Need for Speed: Underground

by Electronic Arts

Product Features

• Features urban street racing and high performance tuner cars
• Build the ultimate street machine by earning cash to pay for custom body kits
• 20 fully customizable, licensed cars from Mitsubishi Motors, Subaru, Toyota, and more
• Perfect skills by nailing the perfect shift in drag racing and by putting you street cred on the line
• For up to four players

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0000C0Z23
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches ; 8 ounces
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: November 17, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (65 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,898 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
  • #8 in Video Games > PC Games > Racing & Flying
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Platform: PC

From the Manufacturer

Enter the world of urban street racing and high performance tuner cars with the latest title in the hit Need for Speed series: Need for Speed Underground. Take on today’s most popular tuner cars from Mitsubishi Motors, Subaru, Toyota and many more, building the ultimate street machine by earning cash to pay for custom body kits and a host of licensed car performance mods. But just creating a custom street racing machine will not get you to the top; it takes a certain amount of attitude and razor sharp driving skills to compete in the tough world of urban racing.

A number of diverse events set in gritty, nighttime environments make up the heart of street competition. Players become complete street racers by perfecting skills in each event by nailing the perfect shift in drag racing and by putting their street cred on the line, racing through the city streets at all hours of the night.

Prove you belong in the elite street racing circles, work your way up the underground rankings and take on the best of the best in each discipline.

Key Features:

• Twenty fully customizable, licensed cars are included in the game from Mitsubishi Motors, Subaru, Toyota, and many more.
• Several unique racing events will be featured in the game including the following: Drag Racing--Explode off of the line with three other racers, on the brink of control, as you race for the finish line. Street Racing--Heat up the cold city streets with some high octane, high speed racing, finding the fastest lines through a variety of open city racecourses.
• Hundreds of ways to customize your ride. Pick from major aftermarket parts manufacturers including AEM Inc., Audiobahn, Bilstein, Dazz Motorsport, DC Sports, Eibach, Enkei, GReddy Performance Products Inc., HKS, Holley, Injen, Jackson Racing, MOMO, Neuspeed, Nitrous Express Inc., O.Z, PIAA, Skunk2 Racing, Sparco, StreetGlo, and Turbonetics Inc.
• Need for Speed Underground’s amazing graphics will immerse gamers in the world of after hours street racing. The diverse urban nighttime environments are modeled after a variety of highly detailed real-world urban landscapes. A new sensation of speed has been created in the game by the award winning Need For Speed team and an OSCAR nominated Hollywood visual effects expert.
• Over 100 unique events give racers the opportunity to earn cash, buy more upgrades, and unlock cars and tracks while increasing their street reputation.
• A diverse collection of high-octane music keeps the game rolling.
• Online support for up to 4 players.

Product Description

Highly Tuned for Intense SpeedProduct InformationHit the streets in the world's most elite tuner cars and take down the ultimateracers in your own customized machine. To own the streets you'll have to riskit all in a variety of high-styling high-speed events -- including Drift Dragand Circuit. Tune your car to perfection by winning hundreds of upgrade partsthen go underground for the most intense addictive driving experience of yourlife. When it comes to speed no other game comes close to delivering this kindof action. And while the need for speed is what keeps you coming back for morecustom looks are your ticket to scoring big with the crowds. You are what youdrive in Need for Speed Underground.Product Features Feel speed like never before. Graphics that obliterate the envelope and turbocharged physics make this the fastest gameplay experience ever. Choose from 20 elite licensed tuner cars from Mitsubishi Toyota Subaru and more. Fully customize your car with hundreds of aftermarket parts from top-name manufacturers. Change your car's appearance to fit your personality change its performance to fit your driving style. Huge highly detailed environments push your gaming hardware to the absolute limit as you battle to own the streets in your urban street machine. Race hard and win upgrades including weight reduction kits turbo suspension kits tires wheels and nitrous. Set the asphalt ablaze in a variety of game modes including Drift Drag and Circuit. Go underground and become the ultimate street racer in the epic Story mode. Build your ideal car take it online and take on the world's fastest competition.Windows Requirements Windows 98 Me 2000 or XP 700MHz or faster 128MB of RAM for Windows 98 and Me 256MB of RAM for Windows 2000 and XP X CD-ROM Drive or faster 2.0GB or more free hard drive space DirectX 9.0 compatible video card DirectX 9.0 compatible sound card Video Card

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The New King of Arcade Racing Games !, December 18, 2003

By 

Derek G (North of Cyrodiil) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Need for Speed Underground (CD-ROM)

Driving fans rejoice! Jumping on the popularity of import street racing, and borrowing heavily from the driving scenes of The Fast and the Furious, NFS Underground is a combination of both beauty and brains that's a must-have for any racing fan; provided you have the hardware to handle it. Best of all, you don't have to endure Paul Walker's lame acting.

Slicked up and glowing with neon, EA's latest release is the most visually stunning NFS game produced to date. You can actually see the reflection of your car and the surroundings off the rain-soaked streets. Even more impressive are how the screen explodes in light and your surroundings shake into a chaotic mess as you approach speeds much higher than your car was originally designed to handle. It's the most visceral feeling of speed in a game yet as you really feel like your computer is doing 150mph. Unfortunately, all this eye candy comes at a price as you'll need some serious hardware to experience it in all its glory. Plan on having at least a Geforce 3 or a Radeon 9000 just for low detail settings. For full detail you'll need at least a Radeon 9600 or a Geforce 5600, not to mention a quick CPU and plenty of RAM.

Many liked EA's previous NFS release, Hot Pursuit, but I was disappointed as the attention to the driving physics seemed to go out the window. I had the same complaint about Midnight Club II; a game that, in a word, sucked. Fortunately, I can say this is not the case in NFS Underground. Each car has a distinctive feel, with individual strengths and weaknesses. It's an arcade racer at heart, but there are enough differences in the cars to make you want to experiment with different cars and find the one that suits your style of driving best.

Sound effects are top-notch. THX enabled, the engines roar to life and cars, buildings, and slow moving objects whoosh past your ears in true surround sound. Those with 4+ speaker setups are in for a real treat with this game. Also included are about 25 tracks ranging from rap to rock to techno, featuring artists like BT, Nate Dogg, Overseer, Fuel, and Static-X. While it's a decent selection, it's still only about 2 hours of music. Perhaps it's just me, but music with vocals gets repetitive and annoying over time as opposed to background music. I never liked that "Get Low" song much to begin with. I've heard it so much now I'm at the point of self-mutilation. Fortunately, EA provides you with the ability to customize the soundtrack so you can eliminate the songs you don't like.

The game isn't perfect. Even with 21st century technology, EA programmers are still unable to create any car damage modeling whatsoever. The cartoonish sight of your car doing triple flips in midair and on the street, only to land without a scratch seriously detracts from the otherwise realistic looking environment you're racing in. And, like all NFS games before it, you're still racing in a tunnel whether it looks like it or not. Just once I'd like to do an out of control jump and actually land in a swimming pool or someone's house instead of simply pinballing off the edge of the screen and back on to the road. The lack of a replay option is also unfortunate.

Customizing your car is a cool (and addicting) feature of NFS Underground, yet EA's method of implementation leaves something to be desired. I can understand that performance options, such as turbo, NOS, and weight reduction kits, are not unlocked until you win key races so the game remains balanced. What I don't understand are why visual upgrades such as paint, vinyl, and even decals are locked up? It's almost laughable to win a race just so you unlock a sticker.

Even with these minor gripes, I would have given it five stars. The "last straw," so to speak, is the A.I. The game gets insanely difficult as you start to climb the ranks. Races are won and lost in mere tenths of a second. What will set you off the deep end is the phenomenon of what I can only describe as the computer "throwing cars at you." As you round a blind corner or jump, you will frequently find yourself directly in the path of the only car on the road. I've been in situations where I have opponents directly to the left and right of me. Guess which lane the slow moving car is in? To some extent, you can use this to your advantage by closely following (drafting) an opponent so they slam into the traffic meant for you. Unfortunately, you still have to compensate for the fact that all of your opponents are psychic. I can't tell you the number of times an opponent managed to slam on the brakes to avoid traffic they couldn't possibly have seen in advance. As much as I love this game, this unfair advantage is too aggravating for me to be able to give it five stars. In the difficult settings, winning becomes less about driving ability and more about dumb luck that you don't slam into something that'll cost you the entire race.

That said, I still recommend this game for racing fans. It's a high-tech thrill that really does fulfill your Need for Speed and it's certainly one of the finest games EA has produced.

Hope the review helped.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars (8.0 out of 10) fun, but flawed., December 5, 2003

By 

Lorin Reed (moreno valley, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Need for Speed Underground (CD-ROM)

Okay, so everyone is nuts about this game. and when i finally played it, i understood why. the cutomization options are such a fun gimmick- i had a lot of fun turning an ugly yellow VW GTI into a drag racing monster with beautifully tinted windows, custom decals, and rims of my choosing. It's what everyone wants when they play a racing game- the ability to craft a car that suits their taste, right down to the type of exhaust. And i have no problem with the fact that this feature was implemented. i think it was a good idea. The problem I have is with the way that it was implemented.
Why am i still unlocking decals and vinyl at level 100? who cares that i finally unlocked the nitrous express decal; dont i deserve more than that at level 100? and why dont i get the wide body kit until the 3rd to last race? great! i can throw this wide body kit on my car, which does absolutely nothing for performance, so that i look good for the final competition.

Money is never a problem in this game. You always have more than enough to unlock anything you want, because you get money after every race. So, a better way to do this would have been to make everything availible from the start of the game, with higher prices on the performance parts and consistent lower prices on the things you dont need (like decals and vinyl). That way, the player can see what they could potentially be unlocking and work for it, instead of just having it blindly handed to them when they can most definately afford it. But because of the way the customization system was implemented, theres really no point in having money in this game.

My other complaint is with the AI. its not like you're actually racing to gain distance on other cars, ever. its more like you're racing against other cars that will always either be ahead of you, or slightly behind you, and catching up fast. This is especially true in later races, where even if you set the difficulty to easy, cars will catch up quickly, and most likely, pass you. I did an experiment to see how the AI worked, and what i found was kind of dissapointing. In later races, when i would perform almost flawlessly (because i'd had to do the same race about 50 times over and over), another car would always be right behind me, or in front of me. But when i slowed down to the pace of the rest of the group, the AI was more lenient, and waited for me. An advantage to this is that the gameplay always provides tension. But the disadvantage is far greater: having to do a six or seven lap race over and over, possibly doing a single circuit a hundred times, just because you crashed once.

Of course, these are technical flaws, and the game appeals to people at an aesthetically pleasing and fun level, rather than a technical one. its an arcade racer, and it doesn't dissapoint at it's arcadiness. You customize your car because it makes it look better. You race against difficult AI becase nothing beats the thrill of seeing the screen blur all those downtown lights into a complete euphoric mass when you use your nitrous to barely pass up another car, just before the finish line. The graphics are amazing, and are a complete evolution from previous nfs games. I should also mention that with a good video card (i'm using a readeon 9600xt), the pc version of this game looks way better than any of the console versions.

This game has conquered it's niche, with cutscenes and music straight outta the fast & the furious (the drawbridge jumps are a complete rip-off of the second movie's drawbridge scene). And the cars are awesome in that they're actually licensed, and you treat em' like your babies as they go from crap to demi-god machines. And i guess thats what matters most with this game- fun. And you'll have quite a great deal of that, as long as you're willing to put up with a slightly less amount of frustration.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars You can't deny a great game., December 18, 2004

By 

DeadlyFred - See all my reviews

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Need for Speed Underground (CD-ROM)

Regardless of your personal views of illegal street racing, Need For Speed : Underground provides an unmatched thrill-ride in the racing genre. You may think the cars look silly, you may think the reckless people who drag race them down public streets should all be arrested, but when you slap it all into a well-polished video game package, the appeal is undeniable. Whether its the allure of the tuner subculture or just an enjoyment of racing games in general that draws you in, I can almost gaurantee you'll be hooked after the first few 100 mile an hour tours of NFS:U's virtual metropolis.

The driving engine offered here is both friendly yet complex, allowing beginners to quickly pick up and become familiar with it, and more seasoned players to exploit a number of skillful feats to shave precious seconds off their lap times. In addition, it has an excellent "feel" to it. Both the car's physics and the motion of the camera will constantly react to even the slightest control input as you send your tricked-out racers barreling across intersections and down narrow alleyways at break-neck speeds.

As much as I personally enjoy games like GTA and Mafia which allow you to race recklessly down city streets, the average cookie-cutter racing sim has never really appealed to me much. You get a fancy car, you get a nice open track, and you get to drive around it; I can't say the formula excites me much. NFS:U picks up the dynamic slack that most racing games lack, providing you with an interesting "real" environment for your racing exploits and additionally allowing a broad degree of freedom for how to fine tune both the performance and appearance of your cars. This means that, hey, you don't like the way pimped-out street racers look? You don't have to race one. Your ride can be as wild or as domesticated as you want it to be, but the racing experience will always be the former.

Some of the races can be pretty tense, especially into the later portion of the game, but the learning curve is pretty smooth so by the time you've worked your way to that point you should be able to handle the extra ante of competition.

All in all an excellent racing game that is accessible to casual players yet offers plenty of rewards for those who put in their dues behind the virtual wheel.

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