Modern Warfare, Mario Galaxy and Football Manager, all arguably clear leaders in their respective fields and these names instantly roll off the tongue. The same can’t be said for one of the most competitive genres within our industry. There’s simply no doubting the lack of great games to play for any budding Jenson Button in 2009, something which was confirmed when this award was the last one we decided on. So, without further ado, let’s wave the chequered flag on another fantastic year for virtual racing.

Forza Motorsport 3

Seven other racers, hundreds of vehicles and miles of track. Despite sounding like a motorsport enthusiast’s wet dream, it’s actually something much more. An initial disappointment with the familiar feeling mechanics were easily shortlived, it’s more than your average cookie cutter sequel, despite having an excellent predecessor, Forza Motorsport 3 manages to refine nearly every aspect of the game and then some.

This year for driving has been all about accessibility, for some it was making menus more stylistic and for others it was improving the overall framework of the game. Turn 10, although tweaking both as well, opted to hedge their bets with a rewind feature. Granted it was stolen from last year’s runner-up, GRID, but it has allowed casual fans to improve their performance without the threat of being penalised for being new to the experience.

This one, like last year’s award, was a tough one to decide but the plethora of modes, content and different experiences from race to race made the ultimate decision an easy one. Our driving game of the year goes to Turn 10’s exquisite Forza Motorsport 3.

Need for Speed Shift

Need for Speed’s major shift to compete more with the realistic racers of the world nearly paid off. If it wasn’t for an awkward career mode and a lack of depth unless you seek it out, Shift would have come much closer to being the five star game it could have been.

DiRT 2

Yeah, let’s face it, the new vibe was a bit overbearing and disappointing for those who liked the clean European style of the original but that didn’t stop DiRT 2 becoming one of the best driving games of 2009 and arguably the best rally game of all time.

F1 2009

We initially cast this game to the fire with our eyes set on next year’s modern console release, we did so at our own peril. Codemasters again produced another quality racer, that easily equates to the best Wii racer that doesn’t feature Italian plumbers

RacePro

We almost overlooked this Q1 release and although it doesn’t compare with Forza 3 in terms of style and shear mass of content, RacePro did it’s talking on the track. Let’s hope they get a second shot at it, all it needed was a few tins of next-gen polish.

Stay tuned to Nidzumi all week for more Best of 2009 Awards as we celebrate the past 12 months in gaming

The Need For Speed name is starting to become a moniker for an EA Racer that simply isn’t Burnout and it’s been slightly hard to take for veterans of the series. From the highly acclaimed early days to the mainstream popularity with customisation becoming the focal point, the Need For Speed franchise has always stood for a lot. Now in 2009, fifteen years after the original, EA are taking the realistic route that ProStreet was originally touted as, only this time they stuck to their guns and justifiably so.

Straight away you’ll feel awkward behind the wheel of these tamed beasts. With a majority of the assists turned on, the controls just don’t have the depth required for a game with realistic simulation ambitions. Any subtle cornering
halts as you’re thrown into an underwhelming drift. Then you’ll give in and try the frequently mentioned cockpit view, only to find it a game transformed.

Shift’s cockpit view is a complete and utter triumph

Personally my spatial recognition isn’t great when within the cockpit, so I tend to stick to the always-approachable chase camera. Yet here, and partly due to the marketing focus, I felt compelled to give this highly touted camera a go. You’ll instantly hit the conclusion that Shift’s cockpit view is a complete and utter triumph in nailing that intense wheel-to-wheel experience.

Every corner will feel more intense and every manoeuvre will feel more risky as you’re bound to have many heart-in-mouth moments while trying to out break an opponent. Your eyes will flicker between dash and rear view while your fingers will flick the right analog stick to get a better view of that driver attempting to overtake. You’ll find an appreciation for Motorsport and it’s all down to a well-polished camera.

The problem is that the framework of the game’s career can’t sustain the momentum. Sure the racing is polished and will ensure Shift will happily prove a successor to the Project Gotham throne but the plethora of racers coming out this year will need something more enticing than endless tiers and experience meters. An overwhelming number of stats are constantly being monitored through the entire game and these will track your progress.

The racing will let Shift become the successor to Project Gotham

Shift has simplified motor racing down to two distinct types of driving, aggression and precision. Kudos style, you’ll constantly be racking up points that fall under both categories with the aim of being labelled as either one or the other. Sticking to the racing line and performing clean overtaking manoeuvres will ensure precision points while drifting and spinning another vehicle will tot up under the aggression column. Either way you’ll be scoring points that will increase your experience level.

Then you’ll have to take into consideration the stars which are unlocked for podium finishes, hitting points markers and achieving specific goals. These goals could be anything from spinning out four drivers to mastering every corner to the racing line. The latter of which you can do regardless of a specific challenge and is only another statistic to track. These are added up and you’ll rank up through tiers, which will eventually lead to the NFS World Tour.

Confused yet? While you’re playing you are so engrossed by the racing that all of this will escape your mind but it’s
a shame that they couldn’t come up with a more alluring career system.

It’s disappointing because despite the early test event that welcomes you to the game and picks options based on your performance, you’ll still want to go and fine tune your difficulty levels and assists. Once you do you’ll be rewarded with more intense competition but not with extra points or currency. Surely the commentator that acts as a mentor could actually guide you and suggest that you change an assist or step up to another difficulty. Instead you’re left with a forgettable career mode that pails to do the gameplay justice.

While the career mode is cluttered with numbers, tiers and levels the rest of the UI is elegantly simple. Stark, tall and bold typography is masterfully laid out within clean menus and the dynamically animated Heads Up Display. They just serve as an indicator for the excellent attention to detail and work that has been put into the game’s visuals.

A plethora of circuits vary from Spa, the long Belgian circuit with it’s notoriously well known corner of the Eau Rouge, and Silverstone with it’s intensely fast paced start that quickly turns into a tight, technical and demanding track. These tracks look accurate but those naturally boring circuits actually translate as much. A short number of fictional city tracks, which don’t help the Project Gotham comparisons, again look accurate but nothing that would blow you away.

It’s just a shame they couldn’t come up with a more alluring career

The gorgeously realised cars have been detailed perfectly with special care put into the excellent cockpits. Customisation however, isn’t as detailed. A lacklustre vinyl editor makes a surprising appearance for a series that has been made famous on the back of its customisation options.

You should probably approach Shift as more of a stepping stone to Forza or Gran Turismo as it’s not quite there yet. Should it have the Need For Speed name on it? Maybe not but it easily surpasses anything that has embodied that label for the last few years. Its cockpit view is an emotional tour-de-force that should be experienced by anyone wanting to feel like a motor racer. That’s why the forgettable career framework, lack of guidance and fine tuning to find that sweet gameplay, is even more of a blow to take.

5. Wipeout Pulse
The Designers Republic designed all the menus and in-game companies for Wipeout but it never seemed like the Heads Up Display followed suit. Nope absolutely no Helvetica to be seen here. Still this Metroid-esque 3D Hud is the best of the crop and looks even better in motion.

4. GRID
The first of two Codemasters titles that are present is GRID. Very basic layout here along with simplified layout that informs without getting in the way of the action.

3. Spilt/Second
Dead Space did change the way that HUDs were perseviced although personally I’d opt towards some nicely laid out pictograms and typography. Nevertheless you’ve got to admit that Spilt/Second’s 3D HUD that’s stuck to the back of the car looks slick.

2. Colin McRae DiRT
Probably not the best screenshot but it will do. DiRT had some excellent informative visuals from it’s excellent menus and loading screens to it’s helpful in-game HUD. Really we are just suckers for anything that’s got Helvetica all over it.

1. Need For Speed Shift
Tall Sans-Serif, Check. Tilted 3D effect, Check. Animated Typography, Check. This HUD has everything going for it and it’s really sparked up a lot of personal interest for this title. Admittedly it’s because this HUD is so well designed.

I didn’t realise how bad that sounds until I read it aloud. I’m not a graphics whore… a design whore maybe.

Anyway, what are you favourite racing HUDs? I’m sure there are a few we’ve over sighted.

Well in case you were wondering what is happening to the Need for Speed series, EA let out some information on how they are going to turn it around. Need for Speed Shift will be a traditional racing simulation seen on the 360, PS3 and PC while Need for Speed Nitro will be the arcadic Wii and DS releases. We will also see Need for Speed World Online which is a PC only MMO set in the Need for Speed universe. It’s a shame that the last one is PC only because what appears to be the only wholly a new idea is going to see a limited release.

Anyway we saw some pretty interesting numbers that summed up the whole fall of Need for Speed thing that’s been happening over the last five years. According to NPD data (which are sales in the USA only) Underground 2 sold 4.5 million units while the next game, easily our favorite of the bunch Most Wanted sold a still impressive 3.9 million sales. Then the short and critically panned Carbon sold a smaller 3.1 million units. That slowed down with the experiment that was ProStreet with 2.1 million. Finally the recently released Undercover sold just under 1 million units.

Now that just shows you that over three quarters of sales have been lost in 5 years. Most Wanted along with the earlier games have been received so well because care was taken over them. But recently with the Wii and DS being so different from other consoles they decided to cater for both which is a difficult juggling act. Now with the games being complete separate with completely separate names and ideas we might see an improvement within the franchise.

Shift will be EA’s answer to Gran Turismo or Forza which will be nice to see a third parties approach on the simulation game. Will this be enough to inject some life into the franchise? Well in terms of sales maybe not. Although Gran Turismo and Forza have always done well the past they don’t really have that casual gaming crowd on board. Generally speaking gamers don’t want to drive a real car they want fast arcadey style racing and that’s why they came to Need for Speed in the first place.

I’m sure Shift will be a great game in it’s own right if it is given the budget and time it needs. We’ve seen from past simulation games that these types of experiences need to be tweaked and tweaked until they are almost perfect and that won’t be done in EA’s traditional schedule of a new game every year. Still Need for Speed is known among it’s fans for it’s high adrenaline rush feel and it doesn’t seem like this will deliver on that kind of experience.

It must have put EA in a difficult position when Burnout took the arcade racing genre by storm when Burnout Paradise came out early last year. I presume that some of the higher ups at EA didn’t want two arcade racers so decided to experiment with ProStreet and now it looks like they are prepared to push NFS fully in that direction.

What gets me is that wouldn’t it make sense to have Burnout as your open world, crash and smash arcade racer and have Need For Speed as your night-time time trial street racer akin to Midnight Club. Then start a new simulation franchise that won’t tarnish an already flagging for help franchise if it doesn’t pay off. But it will be interesting to see how this move goes. It could be the last of Need For Speed or it could be a whole new begginging.

For the past few years now we have seen a numerous amount of Need For Speed titles be put on various consoles and handhelds but the quality of the titles have differed each year. This year we have seen the release of EA’s Black Box latest NFS title being ‘Need for Speed: Undercover’ for the Nintendo DS. Question is where does it fall on the scale in terms of quality?

When I first started playing Undercover I was expecting that I would be playing a quality racer title, like most NFS titles have been, however I found myself in lacklustre races that proved to be to boring than exciting. Like all NFS titles the game revolves around various different race types and you having the objective of winning the race to be rewarded. One of the major problems I came across however were that it eventually became a painstaking task to complete races, and it wasn’t because they were difficult either. The problem was the actual race, racetrack and opponents. Although the racetracks were of lengthy size, similar to the console versions, the actual layout was somewhat annoying as it was difficult to some times to tell the difference between the track and boundary at times causing myself to crash the car on numerous occasions. The opponents seem to be a very basic AI that really didn’t prove too difficult to beat either which really did take away the level of difficulty.

Unlike previous NFS titles Undercover, on DS, doesn’t actually have an open world in which you can drive around but you are restricted to only choose your races from a very simple map. Surprisingly EA have added the car modification feature to the DS version of Undercover however it isn’t as in depth or detailed as what you would find in the console versions. Players also have the opportunity to use different cars, when bought or unlocked but it would be surprising if a player unlocks all cars. The title has a basic control system for the racing, with no use of the touch screen for racing, with the D-Pad for steering and the other buttons used for the basics such as NOS, acceleration, braking and slow down time.

Disappointingly the games graphics aren’t even as a subpar level with most races looking very unpolished in detail, and in some cases it is hard to tell the track apart from the boundary. There are also a lot less cars on screen, the ones that don’t take part in the race, and you usually need to be really close to a building or a car to see it. The games in game soundtrack is not exciting overall containing minor songs, which aren’t very audible when you are racing. EA have included some in game soundeffects as well but nothing majority noticeable either.

Need for Speed: Undercover on the Nintendo DS is pretty much your average racing title that offers very little. If it weren’t for the in-game story, which is very subpar, the ability to customise cars at a minor level or the different types of races, with most being the same, I would have to say this title is on the same level as Need for Speed 1. The racing is enjoyable for some moments but most races prove to be to easy and it does prove frustrating that the graphics aren’t well polished making the racing track confusing to drive on.

Need for Speed is one of the unchanging constants of the universe. EA can always be relied upon to release a game that will at least provide a solid fix of high octane racing. It is one of their titles that tends to polarise opinion though. In racing game spheres most players are either Midnight Club fans or Need for Speed fans and there is usually little that can be done to sway these loyalties.

Last outing EA made a huge blunder which could have been enough to tempt Need for Speed fans to switch over to Rockstar’s street racing competitor. Need for Speed Pro Street ditched the free roaming aspect and returned to a more rigid racing dynamic seemingly due to the surprising and indeed resonating success of Codemaster’s RaceDriver: Grid. Grid came out of left field and spooked EA into making what turned out to be one of arcade racing’s greatest lemons of recent times.

Fast forward to today and Need for Speed returns to the free roaming rogue street racing format with Undercover – an attempt to regain the glory days of NFS: Underground 2, the undoubted pinnacle of the series. Since NFS: Underground 2, each successive release in the franchise (Pro Street excluded) can be likened to a clone of the original with some odd genetic defects. The frustratingly irritating canyon races of NFS: Carbon are an excellent example of this. Each defect was borne from an attempt to improve on Underground 2. Unfortunately, such ‘improvements’ were ultimately the downfall of each game.

With Undercover it seems that EA have tried valiantly to escape these past mistakes. Sadly it has still retained many of the flaws which limit the game’s potential to shine. We’ll get to those in a minute though.

Undercover casts you as a cop using his driving skills to infiltrate a ring of extremely skilled car thieves. In order to gain favour with the gang you will need to gain a reputation for mean driving and also give the state police a fair hassle into the bargain. Proving your worth also requires indulging in some Gone in 60 Second’s style car thievery which provides a pleasant distraction to the disappointingly repetitive slog of checkpoints, sprints and circuits. The annoying canyon races also make a return in the form of outrun races which pit you against a fast moving opponent on the freeway. Unsurprisingly the badly-acted full motion video cutscenes are back with a vengeance, with Maggie Q and Christina Milian providing the distractions this time around.

The core of Undercover remains the same as has been with all Need for Speed games. There is a solid, well balanced driving dynamic and all the tracks are well thought out and different enough to provide a interesting enough challenge. There is also an excellent array of cars ranging from classics like the Chevrolet Camaro SS, through the impressive Nissan GT-R to exotic European cars like the Pagani Zonda. All the usual customisation options are there too although there are far less body kits available than there have been previously. The ones that are there can be autosculpted but this time around it seems to do very little to change how the parts look.

The handling is good and suitably arcadey. The American muscle cars slide and drift effortlessly and the European and Japanese entries provide a wide variety of good handlers and blindingly fast beauties.

Try and say what is remarkable about Need for Speed: Undercover and you might be left lost for words. It is missing to more fun aspects like the drag racing and drift competitions that brought a nice balance to the gameplay of the previous titles. There is not really much in the game that sets the world on fire. This may have sounded like a laundry list of complaints but at the bare bones of it all there is a competent racing game. There are plenty of thrills and spills to be had and you do get a taste of the brand new Nissan 370Z. It’s not enough though to make up for all the lack of inventiveness that has seen the series grow stale.

Need for Speed Undercover is a vast improvement on Pro Street but sadly now it feels more like a reliable old Volkswagen Polo instead of the Porsche GT-3 that it aspires to be.

“Tony Hawk has been the Madden of that category for a very long time, and our performance in this first year of skateboarding has greatly exceeded my expectations,” Gibeau told investors. “I know they’re going to come back and be competitive, but these are the fights that EA knows how to win.”Also mentioned was a new Need for Speed game in development, which will go back to the original roots of the series, after the lower than predicted sales of Pro Street.

Source [gamespot]

The Remote works like a real car wheel as you steer by tilting the remote/wheel, while pressing 2 to accelerate and 1 to brake. Although steering with the remote is ok, the wheel attachment for it is like steering a real car, which gives a nice realistic feel when playing the game.

The other NFS games have had very similar ‘over-hyped’ career stories. As you might have guessed so far this one is a lot different and stands out from the rest because the story is basically you racing to the top like the others; except you have to beat five main racers each with their own style of racing. You’ll work your way through Drag, Grip, Speed and Drift events and then eventually become the King of everything. The customizing section has tons of mechanics that you can fiddle with, customizing each car for a certain style of race is vital because any minor adjustments can affect your ride. Like previous installments you can pimp your car out with fat-off wide-body kit or a wacky custom paint job. It’s a big game and it’s got some skill behind it, especially when you max out your speed.

There are also added modes, like Wheelie mode which is like drag racing but you have to keep your wheelie as long as possible, this is particularly good in some spilt screen multi-player.

The graphics are nothing terrible but are a bit substandard, but this is expectable from the Wii. There is a lot of product placement so get ready to be burnt with ‘coca-cola’ advertisements from the beginning. Damage is a big part in the game because it’s quite a disappointment. The reason being, when you’re going at well over 100 mph you can clip a measly cone and lose control. If you’ve lost control you will normally flip for a few rotations and then after you’ve lost momentum you are left with a car with only a few scratches on it. This would make sense if it was more like its arcade predecessors but it’s not and it nearly ruins the whole realistic feel.Basically Need for Speed ProStreet for the Wii is pretty good. The sound and graphics are a bit off, but the game will provide you will an interesting racing experience.

7.5 / 10