Need for Speed 5: Porsche Unleashed possesses one of the worst collision-detection routines ever seen in a racing game.
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 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.
System Requirements:
Processor= 733MHz
RAM= 256MB
Graphics= 32MB
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