Sunday, December 07, 2008

Need for Speed Undercover Uncovered

Need for Speed: Undercover is the 12th installment of the popular racing video game series Need for Speed, developed by EA Black Box and published by Electronic Arts. It was released on PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, Wii, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation Portable, iPod Touch, iPhone, N-Gage 2.0 and mobile phone in November 2008.

Undercover features a new "open-world" map consisting of 80 miles of road and a large highway system making it the largest Need for Speed "open-world" environment EA has ever created. The city is called Tri-City, and consists of four boroughs called Palm Harbor, Port Crescent, Gold Coast Mountains, and Sunset Hills. There is also a return of the Speedbreaker, rechargeable nitrous, Pursuit Breakers, and heat levels. The police are much tougher this time around, they will now perform PIT maneuvers.

The game's story mode sets the player in the story as a police officer going undercover into the criminal underground of Tri-City, a fictional city where the game is set. Players take on dangerous 'jobs' and compete in races in order to infiltrate and take down a ruthless international crime smuggling syndicate of street racers and car thieves. The player's only contacts to the police are federal handler Chase Linh, played by Maggie Q, and later Lt. Jack M. Keller played by Paul Pape.

Even though the game didn't get much appreciation from critics (~70/100), I felt the game is different and interesting. Graphics has improved but is less realistic. System requirements seems to be same or lower. I am running the game at 1440x900, that too on my custom made Dell laptop which is around an year old (Inspiron 1520, Core2 Duo T7500@2.2 Ghz, 2GB RAM, GeForce 8600M GT (256MB dedicated + 256MB shared)) and it runs smoothly even at the highest resolution. I would suggest to get your hands on it at the earliest, seems to be worth the time. But again I just installed today and hope it won't disappoint me later, so far so good. I started playing NFS from version 2, back in late 90s, and has completed every release of NFS since then.

New Features:
Style points (burnout, close call, near miss, drift, paint trade, in air, 180, 360, 720 etc)
Get $ out of bounty, get out there and destroy everything ;)
Around 11 Game modes (Circuit, Sprint, Highway Battle, Cost to State, Escape, Checkpoint, Jobs, Cops 'n' Robbers, The Heist, Criminal Scramble and Chasedown)
Sweet and sexy Maggie Q (what more inspiration you need to win the races)

See some screen shots below:








For more info, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_Speed_Undercover
http://undercover.needforspeed.com

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