A Fairly good installment in the NFS series, but definitely not the best.
*Here's a few cheats/hints you can do to get basically unlimited money that isn't on this site until now (well at least I couldn't find it!): **I have only tried this on X360 so I am not sure if it will work on the PS2 version
Step 1: First, Enter ALL the cheat codes available in the cheats section by going to Career on the Main Menu, then to secret codes.
Step 2: After doing that, go back to main menu, go into Race Day briefly, the hit "B" to get back to the main menu (this activates the cheats for some reason)
Step 3: Go to the car lot in career mode, and find the Acura Integra (Not the Type-R version) it should say $0 for the car, buy it.
Step 4: Now this will take you to your garage. Hit "B" and then "Y" to sell the Acura Integra, you should make a profit of $7,200 every time you buy one. you can do this as much as you want. You can repeat steps 3 & 4 infinitely to get as much cash as you want!
This cheat will work 100% (I've tried it on PS2 & X360)
Also you can use the cheat "unlockallthings" as much as you want to make money, just sell all the cars you get n your garage every time you enter that code. but you must close the game and then reboot it again every time. you can't enter it more then once without doing that. this works on all systems exept for Nintendo DS and Sony PSP versions of this game.