Be Excellent To Each Other

Right, I have to stop playing this today as it's making me absolutely furious.

I really hope I'm wrong here, but:

I think the last time I played a racing game where your opponents were this irrelevant to actual "racing" was Ridge Racer Type 4 on the Playstation. In RR4, your opponents would all disappear into the distance when the race started, and you'd gradually overtake them over the course of the three laps. This is because it was based on an arcade game, so you'd want to have lots of cars to overtake at all times during your two minutes playing it. It also meant the designers could place your opponents so you'd come across them at key moments so the overtake was dramatic or otherwise exciting.

In NFS:HP, your opponents are perhaps the worst rubberbandy cunts to come along in years. Do Muscle Reflex (a race) and you'll see. Do sort of okay, and your opponents are thick and fast around you, as you struggle to get ahead. Pull your shit together, get some decent boost built up, accelerate ahead... and your opponents are thick and fast around you, as you struggle to get ahead. How can I post such wildly different times in two seperate races and still have my opponents bunched up around me if they aren't being hamfistedly manipulated by the game itself? Even if I manage to keep most of my speed through a shortcut, don't use up too much boost and am still going fairly quickly when I return to the main road, I can guarantee that an AI or three will cruise past me, not even using their boost (you can see the exhaust flames when they do) as if I was standing still.

They are just there, like the AI cops, to constantly get in your way, hassle you and perhaps cause an unlucky accident. Which, in a game where you're competing to post the best time against your friends, is fucking ridiculous. It would be like a 100 metre dash where there's a 50% chance that one of the competitors might suddenly turn and backhand you in the face, while the other two suddenly start channeling Usain Bolt for five seconds and jog effortlessly past you. The playing field is incredibly uneven.

Then the cop missions, especially the Rapid Response ones, where 90% of my failures are due to randomly spawned fucking traffic that DOESN'T PULL ONTO THE SHOULDER BUT INSTEAD STOPS DEAD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING ROAD when you approach. The number of times that I've had a spectacular time but then have some cunt AI who's stopped completely right there in the lane and I either slam into them or a wall trying to avoid them is un-fucking-believeable.

Make no mistake about it, the game is exciting. But Midnight Club LA did pretty much everything this does, and far, FAR better, two whole years ago.

Rubber-banding is par for the course in these games. As for MC: LA doing it better, I disrespectfully disagree, you twat.

As I say, I hope to be proved wrong by playing it some more this week. But I am at controller-throwing stage with it at the moment, and so am giving it a break for today.

Certainly, moving up a level is nice, with all the new cars you've been forced to look at finally becoming available to drive. The Lamborghini Reventon police mission was something of an eye-opener as to what the later stages of the game will be like.

Hmm. I've been playing it in bursts, an hour or two a day. Like I did with Ass Crud II. Enjoyed it a lot more than I would if I just played the hell out of it, because there are so many potentially irritating things. I'll try to beat a time until I feel the burning in my stomach, then I turn it off. I usually nail it first time the next day.

In many regards I can't disagree with your objections to the game and how it behaves, certainly having random traffic in the basic time trial stages is an absolute nonsense, and I got a little piqued this evening on a racer stage that was about 16.5 miles long and appeared to be wiping me out on an apparently random basis.

However, after a few retries, and honing my car choice down, and as daft as this sounds, 'learning how to deal with the randomness', I had a really good run and got through, to the extent that I could have sustained a couple of horrible unfair crashes towards the end and still won.

The rubberbanding is nothing new for Burnout, (and let's be clear, this is a Burnout game, not an NFS game, EA have just branded it to suit them), and neither are the unfair situations it chucks at you (Burnout Paradise did it but it 'felt' OK (or at least less annoying) because it was an open world).

I'm pressing through the racer career first (L13 now) so can't comment on the cops, maybe it's a lot worse as a cop than a racer, but up to now I certainly haven't come up against any gamebreakers, but then again I haven't tried to beat a friends time in earnest apart from the that 'first look' stage with the Zonda, where the random traffic problem became very apparent, and it took me 23 attempts to beat loopdreams (I may well have been beaten again on that one since.)

Racing games always have a tough balancing act, especially the arcadey ones, we all know what Forza was like when you got off into the front before the first corner and just stayed there for the entire race without ever seeing another car - arcade racers just can't let that happen, so you basically have to accept that they'll cheat in one way or another.

Maybe I'm just a bit too forgiving, but then again I'm getting back into the 360 and more 'casual' PC games after 2 1/2 years immersed in WoW, whereby someone fucking sneezing at the wrong time could wipe a 25-man raid and leave everyone with a 15 minute drag to get the party back to where they were - so a few unskippable cutscenes and some cheaty AI aren't really causing me too much offence

All in all I reckon Hot Pursuit is a lot of fun, and for every OH YOU CHEATING BASTARD moment it delivers, it delivers two or three sublime moments where you take down a couple of cops and the closest opponent racers, barge through a roadblock, and then do an insane perfect turbo to the finish line (and maybe EMP a helicopter in the process) - so for now at least, I'm giving it a pass

It's not making me furious like it is Perkies, it's just making me realise that despite all their spectacle (or perhaps because of it) I find arcade racers really, really fucking dull. I find trying to beat someone's time or improve my own about ten times more thrilling just on a track with a car that handles in an intricate, believable way. When it comes to actual racing I agree about Forza but I've had far more fun than this racing through the pack in F1 2010 for instance so I don't think that having AI that cheats to the point where it's no longer a race is a pre-requisite for a decent race in a game. Anyway I'll have a few more goes tomorrow then get it traded in and see what GT5 has to offer.

@AE: While you can anticipate the randomness to an extent, you cannot fully prepare for it. The developers seem to have intended this, with one of the tips warning you not to cut blind corners in the oncoming lane just in case.

But the problem lies in the game's relentless, OCD-esque obsession with your friends' times. You can't have people competing, as WTB said, for milliseconds, when nobody will have the same playing field to do it from. Luck is far too big a factor, and even if you don't care about your friends' times no matter how much the game shoves them in your face, you still have the game's own targets which you still have to hope you get the right set of circumstances for. It's not helped by all the cars feeling extremely big and heavy, and so you can't react quickly to swerve around obstacles quickly. Hell, if you start to move in one direction and change your mind, tough shit. You're going to go that way for quite some way before you can come back.

@markg: Yup. If you could just drive the tracks, unmolested, and get leaderboard times that way, it would be fine.

My problem is that in NFS:HP you are reduced to a time trial, except with constant interference from some truly spiteful cunts who you can never shake. It's like being a child and having a sibling who is absolutely determined to spoil your fun short of just pressing reset on the console.

If they were to seperate these two elements, it would be fine. But to be told you're no good and have failed to get the gold medal in that race, and you know it's because you clipped a civilian car that hadn't even fucking been there the last dozen attempts, well, that can fuck off.

Hmmm, I'm getting a bad feeling about this... Burnout Revenge has cost me two controllers so far and I still have that last cunting Road Rage event to perfect... I hope this game won't affect me in the same way or I may just have to give it up. Then again, Burnout Paradise was nothing but joyful and never had me seeing red.

Well, it should arrive today, we'll see.

So, I think Perkies just saved me from buying this by reminding me it has lots of the bits I didn't like in Burney Pee and Midnight Club. Cheers!

No problem. You're welcome to come and try it to see for yourself.

Don't forget, guys, you can upload a picture to your profile at the NFS website, or use your Live Vision camera to take one (just like in Burny Pee) in the settings menu (X from the main menu).

Also, you can get your pictures taken in Photo mode to download, like this unfortunate cop that was going on an unexpected fishing trip:

So the game makes you watch an advert before you can play it?

Think I'll be skipping it then.

I think that's probably the daftest reason to give it a swerve to be honest. It's a short ad and you only see it the first time. If you're a fan of arcade racers and you can avoid obsessing over friends' times then there's an awful lot to like about it.

I am a fan of arcade racers*. Huzzah!


* Well WEC Le Mans anyway.

Actually I wonder how much Blockbusters will give me for trade in on this? Given that I already used the code to get all the online stuff.

On an arcade racer theme, I was playing Burnin' Rubber the other day and somehow noticed (after 20 years) it features slipstreaming.

Kind of amazed an 8 bit racer does that. Very amazed its taken me 20 years to realise!

There's plenty of EA's business practices you could take a principled stand against anyway. Insisting you register seperately with them and use their servers, which they can then shut down whenever they like (sometimes within a year of release). Unskippable in-game adverts, online passes, etc etc. It's a topic for another thread.

Anyone who's done that first McLaren F1 race on the snowy mountain, what is the target time to get gold? It doesn't tell you, and despite putting in an excellent race and finishing second only to WTB, I'm still only getting silver.

Well I got gold, so beat my time!

edit: And I dunno what the target is, but it definitely tells you before the race...

3:08... it doesn't say on either loading screen (it just says 'get first for gold and 8,000 bounty) and only tells you in the top right corner once you get the controls. Which means you don't have time to look at it.

It's odd, as the other time trial I just did does tell you on the loading screen.

Question about boost: Do you use bits of boost to push your speed even higher while on straightaways, or do you save it to use to accelerate again out of corners? I seem to be getting only negligible differences to my times no matter what I try.

That's the subtlety of the boost system! If you're already rattling along at a fair old rate, I'd save it for exiting corners and going up hills. You'll notice when you're going up hills that it's almost like you're stuck in a lower gear, which is the perfect time to use your boost. And obviously coming out of drifts and tight corners you want to get your speed back up to as close to max as possible. If you're boosting when you're already going full pelt, you're just wasting it because it doesn't actually give you much of a higher top speed, it just gets you to that top speed more quickly.

You've also got to watch out for shortcuts. Some of them will slow you down significantly dependent on the type of car you're in. If you're in the Impreza, go for it, but if you're in a Lambo, the dirt track will destroy your time, even if it's a much shorter route.

On the McLaren route, there's a shortcut to the left which is actually tarmac, so that's fine, but the one on the right which goes through some caves just slows you down.

I've just done it. I don't really understand what I did so differently to shave five whole seconds off my time.

Finished the racer career mode this evening, although not properly finished as I still have quite a few golds to get, still have loads of friends times to challenge, and am not even level 20 either (just 15, or 16, can't actually remember lolz).

Had a little look at the police career mode and that seems to be quite a bit different so probably some decent mileage in that too.

Will most likely divide my time from now on between getting all gold and/or beating friends in racer career mode, and progressing police career mode as well.

It's not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination, and its flaws are many, but up to now I've found it to be a very pleasant aracadey racer sort of experience.

(The one thing I think they really need to fix is the traffic, just have fixed traffic patterns for every fucking event, everything else that irritates about the game is trivia really, but random traffic in a time-based game is really fucking stupid.)

Driving along and having not seen a car coming the other way in some time, you become genuinely anxious, because you know the game is due to spawn one and become terrified it'll place it in just the right place to ruin your game.

CRUCIAL INFORMATION: Go into Audio Settings, and to Soundtrack. You can select any saved playlist of music stored on your 360's hard drive (in my case, my old Test Drive Unlimited playlist).

It doesn't seem to let you choose a USB device like an iPod, though.

OOOH! Aces! I've found the soundtrack to be, er, "not very good" so far. I liked the Burny Pee soundtrack as well. Especially the relaxing classical section.

Can you get rid of that fucking awful 'dramatic-yet-generic' music that plays when the police are chasing you?

The main soundtrack is passable overall, but that chase music really pisses me off.

It seems to be very quiet compared to the game soundtrack, though, so even music at 100% and sfx at 60% I am struggling to hear it.

HOWEVER! It also means that, without the sheer awfulness of that hip-hop mangling of the MGMT song, you can now easily pick out the traffic blasting their horns in warning if you're heading for a head on collision!

Yes, using a custom soundtrack will do that.

It is just playing my own music constantly, menus, loading screens, everything. It mostly saves you the trouble of going into the music player (all 10 seconds of it) and choosing a playlist.

However, it does seem to work well. You have all the noise and excitement of a pursuit, and can't really hear the music. I then had a huge, massive crash -helicopter dropped a spike strip which my cop car hit, swerved into the last suspect and killed him, thus ending the pursuit with my car still spinning in circles - and as the noise quickly subsided and the dust settled, 'Heart of Asia' by Wartergate became fully audible again during the post-race cutscene. Which was pretty freakin' cool.

Oh, and I've noticed you can use Y to control your siren and lights. Tapping it switches between wail, yelp and phaser, while holding it turns it on and off. Pointless but fun.

Got Wanted Level 20 as a racer now, the bounty required was very well judged, by the time I'd got gold for everything and beat the outstanding challenges on my wall, I was only a couple of races away from hitting Level 20.

The random traffic is the biggest problem with this game, whoever at Criterion decided it was a good idea to have you be subjected to COMPLETELY UNMISSABLE CRASHES at the end of a 14 mile time trial because a car just appeared from a junction in front of you, really needs to be repeatedly battered about the head with several real cars to demonstrate just how annoying it can be.

It's bad enough when your racing line gets fucked up because a car (or two, or three) happen to be on the track in exactly the wrong positions in front of you, but at least that can be avoided (even if it does fuck up your time), but when other racers smash up or effectively drop traffic into your lap from in front of you, or cars pop out of junctions dead ahead of you, then yes, it becomes almost murderously annoying, because there is literally nothing you can do about it.

However, it doesn't happen that much, the game is still very challenging and exciting, and it does mostly reward skill and good driving in equal measures (in particular the Gauntlet stages have some decent depth of strategy to them that consistently works once you get it nailed).

I didn't feel like chucking in the towel at any point on the way to Racer Level 20, I'll see if the police career mode offers the same amount of fun.

And besides which, at least it's not fucking GT5

I agree with everything said above. The randomly positioned traffic is a huge issue in the pursuit (hah!) of fun.

You are trying to nail a perfect run through a level to get gold (and many do require one), you do the same line through a corner to ensure you maintain speed and there's some fucking van or something that wasn't there the last twenty times, and it either fucks your line up or you just hit it. It's not helped that their response to something coming straight at them, lit up with lights and siren or not, is to just stop right where they are, no attempt to get out of the way. I am aware that sometimes the traffic in TDU would end up swerving INTO you, but it's nowhere near as frustrating or intrusive as the traffic is here.

This really is a shame because as AE says, it's incredibly exciting and fun the rest of the time. At times I've wished there was no traffic at all, just me and the road and my opponents. I accept that it's meant to take place on real roads where real people would also be driving, but they really do get in the way far more than any other 'real roads' styled game I've played.

I do hope you're not referring to the awesome Chase and Status version of Kids.

So I finally received it yesterday. What a gorgeous game! I think I spent an hour in freedrive just enjoying tearing through the landscape in a Lamborgini. And the races are great, really get the adrenaline flowing. I haven't tried any of the cop career yet.

And I am still no. 1 in the race from the demo! Although I guess I wouldn't be if I had Perkies in my friends list, but I can't add him because he has a full friends list. The popular bastard.

No, it's this: Chiddy Bang



A space is being made for you!

Turns out I was wrong on both counts, as it was Time To Pretend remixed by High Contrast.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJFtEuyNGuU

That's cool. It strikes me of being a mishmash of the Hoppipolla/Planet Earth video, but the music gives it more the feel of this legendary Sesame Street clip.

You mean this one?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHROHJlU_Ng

I'd be sticking my furry head right up that skirt/in-between those funbags if I were Elmo. The spawny cunt.

Cheers! I am trying to send a friend request from the Xbox Live web page, but it seems a bit flaky. Or I'll try from my box later on.

Meh! Lasermink is all over me like a cheap suit.

I am going to ignore AUTOLOG BREAKING NEWS for this evening and concentrate on the cops

I wish you could get rid of Autolog Breaking News if you're not interested in it, instead of it popping up every blasted time to remind you that an increasing number of minutes ago, someone beat a time in some race you did. You know, read the item once, and then have an option to erase it.

This game has annoyed me this evening, as it transpires that the cop mode is far more fiddly than the racer mode, and arguably a bit broken overall.

The RAPID RESPONSE stages are a real endurance test, because not only does it still give you random traffic, IT EVEN PUNISHES YOU FOR DODGING THE TRAFFIC AND CLIPPING THE WALLS. As if bouncing off the scenery wasn't enough (i.e. you're slowed down by definition), the game cheerfully tacks on a 2 second penalty every time you do it.

WELL EXCUSE ME MOTHERFUCKER - my psychic 360 skills are at a low ebb, I have to go for the racing line because I need to get a good time, if you chuck in your 20% probability of randomly fucking me over, I'll just have to start again.

Of course one could always smack into the traffic that has randomly got in the way, but that chucks up a 3 second penalty.

The mass-destruction Chase HQ mode is fucked too, because the behaviour of baddies against roadblocks is almost entirely unpredictable, yeah you might smack into a car as he barrels into the roadblock, you also might just miss him and go sailing on past into the distance - attempt fucked.

Repeated play does bring better results, but whereas with the racer mode where I felt I could get on top of the randomness, cop mode just adds a whole load of other factors in. (On a one-on-one chase route, I EMP-ed my target with considerable skill I felt, only to find that after the cutscene he'd disappeared off down a 2 mile shortcut I had no way of getting onto, and I was still on the main road, OK then, I won't use an EMP at that point of the course......)

Perkies' other criticisms become more valid, the cop mode doesn't do its 'SKIPPING' as quickly as racer mode, (so sometimes you do end up watching half of what you'd allegedly skipped), and one that's fucked me off now I come to think about it is that the cops' boost system works differently to the racers', but then appears to kick you up the ass with the time penalties when you go a bit more mental with it - with no way of skilfully/dangerously regenerating it.

I'm going to stick with it for now, but whereas the racer career easily outweighed the bad with the good, I fear the cop career might tip in the other direction.

I'm holding this game at a CHOPPOTURNIP 9/10 for the time being, but it's flickering down to an 8/10, if cop mode carries on like this, it'll be a 7/10 by the time I've finished.

The most annoying thing about this game is that it's only about two or three REALLY FUCKING STUPID DECISIONS away from being absolutely and unreservedly brilliant - I'd say I've already got my money's worth out of it, but it's a shame that I'm liking it less the more I play it.

EDIT - Sorry Perkies only saw your invite as I was logging off, I turned off notifications for obvious reasons (no I do NOT want to see that someone has logged on and therefore distract my attention just as I'm about to do something I've been after for ages.....), but there doesn't seem to be any granularity to it - game invites I'd be happy to see, random messages about everything else less so - so I've just got the whole lot turned off.

I wondered what you were doing, but after five minutes left my lobby and went into singleplayer. So, how to notify you in future so you'll see it?

Cop mode is both satisfying (for the takedowns of the racers) and infuriating (the rapid response, for the civilian traffic not pulling onto the hard shoulder) in equal measure. I have many a WTF moment whenever I unlock a new car and get given some supercar with a lightbar incongruously strapped to the roof.

I'm not griping right now. I'm driving through the desert in a red Corvette convertible with Taylor Swift on the radio. It's my trip to Vegas all over again!

EDIT: "Seacrest County PD cutbacks mean you only have access to spike strips for this pursuit"

Surely we could sell a few of our Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera Rapid Deployment Units to raise some cash? We'll only wreck them anyway.

I basically won't see messages until I've finished gaming for the session, 'cause when I drop back to the dashboard that's when I'm finishing playing for the night. Pre-arranging a BEEX session for this game would be good if we can get the numbers, I haven't tried online at all yet so don't even know what the modes are.

Maybe I was a bit harsh on the game last night, but after I quit the game I had a bad vibe about it, whereas my sessions as a racer always left me with a good vibe. There's something about the cop mode that seems a bit incongruous too, I know the whole game's preposterous, but being given an Aston Martin One-77 as a novice cop to have a go in pushed it a bit too far - and the fact that at the start of a Rapid Response event you nearly cause a pile up anyway by doing a 180 in busy traffic.

On top of that, given the handling model and random traffic, punishing you for touching the fucking walls is positively masochistic.

I'll give it another session tonight and see if things improve, but after the gleeful joy of racer mode, cop mode isn't sitting right with me at all.

This may sound a bit silly, but if the cop mode is making the game worse, why not just not play the cop mode?

All the Rapid Responses start with a similar cutscene. Maybe it's meant to aggravate you because it's the only time the traffic is shown to actually try and avoid hitting you?




There is a huge element of luck. The last one I played last night was trying to take down a single Shelby Super Snake. I had about five attempts where I just couldn't get near him, all my helicopter-spike strips missed. I was frustrated as anything. Suddenly on the sixth attempt he wasn't just disappearing into the distance, he actually hit a spike strip, there wasn't a traffic car on the exit from a tight bend, and I took him down incredibly easily.

TBH, sounds like typical Burnout/Criterion randomness. (IIRC, the traffic in BO2 wasn't random, which made things easier.)

Really enjoying this.

Pluses:

Very quick, very fun. Ideal quick hit stuff. Handling model is subtle, haven't quite got the hang of it yet. (Feels a bit ponderous and not arcade pointy. Although the GT3 RS handled like a dream.

Minuses: It is just Chase HQ with bells on. Shortcuts hard to find. Tracks are going to be difficult to learn. Can see the issues Meaty is complaining about. Oh, and in the warmup scenes, it looks like the cars float on the road.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/4122146.page

'Guided Missile' rapid response mission had me on the brink of tearing the disc out and snapping it in half.

A 200mph freeway section, full of cars that are in all lanes and just STOP FUCKING DEAD so you ram into the back of them.

Then you emerge from the freeway and have cars that will turn left right across your path.

How the fuck did they manage to program cars that got out of the way for the cops back on the PS1 but can't manage it now?

Because they didn't want that, obviously.

No, they wanted it so my punting a car from behind would cause him one bar's worth of damage but the fact said impact sends him straight into a barrier at 150mph and brings him to an instant, smashing halt doesn't count in the fucking slightest.

OMFG cop mode is sooooo broken, I'm going to take Grim...'s advice and stop playing this game

Racer mode was a real blast though, and gave me the best part of a week's gaming.

I'm just too distraught to go into detail at the moment.

Well, not really, I'll just get another glass of vino (it is Friday night!) and play Pac Man CE DX instead

Overall? I'd say this game isn't worth the full-fat £40 experience, pick it up when it's £20, enjoy the racer mode, and pretend the cop mode does not fucking exist.

If we can get a few BEEXers on for a session that'd be cool, and may elevate the game back up into the realms of decency - but I'm going to call it a day here and peg it at 7/10. I'm really surprised how many areas Criterion have dropped the ball in with this game, it's a definite step backwards from Burny Pee and indeed the previous Burnouts.

We just did have a bit of multiplayer action, well me and Mr. Perkies.

Very good and stable connection, compared to what I have experienced with Forza 3. We really needed some more people, but I thought we did manage to have some exciting one-on-one racing in the end. It's quite excellent to see the opponent pop into a shortcut or come swooping out of one (the latter especially if you see it in your rear view mirror!) or see him doing some last minute traffic dodging.