Need For Speed ProStreet

But then you can always turn some of it off and concentrate on customising your car and racing. It's not very exciting, but there's lots of it to do, with several events in each of the many Race Days and Showdowns you attend. There are standard multi-car races, which are what they are, and Time Trials, where you're racing around the same track as the others but spread out, a bit like Formula One qualifying sessions. There are also Drift races, where you throw the back of the car out for as long as possible to gather points. These aren't actually that bad (and I understand that last year's equivalents robbed you of all your points for going off the track, which ProStreet mercifully doesn't), but the lack of attendant speed and the fairly generic drift mechanism aren't going to gang up on PGR or OutRun with any particular success.

The worst events are probably the Drag Races, which aren't much more than a mini-game, but are put to way too much use. They're basically the 10-second-race thing from The Fast And The Furious (which most of the dev team can probably quote verbatim), and involve warming up your tyres by doing wheelspin with the right trigger (trying to hold a cursor in a green bit on a grip bar as much as possible), and then doing the actual race. This is a case of holding down the accelerator (without overheating) at the start line and then using the LB clutch and right-analogue gear-shifting to build up speed quickly. So in effect, it's pressing two buttons when prompted, then pressing two buttons when prompted, and then doing two more rounds of it. And then doing the entire thing again. It gets more difficult, and if you invest yourself enormously in tuning your car then it's possible to derive real satisfaction from reducing your best times by fractions of a second, which is of course the game's intention, but it's too much hard and repetitive work to get to that point, and my enthusiasm dwindled long beforehand.

Sector races are more interesting. Each track is split into four sectors, and the person who goes through one the fastest "owns it" until someone beats the time for that sector. Anyone who takes over ownership of a sector banks some points, and anyone who goes through subsequently without beating the target time gets nothing. That said, can anyone spot the fundamental flaw? It's that the first person off the line (cars start one after another, ala Time Trials) gets to bank four sectors' worth of points on the first lap. If the second person beats all of those times, he or she gets four sectors' worth of points too. But if the third person beats the first set of times but not the second, there's no reward at all. You can't fight for a better starting position, so that's that really.

Elsewhere, NFS' relationship with the Internet is confined to PS3 and Xbox 360 (the version tested here), and the ability to define your own Race Days full of events and custom racer line-ups is nice enough. EA also uses your broadband connection to serve in-game advertising, and it may not be overly intrusive (it's not like EA doesn't already fill its own games with fairly blatant self-promotion), but squeezing you for shareholder value is taken to an alarming new level at times here. One of the load screens tells you to send EA an SMS to buy the ProStreet mobile games, and every time you buy a car in the shop you're asked whether you want to use in-game cash (i.e. what you've worked for) or Microsoft Points. You can already download premium bundles of cars from Live to save you the trouble of actually unlocking them, which seems a bit pointless to me, and also neatly breaks the difficulty curve of the game for anyone who does it anyway.