Year 11, 2004 ~ Need for Speed: Underground 2 (NGC)

 

One night at a sleepover, a friend broke out a game I'd never seen before. It was a racing game, but it wasn't like Mario Kart. I'd only ever seen and played Mario Kart games. It was gritty, it was loud, gone was the fun goofy Nintendo music and the chaotic power-ups, it was all super speed boosts and a Much Music Big Shiny Tunes hard rock and nu-metal soundtrack. You could blow up gas stations and crash through buildings. After seeing this game at midnight in the basement of a rich kid who liked to cosplay like he was poor, my middle school brain was officially off its skateboarding phase and all-in on street racing. And that game was Need for Speed

...Most Wanted.

Yeah we're not talking about that game. That game is much better.

After experiencing NFS Most Wanted in the company of someone I would simply not tolerate as an adult, I immediately went to Jumbo Video and Blockbuster and rented the only other Need for Speed game I could find, NFS Underground. It wasn't open world, but it also had a cool soundtrack, nitrous boosts, and a little bit of customizing. It was cool, but it wasn't what I was looking for. Then one day at EB Games we were returning an Action Replay we couldn't use because it had no Mac compatibility and I found Underground 2 in the GameCube section. So I... "convinced" (bullied, sorry guys) my brothers into going in on a game only I was interested in. And it did have an open world! It had body modding! It had a cool soundtrack! But it stunk!

NFS Underground 2 was the first Need for Speed game to feature an open world. It did not handle that change gracefully. You end up repeating a lot of the same races over and over again, and in a lot of cases when you find a race in the world it jumps you to somewhere you just straight up don't have access to as part of the main game. In a lot of ways the open world feels superfluous, like it artificially extends a game which relies on the formula of the arcade racing the series was known for up to that point. This was truly a game that walked so its sequel, Most Wanted, could run.

I never actually beat NFS Underground 2 as a kid. It did become part of my regular Saturday routine. I'd do my paper route, bike downtown and get samosas at the farmers' market, come home and boot up the game. And you know what? It made playing Most Wanted and its sequel, Need for Speed Carbon, all the sweeter when I got my own copies.

Other games I've loved from 2004:

Sonic Heroes (NGC), Drakengard (PS2), The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures (NGC), Mega Man Anniversary Collection (NGC), Burnout 3: Takedown (PS2), Katamari Damacy (PS2), Tony Hawk's Underground 2 (NGC), Ratchet 3 Clank: Up Your Arsenal (PS2)