Need for Speed Games Part 3: Need for Speed: Porsche 2000 (aka Porsche Unleashed)

This week on Super Adventures, I've been playing through all the Need for Speed games released during their first decade. Well maybe not all of them, I'm sure there's one I've accidentally skipped, because they just kept making the things! There are more Need for Speed games than there are Bond movies at this point. Well, kind of. It depends on whether you count games like Need for Speed: V-Rally and Over Drivin' Skyline Memorial. Or if you count games like Porsche 2000, Porsche 2000 and Porsche 2000.

Speaking of which, today I'm writing about Need for Speed: Porsche 2000, also known as Porsche Unleashed, or sometimes just Porsche. Once again the US version has the better name, as I don't think a game has any business having '2000' in its title when it actually came out during the year 2000. FIFA 2000 coming out in 1999, that's fine. Death Race 2000 coming out in 1975, that's cool too. But this I don't like.

This is the third part of four. If you want to go back to an earlier part you can find them here and here.

(If I don't mention what system a screenshot came from, it's from the PC version.)

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2000 - NEED FOR SPEED: PORSCHE 2000
(PC, PLAYSTATION, GAME BOY ADVANCE)

Porsche 2000 features an actual person in its intro video! Well okay they're CGI, but it's still a change from cars and more cars. Though there's plenty of those too, as a Porsche test driver goes wandering through a warehouse full of them apparently looking for the light switch.

Trouble is that this time they're all Porsches, as this is the first NFS game since Nissan Presents Over Drivin' Skyline Memorial to be all about one manufacturer. Fortunately there's a lot more than eight models in this one (not that you can really tell by looking at them, cause they're Porsches), plus you can get four more cars as free DLC!

Granted there aren't as many cars here as you'd find in the recently released racing goliath Gran Turismo 2, which has close to 600 of them, but I bet this has considerably more Porsches, seeing as EA had the exclusive licence at the time.

Gran Turismo 2 (PSX)

I mean Gran Turismo 2 does have Porsches in it, because it's a cheeky bastard, but it doesn't have quite so many of them.

There's actual people on the main menu too, as this is the first game where you get to choose your driver! Though if you don't like any of these people you can just click 'done' and get a picture of someone wearing a helmet instead. There's apparently a way to import your own face but I couldn't get it working. Plus I'm starting to feel like I maybe screwed up by calling myself 'Hardgrit' as it doesn't seem like we're doing capitalised first letters in this game.

You can just about see up there that the modes in this game are called 'factory driver' and 'evolution' (Hot Pursuit mode has gone AWOL and 'porsche chronicle' is just a chronicle of Porsches). Factory driver is a brand new feature that has you working as a test driver for Porsche, completing a series of challenges. Evolution is NFS4's career mode again, except with a twist: you start in the early days of the company and complete races to push the timeline forwards and make more cars available.

Car tweaking is back, along with car upgrades, but they're a lot more complicated this time around. Look at all this crap I've got installed in my car! I can also change the interior colour and paint different stripes on it. We're one step away from being able to put neons and vinyls on the thing.

I was going to joke about how backwards it is that it's the Need for Speed set in the 50s that really introduced modding to the series, but then I remembered Grease and hot rods and felt stupid.

The game also lets you open your car's doors and its boot, because it's fun to give the 3D modellers lots more work to do for no real reason. Well okay I suppose the reason is that the game's practically a museum of Porsche history, letting you experience the evolution of style and technology. Suits me, seeing as I'm currently playing 10 years of Need for Speed back to back to experience the evolution of racing games.

I suppose that's why the game has a more realistic driving model than the last few games, so that you can feel the difference in the cars over time as problems are ironed out and driving aids are introduced.

Mostly though what I'm experiencing now is 'slow'. I wish I was going 30 miles an hour! Actually the car can manage that fine... eventually, but it's top speed is only a fraction of what a Lamborghini Diablo can do. Not that you'd know that from the music, which is completely failing to get into the spirit of it.

The game looks good though, kind of. The new 3D dashboard is a bit ropey, but I'm just glad it exists at all. I think this may be the last time we got a cockpit view in a Need for Speed game until Need for Speed: Shift ten years later.

Look, I've found another actual person, inside the level this time! I don't remember ever seeing anyone on a track so far in these Need for Speed games, aside from the cops when they get out of their car. This is all very strange and new.

This is my only chance to see him though, as this is a point to point race. It's been a long while, but they're finally back! I actually prefer point to point over circuits as they're less repetitive and they can't drag them out by adding too many laps, but I can appreciate how others would prefer having a few attempts at the same stretch of road to get better at it.

Speaking of practicing something until you get it right, factory driver mode has you performing stunts and time trials in modern cars. There's also a bit of a story to it, or at least a bit of text before each challenge.

Hang on, I recognise the name Ace from Need for Speed III. That's one of the rival drivers that keeps showing up! Does this mean that Ace is canonically a Porsche test driver called Stephanie?

Man this game looks spectacular sometimes.

This the first factory driver challenge in the PC version. All I have to do is drive up to the cones, do a 360 degree spin and drive out again in under 15 seconds, simple! I'm not sure I ever got out of that garage at the start of Driver, but this I can do.

But then the game starts wanting you to do things like reversing into a 180 degree spin, and any challenge that requires me to put manual gears on is a bit beyond what I'm comfortable with. In fact factory driver mode kicked my ass.

Meanwhile, this is what you get on the PlayStation version of Porsche Unleashed...

Porsche Challenge (PSX)

Oh hang on, this is Porsche Challenge, the game with just one car and no draw distance. Well even less draw distance, as PlayStation games are typically lacking in this department.

In its defence it's rendering at a higher resolution than your typical PlayStation game, like Porsche 2000 for instance, so it's doing more work. Plus it came out three years before the Need for Speed game, so you'd expect it to be a bit less sophisticated.

PlayStation version

Here's what the first factory driver challenge in the PlayStation game looks like. I know it's hard to compare this to the PC game with that screenshot of Porsche Challenge in between the images, but trust me it looks different.

Up to this point it seems that EA Canada would work on the PlayStation version of a Need for Speed game while EA Seattle made the near-identical PC version, but for this game they flipped everything around. Now EA Canada was the one making the PC version, while V-Rally developers Eden Studios made the PlayStation game. (EA Seattle were off making something called Motor City Online or whatever, but I won't bore you by talking about that.)

Though I don't want to imply that Porsche 2000 on PC and Porsche 2000 on PlayStation are the same game, because they are not. The PlayStation game is still split between factory driver and evolution mode, plus the briefing text is similar and you still drive a lot of Porsches, but where you drive them and how you drive them is very different. And somehow the PlayStation's factory driver challenges are even tougher! I don't even know what kind of insane stunt manoeuvres it might have you doing later, as I couldn't even get past the third basic cone slalom stage.

It does look pretty decent for a PS1 game though.

Even if the people hanging around by the roadside are now sprites instead of 3D models.

PlayStation version

Plus you can't open your car's boot in this one! You can still purchase vehicles, but once you've got them all you can do with them is race with them until you've completed enough tournaments to unlock the next era. Then you get to buy the next set of cars!

The PlayStation version has entirely different tracks as far as I can tell, plus different menus. But it also has different music, which actually changes to suit the era! The PC game shows the passage of time through changes in style and performance, but the PS game also changes the soundtrack. It should really be a big improvement, but there's not enough music in each era to make it work. I got sick of the 50s tunes long before I escaped into the 70s (or whatever).

PlayStation version

Another thing I began to notice with the PlayStation game is that the tracks have a lot of 90 degree turns. How well you do in a race depends on how good you get at whipping your car around right angles without skidding off into a wall. Though that became less of an issue once I upgraded a car that could handle them effortlessly.

Overall I'd say the PlayStation game is the far weaker of the two in almost every department, though I do like the shiny cars. Visually it ain't bad at times. But the PlayStation was really getting on in years by this point, as the PlayStation 2 was coming along to replace it in a few months and the Dreamcast had been out for a year. So this is what Porsche 2000 was going up against at the time:

Ferrari F355 Challenge (Dreamcast)

Porsche 2000 already had Gran Turismo 2 to deal with, but then F355 Challenge made the jump from arcade to home console, bringing with it its fantastic handling, plus a more civilised resolution and draw distance. Look, there's actual 3D buildings all the way in the background! And the polygons don't even wobble! (The people are all still sprites though).

I did like the PlayStation game though, kind of. It suffers from repetitive music, tracks full of right angles, and an impossible factory driver mode, but there's still enough Need for Speed in there to get some fun out of it. Plus it may only let you drive Porsches, but at least it has more than one model, so it has that over Porsche Challenge and F355 Challenge.

The PC version on the other hand really pissed me off. Not because of the gameplay, or even because of factory driver mode being a total bastard, but because of how much of a pain it was to get working on my machine! All these games have required user-made patches and wrappers to get them running in Windows 10 (even the later ones), but to get this working in a way that also let me take screenshots took a significant amount of messing around. That said, factory driver mode is still harder.

Plus like I said earlier, I think the PC game is the better one. The improved driving mechanics feel more natural without being so realistic that I can't take corners without slowing to a crawl, and I like the idea of going through the years and seeing how things changed over time (even if the music on the PC game ruins the atmosphere). Plus it's nice to be able to buy cars, choose a nice set of stripes to personalise them, and get attached to them over time. Sure they get antiquated in a couple of races, but they can sit there in your garage forever, as a reminder of past victories... unless you trade it in to make some cash so you can afford the next one. I remember a reviewer once criticising the game for being too much for car nerds, but you don't have to look at the history and stats on each model! You don't even have to open the boot up and look at the low-res engine texture if you don't want to. It's just an extra layer on top of a solid game about racing cars.

But they really should've called one of the games Porsche 2000 and the other Porsche Unleashed, to make it more obvious we were getting two different Need for Speeds that year. Though actually there were three games. One of them was just released a little bit late...

Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed (GBA version)

The Game Boy Advance version of Porsche Unleashed technically doesn't qualify for this article because it didn't come out during the first 10 years of the series. It was released in 2004, which isn't just after NFS: Underground, it's after the GBA version of NFS: Underground!

Graphics took a pretty big leap in the mid 90s as we went from games looking like Star Fox and X-Wing to games looking like Tomb Raider and Rogue Squadron practically overnight thanks to textured polygons. It was almost like we skipped a step. Fortunately the GBA eventually arrived to give us that evolutionary missing link, or at least show us what it would've looked like. This Porsche Unleashed feels like it came out between the 32X and the 3DO and I nearly pulled a Need for Speed 1 and fell asleep while playing it.

I didn't put it on for long but it seems to be a separate game in its own right, with different tracks. It's all evolution mode and no factory driver this time, and you spend your time racing in tournaments that are one race long. It's probably quite impressive that they pulled this off with the hardware, but it's claustrophobic, slow and primitive and I'd rather they'd just ported a fast and basic sprite racer like Lotus Turbo Challenge or Lamborghini American Challenge or whatever instead. Man, how many bloody racing games had a title ending in 'Challenge' in the 90s?

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2001 - MOTOR CITY ONLINE
(PC)

Motor City Online would've been the first PC only Need for Speed game, if it had been a Need for Speed game. Which it wasn't. But it was originally intended to be one and it's built on a the same technology as Need for Speed: Road Challenge, so I'm including it anyway.

The game was something that's rare even now: a racing MMO, without any single player mode. Sure it had AI drivers to fill in the gaps, but they were only there to win and take all your money. In game money I mean (I hope), though the game did have a monthly fee.

Tragically none of these early Need for Speed games are for sale these days (the earliest I could find is 2008's Need for Speed: Undercover), but Motor City Online is especially unavailable because even a second hand copy isn't going to work. The game only lasted two years as the servers were shut down a long time ago. But archaeologists believe it looked something like this:

Actually I managed to get the racing part of the game to work offline on Windows 10 with the help of some files I found on PCGamingWiki... same as with every other PC Need for Speed game I've written about so far. I couldn't have done this article without them. Well, okay I probably could've, it'd just would've taken longer to find stuff. Good site, would recommend.

Would I recommend Motor City Online in its current state though? Well I didn't enjoy playing it much, but it does have some features in it I don't think I've seen anywhere else. Like point to point races where you have to turn around at the end of the track and drive back the other way. I don't think the AI racers had ever seen them before either, the way they all ended up in a pile while trying to obey the 'TURN AROUND' flag. That would've been a decent repair bill I expect if they'd been human players.

To be fair, classic American muscle cars aren't necessarily interested in turning, especially when it's raining. And it does tend to rain when you're racing next to a tornado.

The game's got that magic combination of fun, interesting tracks and cars that are a bit awkward to steer sometimes!

It's got a lot of both of them in fact, with something like 24 tracks and 79 cars, mostly from the 50s, 60s and 70s (plus a Toyota Supra and Mitsubishi Eclipse because The Fast and the Furious came out). It's got a soundtrack to match, and even a DJ! Shame that it seems like a lot of players struggled to actually buy any of those cars because of how long it could take to accumulate money.

I've read that the game also had plenty of modifications as well, both cosmetic and otherwise. But the fastest car generally wins, so people tended to go for races which made everyone equal. And in the end everyone lost when the servers were finally shut down, taking all their cars with them. Though players were apparently given a copy of The Sims Online or Ultima Online as a consolation! (An offline mode would have been a much better consolation in my opinion).

Need for Speed: World (PC)

Despite its failure, EA clearly thought the concept had potential, as they released another doomed CarMMO called Need for Speed: World a few years later, when fewer people were still using dial-up. The game lasted longer than its predecessor, possibly because it was free to play, and this time I managed to catch it myself just before it shut down forever. It was decent enough I thought; played a lot like the other Need for Speed: Underground era games. Plus I like that the abbreviation looks like NSFW.

Fortunately Need for Speed: World was also resurrected by heroic fans and it's in a lot better shape than Motor City Online right now, so if you want to check it out you can find it for free at https://sbrw.davidcarbon.download/

Anyway I'm done for now. Tune in tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion as the series jumps to sixth generation consoles and I play the last few Need for Speeds from its first decade.

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It's typical isn't it? You wait ages for me to write about a racing game on Super Adventures, then suddenly a dozen of them come along at once... and they're all Need for Speed. It's enough to make someone want to leave a comment! So you should totally do that.