Misses the mark in every way

User Rating: 3.5 | Need for Speed: ProStreet PC
For each game in the NFS series, I get my hopes up that it will be anywhere as good and entertaining als Porsche Unleashed (2000), but it always leads to disappointments. "Porsche" had a near-perfect balance between arcade racing and realism, but the series soon departed into a poor "Fast & Furious" franchise which was all about pimping Japanese cars: not my cup of tea. It seems the series has finally let go of the underground streetracing theme, possibly because the streetracing hype is slowly fading away as well. So where to go from here?

The look and feel of the game is even worse than a Tony Hawk game. "Urban" skateboarding-style logos are abundant, as are superfast, flashy edited cutscenes and menus (I bet even MTV would find it too irritating). Then there is this horrible announcer and some other (clearly white) guy in the menus who adresses me as "dog" and "homie" as if he were from South Central. It all sounds so horribly fake. When the game is loading, there are hints pointing out that you should't hit the tires in the corners, and that there are actually signs pointing where you should go. How dumb do they think I am? This is insultung.

As for the game itself: it doesn't look very spectacular (even on high settings) yet it manages to run horribly on my PC, which is pretty fast (8800 GTS). The racing is dull, and the game modes are boring. The controls are clearly aimed at a gamepad, which makes this game a poor port of an even poorer game which misses the mark in every way. After 30 minutes of testing, I didn't even bother to go through the menus to exit it properly: I pressed CTRL+ALT+DEL and terminated nfs.exe.