Need for Speed: Porsche 2000 (AKA porsche unleashed) was released 26 years ago. It did something different from other videogames. You could drive across the beautiful European countryside, and explore this particular car brand and its history.
I haven’t found other games that allow you to basically travel through europe’s most beautiful landscapes with your car and just take in the scenery like that. It was right before the whole trend started with “tuning” culture, spurred by the fast and the furious franchise. (love or hate it, it changed the whole landscape)
What other games would you say are similar to this experience?
I was playing it again just a few years ago. The game aged like milk. With shit. Yes, milk with shit. But for its time it was nice, yes.
Other games? In some of the older Test Drive games you were able to drive off the road, drive into the barn and ride over a chicken. It was a shock to me. It looked more realistic than a real life. And it was rain there. And you could use… no idea how they are called in English… those rubber thingies that clear the windscreen from the droplets or dirt… It was cool.
It has aged yea, but in 20 years there have been no games to emulate this experience
I was a big fan of the original Need For Speed for the same reason, the driving over large scenery levels was the whole point. The technology wasn’t quite there yet but I have fond memories of the first game on PC.
I mostly got it back with Test Drive Unlimited, which featured an entire drivable island (Hawaii I believe?) and you could free roam as much as you wanted between races. One of the races was of course an entire tour of the island and took one hour (and it was not that easy), it was awesome! TDU2 was total garbage, they forgot about the driving, the model was broken. They instead focused on the whole “influencer” garbage, it was really bad.
Recently Forza Horizon 3 recaptured that feeling perfectly, free roaming around Australia. It is easily the best game of the series. The newer entries were less interesting since they turned the game into a FOMO fest (lots of timed weekly exclusives and no game ending). Still, I am looking very much forward to FH6 to roam around Japan, but considering the locale I don’t think we will be able to skip the tuning scene this time.
Thank god for that. I’ve seldom played a game as unfair as nfspu. The amount of times my car flew out of a corner because the map geometry is totally broken is through the roof. And the AI cars always weigh like dump trucks in collisions.
The word you were looking for is windscreen wiper, and it’s funny how such minor inclusions used to be amazing and now they would go completely unnoticed!