Fox's Review: Need For Speed: High Stakes (PS1)

[Fusion]

Thanks to reliable PS1 emulation and the fact I actually found this game sitting in my CD carrying cases, I've found time to review it and cut it to pieces.  It's a piece of art that was lost in the dark depths of this new "NeedForStreet" thing EA started post-Hot Pursuit 2.  It's also personally one of my favorites, because Porsche Unleashed didn't really feel just right.

Quite frankly, I think the PS1 version of High Stakes looks better than the PC version.  I mean, it's got a more simplistic interface, the gameplay's simplified to the simple racing action we always wanted, with guess what else?  The ability to total your vehicle, ain't that great?  Since when did Need For Speed actually take damage into account?

Lastly, I don't know why the PC version prefers to have a completely different look from the PS1 version.  It's outright stupid, it's insane, and last time I saw this happen it was with the original Need For Speed when compared to it's PS1 counterpart.


(Graphics 7/10):

While they're no Gran Turismo 2 on their own, the graphics show off the finely detailed cars for what they are.  The only drawback is that the randomly generic traffic gets boxy vehicles and cartoony textures on them, which ends up breaking the whole racing-against-realism idea, but I can understand since the frame rate of the game is about as consistent as a man with twitchy hands trying to draw a perfectly straight line.

The tracks are ungodly detailed for their time, usually there's enough to cover up the abyss of endless non-pixel ground and even then you won't be staring out the sun, you'll be driving around the track.  The signs, when you hit them, fly over your vehicle unlike previous NFS titles where it was instantly flattened to the road thanks to your vehicle.  There's also more stuff you can hit, that just rips itself apart when you hit it with your car.  The only problem is there isn't enough stuff to break.


(Sound 8/10):

I wonder what happened to the sound in more recent NFS games.  The vehicle sounds here are, well, I don't know if I should call them accurate or "not annoying".  They don't cut into your ears, and the soundtrack's good.  Heck, the soundtrack's better than the newer NFS games which rely on popular music more than the classic techno\punk music mixes. Come to think of it, more recent games rely on the former entirely.

The only spot of this I think the game falters in, is the annoyingness of the police car sirens.  Especially when you're driving them.  Oh, and they did include some "popular" tracks from deadbeat artists who did nothing but think up random riffs and put them together.


(Gameplay 6/10):

Control is vastly different from newer NFSes and if it's anything, it's something that takes getting used to.  The game's mainly about speed, so you'll want to fly through turns as fast as possible.  However, in this aspect you may need to slow down a bit to keep from flying into the wall.  Control's a bit better than NFS3 or any of the games before it, though.  In NFS3 my vehicle felt like I wasn't even really trying to drive it.

The game's interface is somewhat confusing, due to the fact that Single Race mode must be played with your Tournament-earned cars.  That shaves a few points off, plus it's easy to screw yourself over in both the tournament and single race modes by buying your car, and then selling it right off the bat thinking that you want the other.

Another issue is that using cheat codes to unlock vehicles for the Test Drive mode -only- makes you unable to save your game.  While this is an understandable practice of anti-cheating, it's something I'm glad never caught on, and frankly if you use cheats then you'll not want to play the game.

Yet with all those bad things is good things.  You can actually upgrade your vehicles this time, one with a lowering and golder rims that somehow increases handling and braking performance, one that adds a fancy paint job to the car, somehow affecting something else, and one that adds something useful, some cosmetic changes that improve your top speed and acceleration.  If you had enough trouble controlling your car before, upgrading it is the last thing you really want to do.


(Misc Notes)

So I did some vehicle research, and it turns out that all of the Traffic vehicles are coded and playable for some reason.  Why, I don't know, maybe they needed the vehicles coded as real vehicles for them to play correctly.  It's like being able to play as the cops in the PSX Version of NFS3.  Thought it was a stripped game mode but in fact it was there all along.  You can also hack the  police cars into your garage and race with them for a while.

There's also 6 Ford Falcon XR8 slots that just use the CLK 230 model.  Was there to be a Ford Falcon XR8 in High Stakes' PS1 gametype?  We'll never know.


(Overall: 8/10)

Need For Speed: High Stakes is a lost game in the swarm of "street racing".  The action's very arcade-like and the music is fitting.  This is what Need For Speed should be, not the gangster-swinging laugh-inducing headache of a plotline whose only features consist of you going to yet another random city and racing on the same turf for 9000 hours before you vaguely consider going somewhere else.

At least I can P.I.T maneuver other cars mid-race in High Stakes...