My first run from the cops was epic as I didn't really know where I was going, or more importantly how evasion works. I was pretty much just out of tutorial, did my first time trial, alerted the cops and it kicked off from there. I had player cops all over me, dodging them around hairpins, late change of directions and lots of nitrous, with helicopters being called in overhead, road blocks and spike strips being dropped in front, and just as you think you've got away the timer resets and a cop spawns near you or comes full speed head on. Before I knew it I was up to heat level 10, run all around the north of the map finding it impossible to evade them and stop the chase.

I had (wrongly) assumed that evasion would be similar to previous NFS games, where you had to evade the cops before you enter your safehouse. Lesson for this game - just get to the safehouse and hit the button to enter.

I ended my first pursuit hitting heat level 10 and banking 280k SP while driving just the stock starter Porsche. I didn't really appreciate the difficulty until I'd played a few more hours and lost some 100k runs. Now when I start earning those levels I really start looking to get back to the safehouse and avoiding more chases.

I've also tried being a cop for a bit - you have the freedom to explore the world without being chased, and can decide if you want to focus on your own race, or break off onto a pursuit.

Both careers unlock cars really fast, but on the cop side you get them for free and don't spend money upgrading them (only the pursuit tech), so there is less investment needed if you want to hop into another vehicle to try it out.

For now I will say Racer is my preferred career, but lose a couple of 75k+ SP runs in a row and I will swap over to Cop to enjoy that for a bit.

Visits GameSpot to check for updates here

*sees top promoted video*

"The Waiting Game"

Who says Americans are without a sense of irony? ;-)

Thanks for getting this re-opened.

Having this locked without a closing comment did make it look like it was being made to disappear out of sight and hopefully out of mind.

It's now been a month since the current site went live and the unions disappeared. Really now looking for an answer as to what's happening.

I'm using it way less than before the redesign, and as the weeks roll on with features like the unions still missing I find fewer reasons to come back

The single biggest union killer was inactivity - certainly not helped by the current 3-4 week absence of the boards since this site wiped them out.

I wonder if we will have any ability to communicate the existence of the unions with members once they come back, or if unions are so far down the priority list whether we can expect any more than just a forum page.

Once you've had an SSD you won't go back.

The one thing holding me back initially was the size / cost as I wanted to put all my games on it. If that sounds like you, have a look into ISRT (Intel Smart Response Technology). In short it allows you to partner an SSD to a traditional disk giving some of the benefits of each. You get the much faster boot and load times from the SSD, with the storage capacity of your traditional disk. Rather than manually moving installs onto the SSD, it learns what you are using the most frequently and has it act as if those were installed on the SSD. For programmes you don't use as frequently, or for the first couple times, it will have traditional disk load times.

I have mine set up with a 60GB mSSD linked to a 1TB 7,200rpm disk. Power on to logon screen in about 14 secs, and login to usable and opening programmes in another 4-5 secs.

A pure SSD install would probably get slightly faster results, but I don't have to worry about space and get a large amount of the benefits.

So did anything major explode?

Still getting 'tis but a barren wasteland when I look for unions

I just received a flood of notifications - some going back 11 days

Looks like they are getting stuck in the system somewhere - they all related to comments and posts in the forum though - nothing relating to news on games I was following

Thanks mate - nice to see GS notifications are working well - just 11 days late!

I've signed up and in "verification" :)

The current system of one entry per game, regardless of the number of platforms just doesn't work well.

I was aware of the latest review score taking precedence over earlier ones, even when the latest review is just a DLC or a port, but you can't just merge everyones votes on different platforms and treat them as one figure.