The Need For Speed (PS1)

This video was captured using the actual game on an actual Playstation. All of the very painful loading times have been removed for your consideration and enjoyment.

This is where it all started people. Well, almost. This game was first released on the very expensive commercial failure known as the 3DO. I'll never forget the first time I saw this game. Back before You Tube came along, you had to hope you saw it somewhere like a computer software store playing on the screens from tapes sent to the store via the manufacturer. Well, that's exactly where I saw this game. My brother who worked in a computer software store at the time brought home a 3DO demo reel tape. We were in awe of The Need for Speed. Until that time, we had never seen real cars in a video game before. We were used to games like Top Gear. While Top gear 1 and 2 were absolutely fantastic racing games, this was something totally new. Real cars. Not only that, but every car had an in-car view. Peeling out at the starting line. Racing in normal everyday traffic. COPS! OMG! There are COPS in this game!!! Get pulled over 3 times and game over. WOW! CRASHES! There are actually crashes instead of smacking an opponent and simply being slowed down. DOUGHNUTS!!!! YES!! DOING DOUGHNUTS IN A LAMBO!!! Realistic looking tire smoke and tire sounds. Ok I need to settle down now lol. The game was simply incredible. To nobody's surprise the 3DO saw an early death due to it's expense and got crushed by Sega, Sony, and Nintendo.

It seemed to me that The Need For Speed was going to be gone forever at that point. The following year after the Playstation was released, I saw that they had released The Need for Speed. I didn't even think about it. I bought it. They took a stellar title and made it even greater. They smoothed out the framerate, increased the speed, and added 3 more tracks and 1 secret track and secret car, took out the annoying douche bag videos from the 3DO version, and added a championship mode where you race against 6 other cars instead of just head to head like the 3DO. The downside was when the game was ported the graphics took a little bit of a hit. The graphics look better on the 3DO, but the very much increased playability and speed was worth the hit to the visuals. Some some sounds were also changed for the better like the tire and radar detector sounds. Those sounds still remained in the Sega Saturn version. I believe the graphics were better in the Saturn version as well. For some reason both The Need For Speed and Road Rash on Sega Saturn seemed to be based more off of the PC port. Either way, you can't go wrong with this game.

Sadly, even though this game was fantastic, there was some crap to shovel through in the years ahead. Need for Speed 2 was crap. I still need to try out Need for Speed 3 again since I first played it. At the time I was disgusted that they had gotten rid of the in-car view that I loved so much and kinda turned away from it. The PC version at the time looked incredible and still had the in-car view, but I had PC that was unable to run it at the time. Need For Speed: High Stakes was ok if you were just racing, but the game became a slide show in hot pursuit mode due to either bad programing or the hardware limitations of the Playstation. Again the PC version was not plagued with that problem. It wasn't until the PS2 arrived and Black Box released Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 that they nailed the console version. For this reason, I still haven't gone back to try the first Hot Pursuit because the second one on the PS2 blows it away in every respect.

The game today is still very playable and fun. I will not say it is the best, but still fun. It is a must own for any racing game fan. As a final note, I shut the in-game music off since that is the way I liked it from the original 3DO version.