Video Game Vintage Title: Need For Speed: Most Wanted

Need For Speed: Most Wanted

Need for Speed: Most Wanted is a racing video game developed by EA Black Box and published by Electronic Arts. It is the ninth installment in the Need for Speed series. The game features street racing-oriented game play, with certain customization options from the Need for Speed: Underground series. The game is succeeded by Need for Speed: Carbon, which serves as a sequel to Most Wanted.

Most Wanted has been released for Nintendo DS, Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, Game Boy Advance and is the first Need for Speed game released for the seventh generation console, the Xbox 360, as one of the system's launch titles. Another version of Most Wanted, titled Need for Speed: Most Wanted: 5�1�0 has been released for the PlayStation Portable. In May 2012, the PlayStation 2 version was released on the online virtual market, PlayStation Store, for the PlayStation 3. On June 1, 2012, a reboot of the game under the same title, was announced by the British developing team Criterion Games.

Need For Speed: Most Wanted Plot

The game starts with the player arriving in Rockport City from his home in Palmont City after a race gathering between Palmont's top three racers who were arrested by the Palmont PD and Darius told him to leave the city. The player is a drifter, living off-the-grid and scouting for races while driving a custom-built racing 2003 BMW M3 E46 GT-R. As soon as he enters the city, a red 2003 Mazda RX-8, with Mia Townsend behind the wheel, encourages him to follow her, escalating a chase through the streets of Rockport. As they approach and stop at an intersection, a custom-built 2005 Chevrolet Corvette C6 police car pulls them over, but Mia escapes. The driver of the Corvette exits and introduces himself as Sgt. Cross, who states he is determined to stop illegal racing in Rockport for good. As he is about to arrest the player and impound his car (suspicious of the car having no street-legal parts), dispatch calls him about a pursuit across town, and he is forced to leave, but not before informing the player that "Next time, you won't be so lucky" and leaving a pinstripe scratch on the player's car with his car keys.

A few days later, the player is scouting the town when he is intercepted by Ronald "Ronnie" McCrea, a member of a local racing crew, in his banana-yellow 1998 Toyota Supra 2JZ and challenges him to a race. After easily defeating him, he is led to a local abandoned train yard, where there's a local street racing gathering. There, he crosses paths with the ruthless leader of Ronnie's racing crew, Clarence "Razor" Callahan, who drives a heavily modified, custom-body black 2005 Ford Mustang GT. He also meets Mia. Razor mocks the player, refusing to race "this nobody", but Mia defends him and suggests that they bet on a race, to which Razor agrees and bets $10,000 against him. One of Razor's crew, Toru "Bull" Sato, challenges him personally, while driving a metallic-black sleeper 2004 Mercedes SLR McLaren. To make the race more difficult for him, Razor calls the cops, but the player defeats Bull as well.

Soon after, the player goes to another local racing event, led by a mysterious guy named Rog, who drives a black and red 2004 Pontiac GTO. After the player wins the race, Rog catches up to him and tells him he is impressed by the player's skills, but then warns him to watch his back around Razor's crew before driving off upon seeing Razor waiting up ahead. Once Rog has left, Razor informs the player about "the Blacklist", a list of the 15 top most wanted street racers in Rockport. Razor lets it be known that he is #15 on the list, and because he is a Blacklist racer, the player must bet his pink-slip (bet his own car) in order to race him. Razor tells him that he will be waiting for him and departs.

The next day, he arrives at the spot to race, and Razor threatens to beat him down. As the race starts, police join the hot pursuit across Rockport, but as they progress through a crowded tunnel and lose the cops, Mia calls and informs him that he left a huge oil slick at the start line, and his car soon breaks down, forcing him to forfeit the race and, by Blacklist rules, his car as well. As Razor mocks him in front of his own crew and hits on Mia, one of Razor's crew members spots Rockport police approaching and sounds the alarm. Razor and his crew escape, but the player is arrested by Cross personally without his car and taken to prison.

The player is released because of a lack of evidence, since he doesn't have his car. Soon after, Mia arrives and takes him away to the Rosewood borough of Rockport. She explains that Razor cheated in the race, disabling his oil system, since he knew that he would lose against him. And to make things worse, after acquiring his car, he became the #1 racer on the Blacklist. Knowing the player's desire for revenge, Mia sets him up with a garage and helps him buy a car, and giving him a decoded police PDA of rap sheets of the other Blacklist drivers, while Rog, also learning of the player's misfortune with Razor, provides him with details on the Blacklist races.

As the player progresses, it becomes more and more difficult for him, having to drive against more skilled and powerful Blacklist drivers, and many of them try to take down the player in the race due to being on Razor's payroll, wanting to take the player out and eliminate any competition. Also, the player is bothered by multiple suspicions of both Rog and Mia, as Rog suspects about Mia's betting schemes on him, thinking she has an ulterior motive, while Mia suspects Rog is turning the player against her with his concerns on her actions. Worse, the player also has problems with Cross, who, due to having to release the player due to lack of evidence, has a special police crew consisting of police C6 Corvettes against racers, on his back. As he progresses to the top, he finds that #3 and #2 are none other than Ronnie and Bull, but he manages to defeat them.

As he manages to arrive to #2, he finds himself challenged by Razor himself. As he manages to finally defeat Razor and humiliate him, Razor is furious, refuses to give in his #1 spot, and forces the player to take the keys of his car back personally, revealing his true cocky, cowardly and cheating personality, but Mia snatches the keys, saying that it is over. Razor refuses to acknowledge this, and tries to take the keys back, but she overpowers him and knocks him down. As Razor's crew tries to detain her in retaliation, she reveals herself as an undercover cop of the Rockport Police Department, forcing Ronnie, Bull, and the rest to back off. Soon after, the appearance of the Rockport police helicopter, Eagle One, causes Razor's crew to panic and flee as the entire police force arrives with Cross to arrest all of the racers, having been tipped off by Mia. Mia throws the keys to the player, who escapes in time.

Soon after the player and the rest of the drivers arrive, Cross arrives and arrests Razor, but asks where the player is. Mia covers for him, saying that he got away by himself. Cross is furious about this, and asks about the other Blacklist drivers, but Mia informs him that they are through and the Blacklist is gone now. Cross, furious, demands every single unit in town go after the player before departing himself into the pursuit.

The scene shifts to the player, who is escaping from the police back in his car, while Cross informs him to give up and surrender since the Blacklist is gone and he has no chance of escaping. After a huge and intense police pursuit across the entire city, Mia calls and apologizes for lying to him, and that she was forced to be an informant to Cross in exchange for immunity, and that she used the player to arrest the members of the Blacklist, but she never wanted him to be arrested and so she let him go. She informs him about the unfinished bridge that connects to the highway that goes through the interstate leading out of town. The player heads there, smashes through the signs and manages to jump over the bridge, while the other police cars crash and fall into the valley below. Cross himself is forced to stop at the edge of the bridge, while the player heads through the highway and escapes the cops, before speeding away, departing Rockport City. The bridge soon leads him into Palmont City, where the player was before he had left to Rockport a year earlier.

Following player's escape, Cross brings up the rap sheet, and adds the player to the National Wanted list as the game ends.

Need For Speed: Most Wanted Gameplay

Most Wanted is like other Need for Speed games, where the player selects one car and races against a time limit or other racers to reach a destination. Police chases have once again been integrated into certain racing sessions, in which the police employ vehicles and tactics to stop the player's car and arrest the player, like Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, and Need for Speed: Carbon. As players take control of faster cars and increasingly rely on nitrous oxide speed boosts, the oxide meter now refills automatically for the first time since its introduction in Underground, and driving sequences become fast-paced and intense similar to the Burnout series.

Three distinct regions are offered in the city of Rockport, along with cycling weather. Racing events take place between sunrise and sunset, unlike in the Underground where the events took place at night. A Grand Theft Auto-like Free Roam mode is provided as in Need for Speed: Underground 2, but is still limited to Career mode, as well as pursuit-based events in other modes.

Brand promotion from Underground 2 still continues strongly, with Old Spice and the presence of Burger King restaurants, Castrol oil, Axe Unlimited and Edge shaving gel. The Cingular logo is still visible in the game's wireless communication system. Performance, body and visual parts that can be bought in the game are also from real life companies. However, Best Buy stores did not return from Underground 2.

Reception
Need for Speed: Most Wanted was met with positive reviews. Aggregating review websites GameRankings and Metacritic gave the Xbox 360 version 83.05% and 83/100, the Xbox version 82.59% and 83/100, the PlayStation 2 version 81.56% and 82/100, the PC version 81.50% and 82/100 and the GameCube version 79.36% and 80/100. While the Game Boy Advance version was met with mixed reviews with a score of 67.33% and the Nintendo DS version was met with negative reviews with a score of 46.89% and 45/100. GameSpot gave the game an 8.4 out of 10, praising the game for its "sharp graphics" and "outstanding sound effects", but criticized the AI for being "too easy at first, but too hard later on". Need For Speed: Most Wanted was a commercial success; it sold nearly six million copies worldwide.

IGN gave it an 8.5 out of 10 "great" rating, praising almost every element of the game. Praise was given to the map design, described as "a crazily chromed out, sepia-tone landscape of industrial structures", car modeling, saying "The car models are especially sleek looking too", the car line up and the return of exotics. Particularly strong praise was given to the police system, saying "The cops are never that smart, but they continually grow in aggressiveness and numbers." and "they add that very necessary component of challenge, annoyance, and heat that makes this game so fun". Praise even went to the cut scenes and their casting, which usually falls victim to critics, saying "this mixture of animated, highly colored FMV characters and stylized backgrounds is both imaginative and refreshing".