Need For Speed - Hot Pursuit

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Demo hit live a couple of days back. Is it me or are the cars too twitchy for a Criterion game? Maybe a side-effect of slipstreaming, but my car would always be fishtailing as I'd approach offending speeders. Looks fantastic and gives a great sense of speed, just the car handles like ass.

Killing douchebags left and right is hilarious in this game. Managed to swipe a guy into an oncoming pick up truck. Reality be damned this game is fun. Now if my friends list weren't busy with Black Ops/Fallout the social aspects would be more useful...I can almost see this languishing the same way Blur did.

Speaking of which - hope Bizarre Creations survive the turmoil and go to a better publisher.

Edited to add, and not post whore...

Online is insanely fun. Real people are much more interesting to race against than ai guys. Evading a speeders spike strip and emp'ing him, followed by a nitrous t-bone, puts a god damned smile on my face. Seriously, this is the best racing game out so far this year.

Pretty cool that when you do try to post a license pic to the games Autolog site, it actually fucking works and show up in the game...compared to the previous messes/attempts (Tiger Woods) by ea at implementing that kind of connectivity.

quick tip for singleplayer interceptor missions, if the AI hits your road block, turn around facing the road block, they'll respawn and run into all over again...

Need For Speed - The Runs is out. So the lasting legacy of the Frostbite engine is every game will have built in god sized dust specs on the 'camera' during cutscenes. It's an annoying effect. Doesn't show up during the actual races, only during the story bits.

Cut scenes and quick time events aren't a major factor in the early part of the game so far, so that's not bad. Cars are weird to handle when you deal with standard corners or hairpin turns. There's a weight to them that makes it feel like you're driving a truck that's about to flip over. But at the same time the cars do precisely answer to your steering movements unlike the weighty feel Driver San Fran had. Game starts out feeling like a modernized take on Outrun or Cruisin' World...more Cruisin' World now that I think about it. Very intense races, when you factor in the challenging roads, external conditions; but I'm not a fan of the rubber band ai boss fights at the end of stages, where you can literally lose a race because the ai just plows by even though you're using your nitro for the last dash - it's cheap and unnecessary. The other knock is it feels like they've re-used Criterions assets from last years Hot Pursuit (you'll see some of them in the opening title screens). Still it's fun white knuckle racing that's more of a rental you can plow through in a couple of days than an actual long term investment that Hot Pursuit or Forza provide.
Edited by mongycore - 11/16/11 at 8:02am