Most Wanted - That Says It!

I managed to snag an Xbox 360 2 days after the fat man made his rounds - hooray for rural Walmarts.. this was the first game I picked up, knowing my kids are true racing nuts. Now I've played a few PC racing games including earlier NFS titles, every version of Carmageddon, and of course the Grand Theft Auto series. NFS : Most Wanted definitely pushes visuals to a level that would be difficult to surpass. The graphics are amazing on a standard television but widescreen HDTV is truly amazing. Better than reality? Yeah, I think so!!

The Xbox 360 really shows its raw horsepower, able to do split-screen head to head racing (beware motion sickness!) with ease. You have an incredible array of cars to choose from -- I'm wanting to hop into the Lotus Elise! (my real-world Ride is an MR2 Spyder so I like that style of car!) Perhaps the biggest annoyance is that you have to "earn" the right to drive some of the cooler cars.

The car visual models are literally car-magazine perfect. The graphics throughout the game appear to filter the polygons in the graphics to smooth them out - besides the cars, with the humans in the cutscenes it is difficult to tell if they were filmed live or reanimated as a "soft focus" effect is used. The cutscenes add some entertaining taunting, particularly when the cops bust you. The car models have incredible detail, right down to the reflectors in the headlights, disk brakes, etc. Amazing realism. Honestly I don't know HOW the graphics could get any better.

Being a PC-platform convert, since the 360 platform blows away even the highest-end PC of the moment for a mere $400, I'm impressed by the speed the game loads - what, no half-hour installing and rebooting for the latest DirectX update, no minute-long level loads between races? No 5 gigs of hard drive eaten up? Cool. All my games will be on the console from now on, if the kids let me play! NFS : MW loads in oh, 10 seconds or so when starting a race. Cool.

One room for improvement would be in physics realism. You can head-on a semi at 150MPH, stop the semi in its tracks, then just race away. In reality, somebody would be hosing your guts off the semi's bumper of course. Perhaps the difficulty could be stepped up a bit. Cornering on streets at 150MPH is similarly unrealistic. Real cars don't do 90 degree turns at that speed!

The fast racing action detracts from the graphics a bit simply because there's no time to take it all in when it's blazing past you. Even if it were possible to improve the graphics, what would the point be?

I think a racing wheel is in order for this game; the stick controllers leave a bit to be desired!