 MiB) MQ (VP9) (828.2 KiB) LQ (AV1) (327.2 KiB)

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) (41.52 KiB), JPEG (orig) (46.19 KiB)).

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...

HQ (AV1) (32.32 MiB) MQ (VP9) (10.91 MiB) LQ (AV1) (1.686 MiB)

(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 (1.054 MiB) PNG (1.497 MiB)JXL (1.376 MiB) PNG (1.930 MiB)JXL (1.348 MiB) PNG (1.934 MiB)JXL (1.428 MiB) PNG (2.101 MiB)JXL (1.585 MiB) PNG (2.272 MiB)JXL (701.8 KiB) PNG (1.048 MiB)JXL (843.2 KiB) PNG (1.190 MiB)

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 be­low.

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...

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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:

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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 be­low.

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.

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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:

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

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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:

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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).

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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...

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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:

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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):

HQ (AV1) (20.52 MiB) MQ (VP9) (10.69 MiB) LQ (AV1) (1.561 MiB)

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.

HQ (AV1) (56.90 MiB) MQ (VP9) (33.44 MiB) LQ (AV1) (5.763 MiB)

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

HQ (AV1) (28.23 MiB) MQ (VP9) (18.50 MiB) LQ (AV1) (2.813 MiB)

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.

HQ (AV1) (107.5 MiB) MQ (VP9) (66.87 MiB) LQ (AV1) (10.26 MiB)

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...

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