With Hot Pursuit, bad driving etiquette spilled out of the city and onto the highways. In the open world environment, you could hit the road at 200-mph plus with no problem. But naturally, you've got to go fender-to-fender to beat down the pursuing cops. The game also made it cool to outrun the cops. In fact, you'd drive as fast as you could wherever you could just for the chance to make the law appear so that you could show them up. Not nice.
This is a just wicked fun way to beat the traffic. You drive in the wrong lanes, roll through the park, and slam into buildings--it doesn't matter as long as you reached your destination and earned a buck. The fact that pedestrians and passengers alike would chastise your lack of driving etiquette or scream in terror made the experience all the more sweet. It's one of the all time great driving experiences--just plain crazy. Of course, New Yorkers refer to it as "Taxi Driver Training Simulator... while West Coasters just ask "What's a taxi?"
All the racers in the NFS Underground series pride themselves on turning your average city streets into crazy, nocturnal racing themeparks where the price of admission is one lead foot...uh, thumb. In addition to glorifying tuner culture, Underground 2 brings the thrill of the hunt to the street racing game. The fictional city of Bayview here is a free-roaming environment and you're encouraged to cruise around town to find the action. Whether you're downtown or uptown, you have to figure out how to adjust your driving style and tune your rig to tear up the streets, as well as the competition.
DUB lets you pimp your ride to an extreme level of pimpitude guaranteed to make Xzibit and the West Coast Customs Crew cry. But you get some highly competitive racing and a no-nonsense (practically professional) attitude about becoming involved with the illegal street scene. Cars also demonstrate their own "moves" and "abilities" during racing. SUVs and heavy iron, for instance, can muscle their way through the pack like a tank, while quick cars slow down time so they can weave through traffic. Props to the Midnight Club for being outrageous without being over-the-top.
Takedown transforms car crashes into a sort of bizarre ballet of bad driving. Sure, you can just race cars (if you want to be boring), but the game is notorious for its Crash mode, where you speed into traffic-congested areas and try to cause as much monetary damage as possible. When you've developed some "skills" you can try for Crashbreaker combos. Basically, if you can hit a certain number of cars your auto becomes a rolling bomb that you can detonate at will. The Aftertouch feature is also a cool...er, aftertouch that's a sort of motor vehicle "bullet time" effect.
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