Need for Speed Carbon

By Daniel Needham

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Need for Speed Most Wanted brought EA’s street racing series back to its roots with the reintroduction of law enforcement into their equation. And now with the impending release of the Nintendo Wii, the series will hit the console with revolutionary controls not seen in a driving game before, as well as new features and - what every great driving game needs - cars.

Probably the biggest feature of the lot is the control system that will be eagerly anticipated by racing fans worldwide. Players accelerate and brake with the Nunchuk and C-stick. They steer with the Wii Remote, and turn left and right with a motion that is translated accordingly onscreen. That’s right, even your girlfriend can wave the control around and it will actually mean something! Hand braking happens with the 2 button on the Nunchuk. Of course these are just the default settings, but the game will allow you to tinker with the settings until you can reach your happy medium.

After the predominantly illegal activities of Most Wanted, street racing has essentially divided into two distinct factions. Some street racers have shifted to sanctioned races, competitions set up legally on safe tracks. Some racers, however, have taken their sport outside city walls, continuing to defy the law but pushing the boundaries of what any normal person would consider safe even further than before.

This leads to the newest and biggest mode in Need for Speed: Carbon: Canyon Duels. Based on points rather than finishing the race first, Canyon Duels pits two cars against each other in two rounds, with one car chasing the other in the first, and then reversing it for the second. You'll always begin as the follow car, whereby you'll earn points for keeping up with your opponent. The closer you are, the quicker you'll earn points. For the second leg, your opponent will follow you and attempt to chip away at the points you've just earned. Finish in the positive and you'll take home a medal and maybe even your opponent’s car if the stakes get that high.

While you'll be racing one-on-one in Canyon Duels, those only make for about 25% of the races in NFS: Carbon, with the majority of the game taking place in its open-world environment. This is where the majority of the story will take place and it's here that you'll build up your own crew and improve their racing techniques and even get them to race alongside you.

There are three car classes this time out - tuner, muscle and exotic. Tuner cars are things like pimped-out Civics and Volkswagens, basically middle of the road cars that have been given a ton of extra juice and flair specifically for racing. Muscle cars are your classic 1960s and '70s sports cars, while exotics are those quarter-million dollar-plus beasts with hundreds upon hundreds of horsepower. The quickly-defined differences between the three types is that tuners handle the best and have decent speed, muscle cars are really powerful but can’t handle well, while exotics are the quickest, but handle somewhere between the other two.

But as with any quality driver, you’ll need to master all three of these classes if you want to get off of the starting line in NFS: Carbon. Especially since the popular drift mode from the Underground sub-series is making its return, with a reworked scoring system and simplifying the controls, making the user the predominate factor between success and failure.

Yet another feature in Need for Speed Carbon, and probably the most fun, is its Autosculpt system. You're given analog control over the shape of the major pieces of your car, allowing you to raise, lower, angle, shrink, expand and even twist parts however you want (within the laws of science).

This is looking like a totally hot game for a totally hot system. If you’re getting a Wii, or even planning on winning NZGamer.com’s competition, you’d be a fool for not going out and picking up this title for the Nintendo Wii.

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