Thursday, December 27, 2007 by | Enk. |
Overview
It is so hard to describe how genuine Need For Speed: Pro Street feels this year. The atmosphere, the car selection, the damage, track details and locations, even the raceday hubs have been extensively designed and re-designed in order to make each piece unique keeping the quality up and above the usual NFS standards. The game modes are quite good, as well, they have different versions of each to keep ProStreet fresh throughout the entire time you will be playing.
First, we will jump right into the game and walkthrough the career from the beginning.
Career
Once you first load ProStreet (PS from hereon after), you create your profile, of up to 3 different ones, then selecting either Casual, Racer, or King difficulty. We hop into an introVideo which introduces our main character, Ryan Cooper, who you will be playing as throughout the game, watching through the video, you see that he's fresh onto the professional scene, just off the streets and out of illegal racing. After the introVideo, you first compete in a 'ThrottleBody Org' raceday in Chicago, challenging for an invite to the BattleMachine Org. You are given a Silvia S13 to race a 3 lap grip race, which you will be required to win, in order to advance on in the game. This race is a little easier in order to assure you get through it. Placing first, brings you an invite to the Battlemachine Org Racedays.
At the BattleMachine Org RaceDay, you need to prove yourself, which is why they give you a selection between two drag cars; a FWD HondaCivic, or a FWD Cobalt SS., no worries about damages, or totalling here, as the Org would pay the damage, for the first race. You compete in a few races with the given cars, but you will absolutely need to start upgrading your cars performance immediately as you would be completely owned if you don't. However, only have 10k to begin your career with, choosing what to upgrade is very crutial. After upgrading your performance, tuning your car up, and winning more races, you will eventually be able to buy new cars, which you will be looking at through in the carlot, so I wont get into them now.
Dominating a certain type of race event will draw attention from a mode specific org (roguespeed, nitrocide, geffect, noisebomb), and once you have completed your race day, you can advance on your map over to that Org's Racedays to challenge through their events.
Game Modes
Each game mode has its own ups and downs. The first discussed will be the grip races, onto speed challenge, then drift, and finally, of course, drag.
The Grip races are simply circuit races, they are quite fun and the races are not too long, even the 3 lap races went by pretty quick. The AI do get in your way, but it is easy to get around them and shunt them out of your way, pushing them or sideswiping them when entering the turns, using them to help brake and corner that slight bit you need. Even using them for this function, can cause damage to you as much as it does to them, so be careful when you use AI cars in your maneuvers. Sector Shootouts, are essentially grip races where you need to be the fastest between each race section, you will have usually two or three laps try and win the shootout, which is not exactly an easy feat.
Speed Challenge is divided into two seperate types of challenges. First we have the Top Time Challenge, which is just a Spring from point A to B where the quickest time wins, and second, the Top Speed Challenge, which is where you want to be the fastest through each checkpoint, as what the demo had shown. This is really a fun mode as some of the corners are wide enough that you can keep your top speed up while racing through to the next checkpoint. Drive off the road and you may have a costly mistake, at 200+MPH hitting a bump in the shoulder flipping your car into the air, totalling it completely, a costing you either a car or a repair marker. A few of our community leaders were frustrated, as you could hear the rumble of the 360 controller on the table signifying their nasty crashes. Some courses can be up to twenty miles long but the ones we drove were only close to five to ten.
Drift. Oh how they have fixed the Drift mode this year. I am happy EA actually took the time to spend the time and effort to do some proper research and educate their programmers on how drifting really works. They have taken all the research data from real Drift events from around the world and coded it properly into the PSDrift. Points aren't exactly entirely realistic, there are no bonus zones, multipliers, but instead of scoring out of 100, they chose to go with an accumulating scoring counter. You wont get 1million point drifts this year, but a good one could be 5-10k. 3-4k is a good drift, anything over 5k is great. Having a proper line entering the drift is key for a decent score though, if you start too shallow, you'll drive out of the scoring zone, if you start too high, you'll probably end up riding a wall.
Drag Racing this year, is still by far my most favorite game mode in PS. They have completely redone it done the previous NFS Series, and it shows. You race three heats, in which the top time within those three heats is the winner of that event, meaning if you had a really great first run, but bombed the last two, you could still win. This year there will be either a flag girl to watch or else a real working LightTree, both which you can use to get the best reaction time. Your reaction is Crutial if you want really low times. React too early, and you will false start, disqualifying you from that heat. The wheelies, have been adjusted and are a bit more realistic than what were shown in the previous videos. If you are really good you could have a 6th gear wheelie racing down the track, but lack of steering does kind of suck with that, especially on the Nevada Desert 1/2 mile. Using the NOS is critical as well, you want to time them through your taller gears to get your RPMs up so you can hit the next shift sooner. I usually hit mine in 3rd shifted up through 4th, and 5th, finally in 6th right before the NOS kicked out again. It seemed like quite a good setup, especially how I had tuned my GT500.
With a 7.99second quartermile and an 11.99second halfmile my GT500 completely dominated all of the other Community Leaders and Developers.
Tuning
Tuning has advanced quite a ways this year. there is still a choice of prepackaged upgrades, for those of you who don't want to get your hands dirty, and Custom upgrades, which requires picking from a selection of specific brand name parts. The parts you will upgrade will include the engine, air induction, suspension, transmission, nos, and tires. from which after, you can go into the tuning section, and tune your car even deeper right down to the ride height, suspension stiffness, and of course your gear ratios. After you have finished tuning your car, you can put it on the dyno, which will give you specific details, relevant to what racemode your car is made for. My GT500 had 691HP and a top speed of 243MPH, which I probably could have tuned up to 245 if I had more time.
Customization
Customization is another re-signed feature this year, not only can you take your stock parts and autosculpt them, but you can also paint stock parts, and seperated body parts can be painted differently, so you can paint your entire body, or just the front and rear bumpers, skideskirts, hood, roof, doors, and trunk all seperately. This could make for some wild designs, unfortunately, however you cannot paint carbon fibre. Then you can get into body kits, each body kit has a different look to it, bringing up your areodynamics level, but also adds weight, you may autosculpt the bodykit, and fine tune it to get the proper drag and downforce combination, but just sliding the marker all the way to the right wont help, you have to be careful, oversculpting it will actually reincrease your drag or lower your downforce. This goes with the Spoilers, roofscoops, and other parts as well. Selecting the right combination of parts is an intricate part of building your monster. Other parts you will be able to add are Rollcages and Racing seats, which I have yet to see a function for, but I never did try them out, as the time restraints we had for the day kept me on a strict schedule of racing. Of course, I cannot forget to mention the selection of Rims, you can have either 4 of the same rims, or two pairs, which can also be painted, either front, rear, or both, giving your car that entire unique design.
Visual Graphics
The Visual Graphics, your Vinyls, have been redone this year a little as well. You have a little more freestyling to use, placing vinyls not only on the body, but the windows, and bumpers too. Unfortunately, you cannot cover head or taillights, but who would want to anyways? When selecting a vinyl, it comes up on your car as black, so the best option is to have your car painted last (if you use black), so that you can see where you're placing your vinyl, and how it'll look. This year you have up to 25 layers you can put on each seperate body part, so essentially, you will still be able to make some very unique looking cars.
Now after you have made your sexy beast of a car, you want to show her off. The photomode is the best way to do this, not only in a photoroom, but on the track as well. The photomode has been changed, and you will be able to zoom out further this year, making sure you can find the right angle to take your best shots at. On the track, pausing the game, and entering photomode, will allow you to swing the camera around 360degrees, zoom in and out, and essentially find that perfect shot to show off in the EA PhotoGallery online. If it was functional at the time, My Mustang GT500 with the Nos Flowing, doing a wheelie, would have been a prized image in the gallery so far.
Blueprints
Blueprints this year is a new feature that EA has implimented. Once you have created your Monster Car, with the ultimate settings you think will just completely dominate at the racedays, you can share your blueprint with your friends. What this means is that they will have the EXACT same car as you right down to performance as well as the exterior customization. When your friends race your car and win, they will show up on the leaderboards, along with you beside, keeping your name as the original creator of the car. Showing who overall is the best performance tuner online. These blueprints once shared, cannot be edited at all by anyone except the original creator, and thus whatever you have done to customize your car, down to its parts, settings, and windtunnel resistance cannot be adjusted. The players who have your car will only see an overview of what the car can do, keeping the creator's tuning a secret will make him more valuable to search out and befriend if you're looking for someone to tune up your stable of cars.
Graphics
Pro Street has exceeded its expectation in the graphical department this year, highly detailed volumetric smoke which rolls on the tires, the track atmosphere, the details they put into each component of each track, the raceday hubs where you can watch AI characters taking photos of cars, wandering around, or just listening to the 'DJ' at each event, all to give that feel to being at a real raceday.
Physics
The Physics engine has just a near realistic feel to it, as well its nice to still have that arcady sense of speed when you're driving your car at 240+Miles an hour, still keeping to the original name Need For Speed. The sliding of the cars, the cornering, and even feeling a bump in the road which could launch you into the trees, makes ProStreet a challenge. As well, having the same physics throughout the game, is welcome, compared to that admitted mistake we call Carbon.
Damage
Damage, yes the damage has been reduced from the original teaser trailer, but EA has still put alot of effort into it, with realistic scratchmaps, and dent textures which keep the reflections of the car realistic to what the cars damage is. It may be a little toned down, so wheels dont fall off, however the challenging aspect of the race, and the expensive costs to repairing a completely totalled supercar, will make you glad you dont have the extra that it could've cost you, if the damage was more endowed. Maybe next year they'll put the final crack into the damage. You will have the opportunity to either repair your car before its next race, or leave it be, but racing with a half wrecked car makes it that much more difficult to finish the race if you're a smash and crash style player, and also, its cheaper to fix a car in level 1 damage than it is to fix when its totalled.
Points System
There really isn't much to explain on how the points are setup this year, but you gain points for not only placing first, but how little or no damage your car may have, or even by beating a target time by so much. Each race will have a different target to beat increasing your chances for a few more much needed bucks to add to your continually dwindling bank account.
Rewards
After winning a raceday, you will have a choice of 6 reward cards to choose from, unknown what they are, you randomly select one and it could be anything from a cash value prize, or a repair token, a total repair token, even unlocks to performance parts specific to a certain car. Then you have the choice to leave the race day, or continue to race the rest of the events in that raceday and Dominate it, which then would give you a second option of a reward card, selected out of the five left that you have not yet chosen. Interestingly enough, John our producer didnt realize that there was a FREE CAR reward as well, he was as surprised about it as I was, however I didnt think to use the card to see what vehicle I could choose from, however, I'm certain that it would only pertain to the ones that are currently unlocked. My suggestion, hang onto that card for awhile until you unlock something you couldnt yet afford, and has the Horsepower you'll require later on in the game, like a Lamborghini or the Zonda F.
NFS Pro Street takes the Gold-Review
At the beginning of November was a Community Day at Electronic Arts Black Box in Vancouver, Canada. Unfortunately I (Shocker) couldn't make it this time, but gladly Sinister was so kind to let us publish his Review here at NFS-Planet. In this article you can read his impressions and experiences with Need for Speed ProStreet: Multiplayer Overview
The Multiplayer is setup into three different styles of racedays. Solo, which is known as Asynchronous. Co-op, which is Two players on the same console, or Multiplayer, which is Synchronous up to 8 players online at a time. First we will start with the ASync. Asynchronous racedays are created for online competition with your friends that cannot be online at the same time, they have the option to race any time and try to beat your score or time. They can download your shadows to see how you have done it, or to see how your race was won. John Doyle, had downloaded my Mustang GT500 shadow for Drag racing because he just could not believe that I had such an unbelievable monster racing on the track. The races are tallied and scored accordingly, and show up in a points list, either showing just your "friends" who have raced, or everyone who has taken on your challenge. Sadly I was 1800 points shy of beating the Developers challenge EA had setup for our community day. John had to go back and race a few extra times just to get his score up to squeak past me just at the end of the day. (Good Job John, Well played :P )Co-op, is essentially that, two players racing on the same console. We had not tried this mode at the community day, so unfortunately there is not much to discuss.
Synchronous Racedays, are entirely similar to ASync Racedays, except the fact you're playing live with up to eight people. If you cannot have eight people racing all at once, you would have AI competators introduced and fill up whatever spots are empty. Also, with the Sync Races you have a 2 minute lobby time, which is used to swap cars, if nessesary, or for the alternating leader host to change the options for which race is next. After players sit idle for 5 seconds, the timer speeds up to 10 seconds, and the quit game is locked out, so you cannot quit the match, keeping players from disconnecting last second.Overwall Challenge
I must say, compared to the lack of challenge Carbon had brought to the table, ProStreet is a welcome sight, right from the beginning you must work and fight your way through each race to win. Challenging AI, who can make mistakes just as easily as you can, crashing, missing lines, taking corners too wide, all make the play value of PS worth its name. The harder you set the game in your initial selection, will determine how competative the AI are. I reccomend everyone race on King Mode for the ultimate challenge. And of course, the online racing will be as competative as your friends and you make it.Downfalls
Yes, I have hyped ProStreet to be the god of all racing games, but of course, not everything is as great as it should be, there were a few downfalls with dropped some points for EA this year. Sadly the Synchronous multiplayer was a little laggy at the beginning, but once the racers started spreading out, the lag seemed to disappear. The lack of replay, is a very sad feature left out this year, but understandable, EA claims that the replay memory wasn't properly replaying the damage the way it was originally in the game, so they still want to work on it, a high probability that it will be in the next installment of NFS. The damage wasnt as extensive as original teaser trailer had made it out to be, but again, this could be a part with the fact that alot of general users just would not enjoy the game if they couldnt proceed through the game very easily. Alot of players would be frustrated to have to continually repair their cars, especially with wheels falling off and the likes, Damage was originally too heavy, but now, its just a little too light. Next year, they'll have a happy medium. The last real downfall I noticed was the lack of entering the pause menu during a crash, I'd have liked to be able to restart a race when I crash, or even go into the photomode and shoot a picture of a wild and crazy wreck, but that just didnt happen this year. This is a suggestion already in the mailbox for next years installment. So I shall conclude this goldreview, which most of you will have either skimmed through, or hung on to every word, hopefully affirming your opinion on what Prostreet will really be like this year, and I hope to see alot of you in the online org challenges that we the community will start setting up nearing the beginning of December. And I would like to thank all the gamers for continually supporting EA and the NFS franchise for another great release, and hope you will continue to do so for the many years to come.My Rating.9.7/10
And for a special bonus to those who have read the entire review, EA and SpikeTV have worked on releasing an hour long documentary called "The Birth of ProStreet" which describes the culture of Sanctioned racing, along with alot of actual game footage from the game itself, and how EA used realtime racedays in order to help give the game its needed research. The documentary airs on SpikeTV Nov10 @ 1am EST.
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You Can Discuss about Nfs ProStreet at
NfsPlanet's Discussion Board, here
Some Videos, here .. also some wallpapers, here
And Nfs Prostreet's Coming & already released patches, here
Btw there's A difference b/w Wallpapers and Screenshots, you can see screenshots here
Official website, Ea.com & Needforspeed.com
The Multiplayer is setup into three different styles of racedays. Solo, which is known as Asynchronous. Co-op, which is Two players on the same console, or Multiplayer, which is Synchronous up to 8 players online at a time. First we will start with the ASync. 
Synchronous Racedays, are entirely similar to ASync Racedays, except the fact you're playing live with up to eight people. If you cannot have eight people racing all at once, you would have AI competators introduced and fill up whatever spots are empty. Also, with the Sync Races you have a 2 minute lobby time, which is used to swap cars, if nessesary, or for the alternating leader host to change the options for which race is next. After players sit idle for 5 seconds, the timer speeds up to 10 seconds, and the quit game is locked out, so you cannot quit the match, keeping players from disconnecting last second.
I must say, compared to the lack of challenge Carbon had brought to the table, ProStreet is a welcome sight, right from the beginning you must work and fight your way through each race to win. Challenging AI, who can make mistakes just as easily as you can, crashing, missing lines, taking corners too wide, all make the play value of PS worth its name. The harder you set the game in your initial selection, will determine how competative the AI are. I reccomend everyone race on King Mode for the ultimate challenge. And of course, the online racing will be as competative as your friends and you make it.
Yes, I have hyped ProStreet to be the god of all racing games, but of course, not everything is as great as it should be, there were a few downfalls with dropped some points for EA this year. Sadly the Synchronous multiplayer was a little laggy at the beginning, but once the racers started spreading out, the lag seemed to disappear. The lack of replay, is a very sad feature left out this year, but understandable, EA claims that the replay memory wasn't properly replaying the damage the way it was originally in the game, so they still want to work on it, a high probability that it will be in the next installment of NFS. The damage wasnt as extensive as original teaser trailer had made it out to be, but again, this could be a part with the fact that alot of general users just would not enjoy the game if they couldnt proceed through the game very easily. Alot of players would be frustrated to have to continually repair their cars, especially with wheels falling off and the likes, Damage was originally too heavy, but now, its just a little too light. Next year, they'll have a happy medium. The last real downfall I noticed was the lack of entering the pause menu during a crash, I'd have liked to be able to restart a race when I crash, or even go into the photomode and shoot a picture of a wild and crazy wreck, but that just didnt happen this year. This is a suggestion already in the mailbox for next years installment.
And for a special bonus to those who have read the entire review, EA and SpikeTV have worked on releasing an hour long documentary called "The Birth of ProStreet" which describes the culture of Sanctioned racing, along with alot of actual game footage from the game itself, and how EA used realtime racedays in order to help give the game its needed research. The documentary airs on SpikeTV Nov10 @ 1am EST.
