Need for Speed Underground

Screenshots

Notes

Need for Speed is a series of arcade (in the sense of not being realistic simulators) street racing games. Need for Speed Underground for home consoles is a game that I personally have a lot of nostalgia for, having played it a lot on the PS2. The main features were the nice graphics (for the time), detailed car customisation, and fun career mode with a story told in pre-rendered cutscenes.


The GBA version is not up to that standard.


The visuals are a mess. The 3D is not technically impressive, because the GBA hardware is not up to very high quality 3D. However titles like Mario Kart, F-Zero, and other racers showed us you could do good-enough 3D on the GBA to make racing games work. NFSU's graphics look terrible though. They are far too busy, with busy background textures and aliasing everywhere. There is also a problem with the perspective/depth perception, making it hard to see turns coming up. This is compounded by the track design, which is a city with streets crossing over the main track. These side streets are blocked by invisible walls, but I sometimes mistook them for the path I was supposed to be taking. There's no minimap either. All of this adds up to make spotting upcoming turns the hardest part of the game. There are often flashing arrow signs showing where to go, but even these can be hard to make out until the last minute, and confusingly seem to render in front of other terrain.

Sound is not great either. There are renditions of full songs, including the iconic "Get Low" title music. These are not good quality though, and crackle and pop constantly. The car engine sound effects are pretty poor too, sounding weak and tinny. There's a constant annoying tire screeching whenever you corner too.


Core gameplay is Ok, you accelerate, brake and hand brake. The cars are very inclined to start sliding and drift around corners. The AI doesn't seem that challenging, and the only time I lost was when I crashed horribly into passing traffic or a side street with an invisible wall. There's a decent selection of tracks and cars, although the none of the tracks really stood out or had anything unique to identify them and since you never get to see a map view I couldn't really tell them apart. There are 4 modes: circuit race, sprint race (from point A to point B rather than laps), drag race, and drifting, which gives a little variety.

The exception to the game being easy is Drag racing, which seems to be kind of broken. From what I can tell, the AI is always a higher top speed than you but lower acceleration. This means you always start in the lead but the AI will win based on pure speed. The only way to win is some combination of luck and/or blocking them, which is fraught as sometimes you just spin out and die. I got to #1 in all the rankings, except for Drag mode which I gave up on. Hence the "Partially complete" in the title.

You can customise cars, improving performance and changing the looks as you progress in the career mode. A lot of the visual upgrades to body work are too small to be worth bothering with though, as given the poor graphics you won't be able to see them when racing.


The career mode ("Underground mode") is not particularly inspired in this version. There's a leaderboard of 11 NPC racers + you, and each night you can challenge one to a race to improve your place on the standings. Sometimes they challenge you instead, and as a nice touch in this case is that you get to select the track and number of laps and cars. Annoyingly though, the game never tells you this information when you challenge someone else, leaving you guessing when the race is going to end. Ranking up unlocks cars and part upgrades.

Some of these complaints might just be that the game hasn't aged well, and was received better at the time, but there are much better racers on the GBA which hold up more competently today. Overall I wouldn't recommend playing this game today and I didn't enjoy it much.