NFS Underground 2 details

Details of the hotly pursued Need For Speed Underground 2 have appeared on the game's official website, giving us a better idea of how EA/Black Box plans to improve on last year's chart-topping chav racer wet dream. In short, it sounds like the experience of driving around Los Angeles for a week without using brakes.

As indicated in the original announcement, NFSU2 will rely on us zooming around five distinct neighbourhoods connected by freeways in heavily customised cars and getting involved in impromptu head-to-head races and the like. Those neighbourhoods will range from hilly suburban areas to a downtown grid, and force us to contend with differing road conditions, real-time weather effects and various hazards along the way.

In a nod to the likes of Midnight Club II, NFSU2 will involve finding people to race instead of just hitting a button. In fact, "the streets are your menus" this time out, although we imagine the heavy duty customisation will rely on a more traditional approach to make sense of the hundreds of new handling, performance, visual and audio customisations, including the likes of scissor doors, roof scoops, hoods, rims, wide body kits and neon trims. And we thought our furry dice were pretty cool...

In addition to the last title's Circuit, Drift and Drag events, we'll also be able to test our mettle in three new modes we haven't seen mentioned yet, and base our custo-car templates on more than 30 vehicles from the likes of Mitsubishi, Nissan, Toyota, Ford and Volkswagen.

Aaaaand of course rounding things off we can expect online options on both PS2 and now Xbox, thanks to the Xbox Live agreement EA and Microsoft announced during the latter's pre-E3 press conference last Monday. But will it rev-olutionise the genre? (Coat. Fetching.)

Read more, and sign-up to see various bits of concept art, by heading over to the game's official site. The full game is due out later this year on every current console platform and PC.