Need For Speed Underground

GamesRevolution Ratings: 10/9 Excellent

Import racing fans should definitely check out Need for Speed Underground.

It's hard to talk about an import car racing game without mentioning the movie The Fast and the Furious. The movie put as much of a spotlight on tricked-out cars as it did on its cast, and the resulting effect caused a huge surge of interest in the import racing scene. In the wake of the film, a number of other properties have risen up to try to claim a piece of the lucrative scene as its own. Need for Speed Underground is EA's attempt to get involved, and it's mostly a success

A driving game is only as good as its handling and physics model. In this respect, Need for Speed Underground does a pretty great job, though it's by no means a realistic simulation--nor is it trying to be. It's definitely been designed with accessibility in mind rather than focusing on realistic simulation aspects. In fact, the game probably controls best with an analog, console-style gamepad. As a result, the game is quite easy to pick up and play, though some portions require a little more finesse than others. Driving with finesse earns you style points in a system similar to the one found in the Project Gotham Racing series for the Xbox, though this one is much more lenient and awards points for the simple acts of powersliding, drafting, and catching air. Style points accumulate regardless of the mode you're playing in, and you can unlock rewards each time the style points meter is filled.

Need for Speed Underground contains a decent-sized car roster. Right off the bat you'll find a Honda Civic, which is one of the more popular rides in the scene. But the inventory doesn't stop there. You'll also find a VW Golf, Acura Integra, Toyota Supra, S2000, Ford Focus, Dodge Neon, Mazda Miata, and a few more. Though the different cars are rated in handling, acceleration, and top speed, in practice the cars don't drive all that differently, especially once you've purchased some upgrades in the career mode.

The import racing scene is heavy on modifying cars with aftermarket parts, and Need for Speed Underground duplicates this aspect pretty well. The car upgrades are broken down into visual and performance upgrades. Performance upgrades come in multiple levels and must be unlocked before you can purchase them. These upgrades include turbocharge, better engines, weight reduction, enhanced braking, computer-chip tuning, nitrous oxide boosts, and so on. The game contains a lot of actual aftermarket brands for its parts, so when you purchase an upgrade, you'll have limited control over which brands you're buying, but the brand makes no difference--all the brand packages perform equally well.

The visual upgrades also have a positive effect on your car. Purchasing spoilers, body kits, replacement hoods, neons, headlights, taillights, or window tinting for your car, or making other major changes to your car's appearance, increases your reputation rating. As your rating gets higher, the multiplier bonus you get on your style points increases, which lets you unlock other rewards more quickly.

The main reward you get for your style point total is access to vinyl stickers for your car. They start out simple, such as racing stripes and designs, but you can eventually put brand stickers from many different aftermarket part and stereo makers all over your car.
The tracks in Need for Speed Underground are well designed, but even though there are well over 20 different tracks in the game, they get pretty repetitive. The game uses the old trick of opening up or closing certain pathways to reconfigure certain sections of a track while using the same sections over and over again. Because of this, you really have to pay attention to your map as you drive to make sure you're prepared to take the right path. The game offers what appears to be a large city, but going off the track will simply reset your car back onto the proper street.
Need for Speed Underground contains a good variety of different races that help keep the action varied, though a lack of unique tracks keeps most races from feeling different from one another. Circuit racing, standard one-shot runs, and knockout-style circuits are all included, and all offer slightly different takes on the plain old race, and drag racing and drift racing change things up nicely. While the initial thought of drag racing--racing in a straight line--may sound pretty boring, the gameplay is quite different here. The steering gets reduced to slot-car-like lane-change control, and your main focus is on shifting properly. A clear RPM meter is displayed on the left side of the screen, and indicators instruct you when to shift. The early drag races are simple, clear races. But the later tracks throw traffic and other obstacles in the mix, forcing you to worry about lane position as much as you worry about shifting.

Drift racing puts you alone on a short, wide track. Time means nothing here. Instead, you'll be graded on how well you can powerslide around turns. Proper use of the emergency brake is key here, though learning how to drift properly isn't very difficult at all. It isn't as exciting as the drag racing, but it makes for a nice change of pace.

The career mode is called "go underground," and it lets you engage in all of the game's race types in its 111 races. Since the game certainly doesn't contain 111 different track layouts, you'll be spending a ton of time racing the same stretches of road, forward and backward. This can make the mode a little tedious, but this is the only way to make money to spend on car upgrades. Each race comes in three different difficulty settings, and you'll earn different amounts of money depending on which difficulty you select. Being able to select this from race to race is nice, because it lets you make the difficult races easier, ensuring that you progress pretty steadily. That said, the game isn't terribly challenging on its normal setting, so anyone with a shred of driving game skill will probably want to select the hard setting, as it manages to put up a decent challenge most of the time.

Go underground also gives you a few cutscenes, which are meant to give some meaning to your progression by having a pretty bad-looking polygonal woman tell you about your performance, but these are chock-full of really lame, fake attitude and come across as incredibly hokey.

The console versions of Need for Speed Underground allow you to get into two-player races via a split-screen, which works reasonably well. However, the PC and PlayStation 2 versions of the game have online play, which includes head-to-head challenges as well as four-player races. Additionally, you can actually pit PC players against PS2 players, which is a neat inclusion. Online rankings are a factor of your reputation, which increases and decreases as you win and lose races. If you don't feel like putting your good name on the line, you can also drive in unranked races. The online play works pretty well, though lag does manifest itself as cars that sort of skip around the track.

Need for Speed Underground's coolest aspect is probably its graphics. The console versions of the game make use of a pretty dramatic motion-blur effect that gives the streets a grimy, realistic look. The blur also gives you a pretty good feeling of speed. The streets are almost constantly wet, giving them plenty of opportunity to show off their reflectiveness. The cars are also supershiny and reflective, though the reflection doesn't update often enough in the console versions of the game, which makes the reflections look a little choppy. The frame rate also tends to take a few dives in all the console versions, and this, combined with the constant motion blur, makes some parts of Need for Speed Underground look really surreal. The PC version of the game starts out with the motion blur disabled. You can enable it, of course, but it never gets as heavy--or as cool-looking--as in the console versions, and the PC version looks a little too clean as a result. The car models all look pretty accurate, and the additional body kits, spoilers, rims, and other visual add-ons look good. Overall, each version of Need for Speed Underground looks great, though the Xbox version is definitely the best looking of the bunch by making good use of the motion-blur effects while still running at a mostly smooth frame rate. The sounds of racing are well done in Need for Speed Underground. Tire squeals, engine noises, and exhaust notes all come across properly and about as realistically as you'd expect. You'll also notice some great but subtle things, such as the sounds of a turbocharged motor versus a standard motor. There is a lengthy soundtrack with songs from artists such as Nate Dogg, Lil' Jon and the Eastside Boys, Petey Pablo, Rob Zombie, and The Crystal Method. The Xbox version lacks custom soundtrack support, which is disappointing, but the soundtrack definitely fits the theme of the game and has a decent amount of variety

Source:-Http://gamespot.com

GamesRevolution Offers You To See The System Requirments Of This Game.... Don't Visit Other Websites Just Visit GamesRevolution.tk For All Games Stuff.....

System Reqiurments...

Processor: Intel Pentium III
Display Card!: NVIDIA GeForce DDR
Memory: 256MB
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 98

Need For Speed Porche Unleashed 5

GamesRevolution Ratings:- 10/5 Good

Porsche Unleashed is a beautiful, comprehensive, and highly enjoyable racing sim that's suitable for just about any driving Enthusiast.

Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed strays from several conventions previously established by the popular arcade-style exotic-car racing series. For one thing, like its name suggests, Porsche Unleashed features automobiles exclusively from one manufacturer. What's more, the game has a more detailed, more realistic driving and physics model than its predecessors, though the game's realism is scalable. And while Porsche Unleashed has a few minor shortcomings, it nevertheless stands as the most ambitious game in the series since the original. As such, it'll more than likely make you love the Porsche on the off chance you don't already.
Porsche Unleashed looks good enough to do justice to its prestigious German sponsor. The game includes many dozens of different Porsche models from the manufacturer's 50-year product line, and each one bears the unmistakable curvature of a Porsche. The 3D car models are highly detailed: The cars all have working turn signals, brake lights, and headlights, and when you look at them in the garage, you can even check the engine under the hood, pop the trunk, or view the car's interior. The cars shine in the sunlight and reflect street lamps at nighttime, and they can also get noticeably damaged. You can clearly see their independent suspension at work as they corner, thanks to the game's realistic four-point physics model, and you can even see their drivers turning the wheel and shifting gears. You can drive the cars from a 3D cockpit view, from which you get a great sense of speed, but the cockpit view's limited visibility and slower frame rate - as well as the muffled engine noise - make the cutaway first-person view preferable, though you can also select from two external perspectives. The cars in Porsche Unleashed don't look totally perfect, as some of the minor details such as the door handles are part of the texture maps, rather than part of the polygonal geometry. But such details are only evident if you spend a lot of time gawking at your cars in the garage, rather than racing them out on the streets of Europe.

The various courses in Porsche Unleashed look even better than the cars do. Porsche Unleashed is the first Need for Speed since the original to feature extended open-road courses in addition to closed-circuit tracks. The lush natural scenery and subtle lighting effects give you a good sense of where you're driving, whether high up in the mountains at morning or down low by the docks at night. Some tracks offer alternate routes to take, and all of them have plenty of peripheral detail that you'll only start to notice after you've already raced along that stretch of road a half-dozen times. Put it all together, and Porsche Unleashed looks fabulous. The car detail and the great sense of speed you get from behind the wheel, in addition to the quaint backwater European courses and even the game's stylish front-end menus make Porsche Unleashed very classy, much like its namesake. Of further note, you can easily adjust graphics detail and resolution to best suit your system, such that you'll find a good compromise of visual quality and fast performance even on a low-end machine. However, slower computers with less RAM will experience noticeably long loading times before races and even between menu screens.
Porsche Unleashed sounds as good as it looks. You'll hear authentic engine noises and screeching tires throughout each race, along with realistic Doppler effects as you blast by your competition. You can actually hear how powerful the engine is in each of the various cars you'll drive, and you can gauge your RPMs just by listening, rather than by glancing at the tachometer. Porsche Unleashed has more than a dozen fast, funky techno music tracks that help set the pace, although the music might seem anachronistic when you're driving a 1950s-model Porsche.
You'll get to drive the very first Porsches all the way up through its fastest contemporary designs in Porsche Unleashed's evolution mode. The evolution mode begins in 1950 and lets you compete in a series of tournaments to earn cash. Each tournament takes place some years after the previous one, so you can use your earnings to buy new Porsche models as they became available. The evolution mode can be played as a serious simulation: You can tweak your cars' shocks for ride height, stiffness, and travel, just as you can adjust downforce, brake balance, and tire pressure, all to suit the road conditions. Porsche Unleashed is easy to play with automatic transmission in beginner mode, but expert mode can be a real challenge, as even the best Porsche is liable to slide out of control off a sharp corner unless you're ready to brake and downshift around each bend.But even the expert mode is highly forgiving with regard to damage modeling; you'll typically be able to recover even after a head-on collision with some unassuming motorist, though damaging your car can directly affect its steering and its other driving characteristics. You'll have the option to pay for repairs in between races, or you can opt to put your car on the used-car market and hope to make some money off it. Similarly, you can buy used cars as they become available between races, and thus save yourself some money that you can use to purchase lots of different custom parts for the vehicle. The evolution mode is also a clever means of offsetting the game's learning curve, as the older-model Porsches are a lot slower than the modern-day ones. The only problem with the game mode's design is that it'll take you awhile to work your way up to the Porsche models you're used to seeing on the streets, which can get frustrating if you want to cut to the chase right away in the latest 911 Turbo.
If you just want to get behind the wheel of the fastest car Porsche has ever made, then you'll prefer the innovative factory-driver mode, in which you assume the role of a test-driver for the manufacturer. You'll get assignments from various Porsche personalities, including an executive, the chief tester, and even a rival test-driver, and you'll need to complete each of these to advance to the next. There are around three-dozen missions in all, and they range from standard test-driver challenges that test your cornering and acceleration, to more unusual scenarios in which you need to deliver your vehicle for shipment quickly and without damaging it, to rally races, and more. Porsche Unleashed has no hot-pursuit mode like its predecessor, but you'll sometimes encounter Porsche cop cars in the factory-driver mode, who'll try to run you off the road one way or another. Some of the missions are very challenging, but they're short enough and diverse enough that you'll want to persevere through them all, if only to see what sort of exotic car you'll get to commandeer for the next one. Fortunately, no matter what car you're in, the game controls responsively regardless of what peripheral you're using. There's even an option to set your joystick dead-zone to help make your steering more precise.

In addition to the other modes, Porsche Unleashed lets you run a quick race against up to seven opponents, and it also includes a knockout mode that's an endurance match in which the last car around the track is eliminated each lap, until one car wins. The quick-race mode lets you choose from the cars that you've made available in the evolution mode in addition to a few select stock models, which means that you'll need to spend a lot of time racing through the ages before you'll have a wide selection of cars. Porsche Unleashed also includes a history of Porsche that has photographs and even some video advertisements of many of its famous cars. As of this writing, the game's online multiplayer racing mode is still in an open beta-test phase, though Electronic

Arts is already starting to provide additional cars for download.
Porsche Unleashed is a beautiful, comprehensive, and highly enjoyable racing sim that's suitable for just about any driving enthusiast. It makes no false claims about the limits of its extensive features, so although it'll give you a chance to experience what it's like to drive all the different types of Porsches from over the years, it won't let you race those cars against their competition from other exotic-automobile manufacturers. Nevertheless, once you get behind the wheel of one of the high-performance machines featured in Porsche Unleashed, chances are you'll feel no need to drive anything else for a long time.

Source:- http://gamespot.com/

GamesRevolution Offers You To See The System Requirments Of This Game.... Don't Visit Other Websites Just Visit GamesRevolution.tk For All Games

System Requirments..

Pentium 2

32MB Ram

3D Accelerator

150MB HDD

Source:-Http://game-over.com

Need For Speed Hot Pursiut 2

GamesRevolution Ratings:- 10/10 "Excellent"

It certainly is a good arcade-style driving game.........................!!

A few weeks ago, Electronic Arts released three versions of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit II simultaneously. This sequel to the 1998 arcade-style driving game was made available for the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube, but interestingly enough, not all three games were identical. While the PS2 version, which was developed by Black Box, is a wholly satisfying racing game with great graphics and a visceral sense of speed, the Xbox and GameCube versions of Hot Pursuit II are noticeably tamer in terms of control, graphics, and sound. That's because those two versions of the game were developed by a completely different company, EA Seattle, in order to ship on time alongside Hot Pursuit II for the PlayStation 2, which Electronic Arts considers to be the primary version of the game. Unfortunately for PC game players, EA didn't port the superior PS2 version of Hot Pursuit II to the PC. Instead, PC owners get a port of the less spectacular GameCube and Xbox versions of Hot Pursuit II. That's not to say that Hot Pursuit II for the PC is bad. It certainly is a good arcade-style driving game, but it's nowhere near as fun as the PlayStation 2 version.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit II is not a driving simulator. It's not Grand Prix 4, and it doesn't set out to be. This game is all about arcade-style racing, where car-handling properties are wildly exaggerated, and physics are more like loose suggestions, rather than strict laws. Nonetheless, like all of the previous games in this series, Hot Pursuit II has a number of highly coveted car licenses from American and European manufacturers like Lotus, Lamborghini, Dodge, Chevy, BMW, Mercedes, and the two most prestigious car makers, Ferrari and Porsche.
As its name implies, Hot Pursuit II largely focuses on the art of outrunning the law. Actually, Hot Pursuit II is like two games in one. Unlike other racing games, this one has two equally large championship modes, only one of which involves the police. Called "hot pursuit," this career mode is composed of 33 individual racing events that force you to beat a number of opponents, while contending with the police, through a handful of different race types. In contrast, World Championship mode is laid out in a branching manner, and in this mode, you're required to successfully finish one race before unlocking the next. As you'd expect, your opponents will get tougher, your goals harder to achieve, and the police less forgiving as you progress through this tree. The police will come after you if you break the speed limit, and since you must cross the finish line before your opponents do, you'll be breaking that limit constantly. At first, the cops will just send a couple of Crown Victorias after you, but if you refuse to pull over, they'll pull out all the stops to bust you. Much like in Grand Theft Auto III, the number of cops that are thrown at you is measured by the number of stars in the center of the screen. When this meter is full, the police will place barricades and spike strips on the roads, they'll chase you with faster cars, and they'll even call in a helicopter that drops, of all things, explosive barrels in front of you. If the police manage to pull you over just once in a given race (you get three strikes in the PS2 version), you'll have to start all over.
However, that sounds more foreboding than it really is. Hot Pursuit II starts off relatively easy: You'll be driving "low-end" cars like the Lotus Elise and Opel Speedster, as will your competition, and the cops will go easy on you for the most part. As you work your way through the 33 missions, the competition will gradually get stiffer, but never to the point of being frustrating. The other cars are ruthless--they'll take every opportunity to give your rear bumper a not-so-friendly tap, though they themselves are by no means perfect. You'll often see other racers plow into oncoming traffic or miscalculate a turn and ricochet off a wall or guardrail. You'll do that too, especially with some of the faster cars. While the physics in the game are by no means realistic, the cars' performances are still reflective of their real-world counterparts, although in a much exaggerated manner. The Ferrari F50, for instance, has a loose back end, making it harder to control around corners than the tamer BMW M5. Still, you can pretty much go through every race without ever taking your thumb off the gas button, though judicious use of your hand brake makes cornering a lot easier.

It's perhaps a little strange that you're not rewarded for driving wildly in the PC version of Hot Pursuit II, like you are in the PS2 game. In fact, the points system in this version of Hot Pursuit II is completely different from the PlayStation 2 version. Here, you'll be awarded with a bronze, silver, or gold medal upon completing any of the hot pursuit racing events, and each of these awards has a certain point value attached to it. You do get a few points within each race for posting the fastest lap and such, but unlike the PS2 version, which lets you earn points in many different ways, like taking massive jumps, the PC version is much more limited. What's more, you can choose which cars and tracks you wish to unlock yourself by spending your points accordingly--nothing becomes available to you automatically. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; it just seems strange that it's done in a completely different manner from Hot Pursuit II for the PlayStation 2. There are a little more than 30 cars that you can unlock in the game--about a dozen less than in the PS2 game--including 10 cop cars, all of which can be driven at will in the game's challenge mode. Additionally, Hot Pursuit II has 12 unique racetracks, though that number quadruples if you count the mirrored, reverse, and mirrored-reverse courses. In a nice touch, Hot Pursuit II's challenge mode even lets you play as the cops, and you can call in roadblocks and helicopters of your own

Source:- http://gamespot.com/

This Game Feautures Official License From The World's Top Automobile Manufecturers.

GamesRevolution Offers You To See The System Requirments Of This Game.... Don't Visit Other Websites Just Visit GamesRevolution.tk For All Games Stuff.....

SYSTEM REQUIRMENTS.

Minimum System Requirments.

Windows 98/ME/2000/XPProcessor:

Pentium 2 @ 400 MHzMemory:

64 MBHard Drive:

100 MB FreeVideo Memory:

16 MBSound Card: DirectX CompatibleDirectX: 8.0Keyboard & MouseCD/DVD Rom Drive

Recommended System Requirments...

OS: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP

Processor: Pentium 3 @ 933 MHzMemory:

256 MBHard Drive:

100 MB FreeVideo Memory:

16 MBSound Card: DirectX CompatibleDirectX: 8.0Keyboard & MouseCD/DVD Rom Drive

Source:-Http://vgrequirements.info

Need For Speed III Hot Pursuit

GamesRevolution Ratings:- 7.9 Great

Not only is the latest Need for Speed miles ahead of the last NFS game, but it approaches (and dare I say surpasses?), the best of the consoles in terms of sheer fun and speed.

I don't usually play racing games on the PC. Either they're pale imitations of the arcade and console racers, or they're boring 50-lap simulations. I mean, why play Need for Speed II and Test Drive 4 on the PC when I can play Super GT in the arcade and Gran Turismo on the PlayStation? For ages, I told friends that the PC had nothing on the arcade, even venerable classics like Daytona and Sega Rally. Well, I think I'm going to be eating crow for the next few weeks... and loving it. Not only is the latest Need for Speed miles ahead of the last NFS game, but it approaches (and dare I say surpasses?), the best of the consoles in terms of sheer fun and speed.
Need for Speed III is a great game. It has an exhilarating sense of speed, clean and beautiful graphics, polished production values, and trackloads of unadulterated fun. In many ways, Need for Speed III has that same addictive quality I found in Quake II, Starcraft, and Heroes of Might and Magic. That's pretty celebrated company, but I don't think it's an unfounded categorization. Need for Speed III has that same "just one more turn or just one more deathmatch" quality that the other games have. And just like in those games, the action in Need for Speed III is so engrossing and rewarding that the next time you come up for air, you'll find that two hours have whizzed by.
While Need for Speed III shares an addictive quality with those games, it has something of its own: pure speed. This game is fast and fun. The frame rate is fast and incredibly clean. I've played my fair share of PC and console racers where the pop-up was horrible, as cliffs and buildings would suddenly appear out of thin air, many seconds after you should have seen them on the horizon. Whether it's the smart track design or the beautiful engine, the bottom line is that I only saw one or two instances of minor pop-up. And multiplayer is as fast and fun as the single-player experience. The sound of your revving engine and the fast frame rate both combined to create the illusion of breakneck speeds, although the replays didn't look quite as fast I would have liked.
Aside from the speed and addictive quality, Need for Speed III has the requisite list of features that marketers like to put on boxes, journalists like to list, and consumers always look for. There are many cars, with subtle differences, and the ability to tweak more than a few car qualities, such as steering speed, aerodynamics, and suspension. And, surprisingly, the tweaks will affect your car noticeably.
In classic Need for Speed fashion, there are more than a dozen supercars to race, including several bonus cars that open up with sustained excellent race results or cheat codes. The range of cars is a fascinating gallery of every car enthusiast's dream vehicles: Corvettes, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Porsches, Jaguars, Mercedes, and an Italdesign prototype car. There are also roughly ten tracks, including the bonus track, encompassing several different environments and difficulty levels. You'll race through a canyon, snowy mountain caps, urban utopia, and forests. You can race during nighttime and in rain to add further to the track variety. Visibility takes a huge hit in either condition, making races on the harder courses incredibly treacherous. Unfortunately, I didn't experience any noticeable difference in driving under rain; the road didn't appear any slicker and handling was pretty much consistent with perfect weapon. If there was a difference, it was too subtle for me to notice.
The single-player game modes include a single race, knockoff (where you eliminate the last place of each race), tournament (where you race through the entire circuit for points), and hot pursuit. Hot pursuit is EA's answer to all the critics who lamented the loss of the cops in Need for Speed II. You aren't only trying to outrace an opponent, but also escape the pursuing cops. Three tickets, and you're out. Or alternatively, you can play the cop in pursuit. The radio chatter alerting you to the cops' presence and their strategies (pursuit or roadblock) are nice touches.
The graphics in the game are pretty amazing. The reflection on the cars is outstanding, as is the rain, and the leaves and dust that follow in your wake. The lighting is especially impressive during the night and rain races. Best of all, everything, including the up to seven competitors, animating background objects, and your rearview mirror, can be packed on screen with barely a hint of a performance hit (OK, sometimes, it will slow down slightly, but not by much). The production values on the track briefings and the car gallery are also first-rate.
There are a few problems. For one, the dashboard doesn't light up at night, and there are no windshield wipers at your disposal during rain. It's disappointing that there's no damage to your cars. I understand that none of the car companies want to see their poor little vehicles hurt in this game, but what's the excuse for not being able to dent the nonsupercars you crash into? And unlike in the latest Sega arcade racers, the cars in Need for Speed III, while maintaining an effective illusion of high-speed driving, sometimes appear too much like they are gliding on the road rather than actually driving and hugging the road. And why not just open all the regular cars (not the bonus cars) in hot pursuit, knockoff, and tournament mode? Still, it's a testament to the game's addictive fun factor that when I was racing, none of these shortcomings ever bothered me. While the arcades still have the edge in racing games, Need for Speed III goes a long way toward giving PC gamers a real taste of exhilarating arcade speed and action

Source:-Http://gamespot.com

MIdtown Madness 3 Xbox

The Midtown Madness series started out on the PC back in 1999. The game has always offered checkpoint-style races in huge, open cities carefully modeled after real-world locations. The first two games were developed by Angel Studios, the team that went on to develop Midnight Club for Rockstar. This new, third entry in the Midtown Madness series is exclusive to the Xbox and has been developed by DICE, the company behind another successful Xbox driving game, Rallisport Challenge. While the developers and the platform may have changed, Midtown Madness 3 still delivers the same style of street racing you'd expect to see, with the added bonus of some fantastic online thrills

Midtown Madness 3 gives you two complete cities to work with. Though you can pick from either city at any time, Paris is laid out in an easier-to-navigate fashion. The other city, Washington DC, makes use of overpasses and trickier-to-navigate roads, so starting with Paris and working your way up to DC is recommended. Each city offers the same collection of single-player modes. The main mode is called "work undercover," and it serves as a weird sort of story mode for the game. Essentially, you're taking on a bunch of random car-related jobs as you attempt to get to the bottom of some silly crime. Each job puts you in different vehicles, so you'll be driving police cars, pizza-delivery cars, rental cars, money-transporting armored cars, and so on. This basically wraps a loose story around a series of checkpoint races, though the story isn't very interesting and is stacked high with lots of poor voice work. The other one-player modes are a little more in line with the Midtown Madness legacy, offering the ability to cruise the streets aimlessly, to participate in checkpoint races against the AI, or to engage in blitz races, which are checkpoint races against the clock. All styles of races present opportunities to unlock either more races or more vehicles for use in the offline modes. The racer AI and rigid nature of the checkpoint-style races grow tiresome fairly quickly, making the single-player game less than exciting, especially when it forces you to race in, say, an aggravatingly slow armored car.
The physics model and control found in Midtown Madness 3 seem to be designed to be about as far from a racing simulation as you can get. Cars whip around corners with little problem, you rarely have to use your brakes, and generally, the game is designed for fun rather than for accuracy. Once you get hold of the game's faster cars, the driving really is quite fun, but the slower cars are, as you might expect, pretty boring. The physics and collision detection are a little crazy. While the streets are filled with traffic, cars fly out of the way when your car comes into contact with them. It's as if the other cars were made of cardboard. There are a lot of breakable items on the sides of the streets, such as light posts, barricades, and so on. Many streets are lined with trees, but you can't actually knock over trees. Strangely enough, your car just sails through trees, but doing so actually causes your car to pop up in the air a little bit. Given that you can drive through and smash up the rest of the scenery with only slight repercussions, the way the game handles trees is pretty weird.
While the game has support for both two-player split-screen and eight-player system-link games, the obvious standout is the game's Xbox Live support, which allows up to eight players to go at it over the Internet. The game's multiplayer modes are more configurable and much more exciting than the solo component. Capture the gold is a CTF-style mode that puts gold in a random spot on the map. You must collect the gold and deliver it to a drop-off point to score, but you'll lose the gold if another player wrecks into you. Hunter starts one player off in a police car. The cop must ram the other players, and when a player is hit by the cop car, that player turns into a hunter. The winner is the last driver to get smashed by The Man. Tag is, essentially, a game of hot potato. You pass the moniker of "it" around as a timer ticks down. Whoever is it when the timer expires is eliminated, and play continues until only one driver is left. Stayaway is the opposite of tag, where you want to be it for as long as you can by avoiding contact with other drivers. The "it" car is slowed down, making it difficult to completely escape the opposing vehicles. Finally, the checkpoint and cruise modes from single-player also move over.
Midtown Madness 3's online mode has been designed with ease of use in mind. You can join a server midgame, and when cruising or between games, it's easy to quickly drop out and select another car, and you don't have to unlock cars in single-player to enjoy racing the higher-end models online. These things make the game more accessible than its nearest competition, Midnight Club II. The game definitely could have used some online statistic tracking to create a more meaningful sense of competition, but the game works very well online over standard consumer-grade broadband, and, more importantly, Midtown Madness 3 is just plain fun to play against other human competitors.
Graphically, Midtown Madness does a decent job of presenting city streets and auto racing. The game moves at a smooth frame rate and has a good amount of detail. However, the game really doesn't give you a very good sense of speed, and 100mph usually feels more like 45-60mph. The environments are large, and many monuments and other recognizable locations are included, but the average buildings and storefronts that fill the streets don't look so great. Overall, the game comes together to look good, but not particularly great. The game also has support for 480p.

The game's sound is your standard collection of racing noises and tire screeching, and all of that is done well. The voices used throughout the game, however, are quite terrible, and the music isn't much better. The game has custom-soundtrack support, and it's highly recommended that you use it.
Make no mistake, Midtown Madness 3 is an online game. The single-player modes are simply run-of-the-mill checkpoint races that don't really add anything meaningful to the overall package. The online play really saves it, though, as the nice collection of modes and the ease with which you can jump into games or change cars as needed definitely put the focus on fun. Players looking for a terrific online racing game won't be disappointed.

Source:- Http://gamespot.com

EA SPORTS Cricket 2007

Sigh, a good walk ruined. Oh, hang on, that's the other one. Ah, the comforting sound of leather on willow, long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and, as George Orwell said, 'Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist'. And Freddie Flintoff going to the Prime Minister's house while shitfaced live on telly, and Girls Aloud playing at the Twenty20 final (which is easily the best thing that ever happened to the sport). Yep, cricket, the nation's favourite sport last summer (and maybe still, what with the terrible rugby results over the weekend and Steve McClaren's uninspiring performance as coach of the England football team).
But while cricket is still just about hanging on to the wave of popularity that engulfed it after England won the Ashes in 2005, EA's Cricket is still just about hanging on to the Byzantine inaccessibility that stopped most people from enjoying the last one. Which means it's especially forbidding for people like me, whose dalliances with cricket are confined to a position on my primary school's cricket team (as scorer) and owning one of Graham Gooch's old bats (located under my stairs).

See, Cricket 07 is pretty much business as usual for EA's sequel-making machinery. The company's evolutionary approach to making sequels means that the game is still probably only of interest to people who enjoy programming satellite navigation systems using a harpsichord. Well, people who enjoy programming air traffic control systems using bagpipes anyway - it is slightly different.
Different, but still baffling when you fire the game up for the first time, because there’s still no tutorial. Instead, there are, still, some practice nets, where they say helpful things like ‘the ideal line for a fast bowler is on or just outside the off stump’, or something about slips. Which actually isn’t that helpful if your experience of cricket is confined to a position on your primary school’s cricket team (as scorer) and owning one of Graham Gooch’s old bats (located under your stairs). What does ‘off stump’ even mean, and what’s a slip?

Sure, the game of cricket can get pretty complicated, and obviously I’m an idiot for not knowing this stuff, but would it have been so difficult to include a tutorial covering the basics of the game for those who might be interested in finding out how to play it? Tiger Woods doesn’t require you to know a sand wedge from a five iron, and it’s a better game because of it. Gears of War doesn’t require you to know how to fix a suit of power armour. It’s possible to talk about the complexity of cricket itself as if it’s some sort of justification for developing a poor game, but internet games like stick cricket have shown that, ultimately, it’s possible to boil the sport down to something totally straightforward and still fun. More significantly, the Codemasters Brian Lara series has shown that it’s possible to produce a cricket game on consoles that’s not totally inaccessible.
It’s not like EA hasn’t tried to make Cricket 07 more appealing to the layman. The publisher has been making a lot of noise about its Century Stick (TM and R and Copyright and all that sort of stuff) control system, for example. It’s a ‘groundbreaking’ control scheme that’s supposed to simplify the art of batting. During EA’s last trip to the crease, you had to remember the buttons for a bewildering number of possible shots, most of which were pointless apart from defensive strokes. Now, thanks to the Century Stick (TM and R and Copyright and all that sort of stuff) control system you just have to flick one or both analog sticks to select your shot, most of which are pointless apart from defensive strokes (if you have a dual-stick pad, obviously. Otherwise you’ll be selecting your shots using the arrow keys).

Certainly you don’t have to sit with the manual on your lap, like last time, but it’s scant improvement if, as a cricketing neophyte, you don’t know which shots to play, or when to play them. And the game mechanics themselves are still a bit of a numberwang style mish-mash of moving bars and things. Bowling pretty much consists of choosing a delivery style (like the one that sort of curls a bit, or one that bounces, and other types which presumably all have special names), then choosing your aim, then stopping a moving power bar before you end up bowling a no-ball, which happens a lot more often than it does on telly. Batting consists of timing your shot and targeting at the moving, pulsing reticule that indicates where the bowler’s aiming, before pressing some combination of the two analog sticks and hoping that the ball ends up not going near a fielder (because you don’t quite understand how the aiming works or how fielding works, and there’s no tutorial to tell you). It’s hardly the heady intoxicating rush of seeing some boozed up cricketers on an open-topped bus.
Obviously EA’s got all the proper player names and badges and stuff, and Freddie’s on the cover, and there’s music (but it’s not very good). But the big new addition, for those who don’t mind the lack of a tutorial or the number of defensive strokes you’ll play is the Ashes section. In addition to the full gamut of international and domestic (English and Australian) games and competitions, the Ashes has a menu entry all of its own. It allows you to play a one-off series or entire tour from last year or this year, but, more interestingly, it has a series of challenges based on the actual events of last summer’s Ashes tour. So you might need to score 50 runs with Pietersen, just like he did in real life or whatever. Which would be a really neat idea, if the game itself weren’t so poor that you wouldn’t want to bother.

Source:- http://eurogamer.net/

Need For Speed 2 Special Edition(EA GAMES).....

Submitted by Zeeshan Minhas

Rating: 10/10 This was a great game at it's peak and the soundtrack from EA...well, great as always. I trmemeber sitting at home when I was a kid, listening to the main menu tune as it was so cool, and the tracks had the most marvelous music to go with the settings, those were the days when the music was still nice and innocnet, and you could listen to it even if you were like 7 or 87. good good good.

It was THE GAME I started with. A Fantastic experience and a wonderful music collection. The best part about this game I liked is that when and if the car slowed down, the music would also slow down, and would again pick with the speed of the car.

Submitted by Zeeshan Minhas

Rating100/100 A Fantastic Game Ever I Like It.....................Great Game In The Need For SPeed Sereis Ever Ever And Ever.........................Wonderful

Source:http://downloads.khinsider.com/