Eat your heart out, Michael Bay!
In General
- As in Awesome Video Game Levels: Most of the games in the series have at least one of them. You be the judge!
- The Need for Speed: Coastal. The joy of the point-to-point tracks without the monotony of City, or the Difficulty Spike of Alpine, as well as seeing the ocean by the roaring cliffside, the horizon yellowing as the sun sets, the hot-air balloons up in the sky, and the half-buried Statue of Liberty. This is also a Shout-Out to Planet of the Apes (1968).
- Need for Speed II: Proving Grounds may just be an easy superspeedway, but it certainly lives up to the series' name. Also, it has an awesome song to be "Hallin' Ass"
to. - III: Hot Pursuit: Empire City was certainly a track worthy of being a prize for beating Knockout mode. Its cyberpunk influences, great techno theme, the tight and tricky layout, and even those alleyways near the start/finish line that could be used as shortcuts early on made it a fun track to race on.
- Most Wanted 2012: The crown goes to the Hughes International Airport in northeastern Fairhaven which appears as part of the Terminal Velocity DLC. Big jumps, futuristic architecture, a long drag strip derived from a plane runway, a construction site and winding roads. And you can drive INSIDE the airport! See this gameplay video to witness the utter awesomeness of this airport. And if you have this pack, get ready to feel like Frank Martin.
- Using a Turbo as a Racer. Just hearing it power up with a short Beat, followed by a loud boom! as your screen goes into Tunnel Vision while your engine screams with the power of an F18 taking off on Afterburner as you break 400 KPH. Made even better by the cops’ reaction to it:Dispatch: “All units, we’re detecting a power surge from the suspect. Be on guard.”
- If you use it in a low gear, you also get to enjoy the car's bouncing redline until it shifts up.
- Just about any time you hit an EMP on any car. The camera zooming to center on the targeted vehicle, followed by a second of silence... boom! Sparks of electricity explodes around the target as the car uncontrollably drifts into a crash. Then you get a very satisfying message.EMP Hit: 200 Bounty / EMP Bust/Wreck: 500 bounty
- Remember that you are in control of a machine that can not only break 400 KPH and instantly destroy cars from a distance, but also destroy freaking helicopters from a distance!
- Let’s not forget the sound a police helicopter makes when it passes over your vehicle. Just... beautiful. Bonus points if you’re drifting at night while it happens.
- Busting the last Racer (or being busted) is epic in itself. The cinematic camera just makes it even better as it shows (in great detail) how wrecked the Racer’s (or your) ride is.
- This video shows how satisfying it is for your helicopter to make the last bust. Not surprised? How about when the Racer gets busted on the finish line?
- This
- Jamming an EMP just before it hits. The fact that jamming an EMP causes no cutscene and instead mutes all in-game sounds for 3 seconds (minus the sound of the Jammer activating) while the police dispatcher warns of communications being jammed. The entire sequence is epic in itself.
- "Calm Before the Storm" has you and 3 other opponents race with complete radio silence. Only when you pass the 11.8 mile mark do the police appear with a huge amount of police cars waiting for you. Only then does the pursuit music start playing.
- Hell, just the fact that the game, despite just being nothing more than a racing game, has so much detail in it. There are occasionally civilian helicopters carrying wood logs and random Cessnas flying overhead, all with their own sound effects. The graphics themselves are a sight to behold, especially for a 2010 game. You’d be surprised at how good the game looks at maximum graphics.
- If you play long enough as a Racer, you can notice that the cop AI isn't specifically programmed to target just you. Cop cars often overtake other Racers to immobilize them with Spike Strips, while other cars target Racers with EMPs (you can hear the sound of/see the cops' EMPs hitting or missing other Racers). Sometimes Racers themselves crash into other cars while you whizz past them as you get this message:
Crash Escape - On the subject of small details: hitting top speed in Exotic and Hyper class cars and listening to the engine shrieking as you reach its limit.
- The voiceover description that each car has. In addition as a callback to the extended narration of the original Hot Pursuit, one video comment points out that this level of Car Porn is what you would expect from realistic racing games like Forza or Gran Turismo rather than an arcade racer.
- Jack takes a page out of Live Free or Die Hard and rams a freaking helicopter!
- See how far you can go off those interlocking rings in Most Wanted 2012 with a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport or a Koenigsegg Agera R using powershot pro nitrous. Either way, it's fun to go off those rings.
- If you drive at it from the correct angle (facing the hotel with the rings in the foreground, it's almost directly from the right, a bit towards the hotel) in a fast, flat car like the LFA or Marussia, you can land INSIDE the parking garage. That's right: you can launch a supercar into a gap between 2 concrete barriers maybe twice as tall as your car!
- You think that's far? Combining the Ultimate Speed Pack and Terminal Velocity DLC and using the mod-switching bug mentioned on the YMMV page will let you go over a plane with a Hennessey Venom GT Spyder at 270+ MPH and land OVER SIX HUNDRED YARDS AWAY.
- With the Terminal Velocity DLC for Most Wanted 2012, you can have a drag race on an airport strip, with airplanes parked on the runway. Not to mention the feeling you get when you pass either one of the speed cameras at either side, reminding you that you are in control of a machine that can (with generous tuning) break 300 MPH/480 KPH.
- All of the racing scenes in the film, made better by the fact that they were all done practically with no CGI whatsoever.
- Also from the film: "Just go to the window."vrrrRRRRRRR*rattle*... vrrrRRRRR*rattle*...
- The final race in the reboot involves you racing against all five of the Icons (Magnus Walker, Ken Block, Akira Nakai, Fish & Risky Devil, Shinichi Morohoshi), as well as all your buddies (Spike, Manu, Amy, Robyn, Travis) throughout the perimeter of Ventura Bay except for the northernmost part. Not only the race is fast and tight, but the ending in particular involves you, your friends and the Icons taking a group photo after a wild party. Doubles also as a Heartwarming Moment, as it's the first ending in the series where everybody is happy.Robyn: #UltimateBestNightEver!
- Again, the reboot enforces you to make your own CMOA with the Perfect Moment mechanic, which involves maxing out every single one of your multipliers for each of the five ways to play in a single moment. It is nowhere as easy as it sounds, but upon doing so you will be greeted by the words "PERFECT MOMENT" appearing on your Hud with a dan-dan-dan-dan-dan-WOOSH.
- Pictured above is "The Highway Heist" which was featured in the E3 2017 gameplay trailer, where Jess manages to retrieve Marcus's Koenigsegg Regera from the truck, complete with an explosion as the icing of the cake. "I got this" indeed.
- The iconic BMW M3 GTR that appeared in many Need for Speed games, surprisingly becomes part of the main plot since Carbon, serving as the de facto Final Boss of the game, being driven by Frank Mercer himself! Did we mention you can also drive the unlockable Hero cars that you obtain from the other Driver Stories, such as Eddie's Skyline or Rachel's 350Z? Yet those two are both all in their respective body kits used in Underground itself!
- Lucas' Big Damn Heroes moment midway through the story, when he rams his father's '69 Camaro SS into Frank's police cruiser, saving Ana and the player from being arrested. He then punches Frank Mercer in the face as payback for beating him up. While he's still nursing wounds from said beating.
