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Thursday, November 25, 2010

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2010

I have been playing the newest title of the “used to be popular” Need for Speed series and I have to tell you that I am absolutely loving it. It reminds me how I used to play NFS in the Most Wanted and Carbon days. I do not just play the game. I record the game and post the videos or at least tried to post videos. I bet there are few drifting videos on the my youtube channel. But that was when I was living in Sri Lanka. You know, crappy internet? Now I do not have that problem. How long does it take me to encode and upload a race at HD? Just about 5 minutes for the entire process. Weee! (How much will I miss this speed when I go back the Sri Lanka someday!!!)

Anyways, I finished Call of Duty Black Ops to quickly because I had to start playing the game. I installed it on the SSD, so I don’t know if the load times are better or not. No way to compare. At first, I was a bit shocked to find out the handling was a bit like NFS Pro Street. I’m sure there are people who love simulation type racing (GRID was like that, but it was fun! Pro Street wasn’t) Anyways, there is a bit of everything. Much of it is like arcade, but it is not just like that. You have to properly drive the car! However, I still cannot get a non-drifty curve with big bends. I always drift. It is fun though. But I bet it kills some time. Doesn’t matter. All that matters it drifting is FUN! I know why Jeremy loves drifting so much, even if it peels off the tires so badly.

Anyways, back to the game. The first race wasn’t great. The car wasn’t great. That race alone can make someone hate the game. But it gets much much better afterwards. The graphics are nice. Of course, they don’t use all the tech they can to implement simple, but breath taking sceneries. The graphics are pretty nice. There aren’t much special effects though. (I hear there is a patch coming in a few days’ time which would add weather effects like rain and snow! Gotta apply that as soon as it comes out!

The cop chases are fun! I don’t like being the cop, but I like getting away. Cops in this game is much much harder than the previous one. But spike strip doesn’t get you in one go. They all add up as damage to the car. After some point, you get caught. (well, at least that is what I felt. Maybe not how it is supposed to work.) In the previous hot pursuit game, the helicopter dropped fuel barrels. Now they drop spike strips! Yikes!! Cops can shoot an EMP blast as well. Luckily, it doesn’t bring the car to a complete stop. It is also like the spike strip. Adds to damage. What is nice is that the drivers are equipped with the same tech. They can drop a spike strip, shoot and EMP blast, and there are few other tricks to get away from the cops. One of the hardest parts it dodging an EMP blast. Sometimes braking helps, sometimes you can drop a spike strip to kill the cop car which got you locked into an EMP blast…like wise.

And all these things require what kind of a PC to run the game smoothly? I don’t know and I don’t car. My PC runs the game amazingly well. FPS is around 50-60 at max details but no AA. Who can spend that much for just AA, right?? Even when recording with FRAPS, the FPS is around 40. The game seems to be single threaded. I see only core 0 running at full speed. Others are idling. That sucks! I hope the game is not CPU bound, even on my PC!!

Anyways, here are the gameplay videos I uploaded to youtube. Enjoy! (click on the arrow buttons to navigate the videos.

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