You leave skid marks on the road where you brake or turn tightly, and you can hear your tires shriek as you speed around bends. In Underground, not only do you see tire smoke when you race off the starting line, but whenever you drift around a corner. The squeal of rubber on tarmac punctuates every turn in The Fast and the Furious and it helps add depth and texture to the racing scenes - you can hear the car struggle to stay on the road. This may seem like a weird thing to mention, but the previous Need for Speed title - Hot Pursuit 2 - only featured tire smoke when racers were getting off the starting line. Related: The 10 Best Selling EA Franchises of All-Time, RankedĪnother way the game communicates speed is through tire smoke. It takes you out of the driver’s seat for a moment and makes you a spectator of your own speed - a fantastic stylistic choice that allows you to be both the player and audience simultaneously. As if that weren’t enough, if your car goes over a raised part of the track at high speeds and catches some air, the camera moves in front of and below you, and time slows so you can appreciate your sick neon underglow as you stick the landing. You truly believe you’re pushing your tuner to its absolute limit. Underground’s drag races feature an even heavier dose of shaky cam, which makes it feel as though your car may rip itself apart at any moment. This method of communicating nitrous-infused speed is now the standard in racing games. It turns your Ford Focus into a space shuttle - it’s exciting. It communicates that same sense of sudden acceleration the film does. In Underground, hitting the NOS causes the screen to shake as all the lights blur and elongate as your car strains to speed up. It’s mechanically effective in that you do go faster, but there’s no thrill - your heart doesn’t leap into your throat, your car just moves a teeny bit faster. In earlier racing games, such as Midnight Club: Street Racing, hitting the boost merely speeds your car up a bit. Underground mimics this sense of physicality by borrowing the film’s space warping visual effects. The film is a real kinetic delight, designed to take you along for the ride. When Brian hits the nitrous the world twists and warps as the force of the acceleration shoves him back into his seat and strains the chassis of his car exhausts sputter and spew flames as racers rev their engines at the start line tires burn and smoke as corners are taken at breakneck speeds. The Fast and the Furious is great at conveying a real sense of velocity and kinaesthesia. The influences run deeper than just street parties and a narrative. The main antagonist even looks like Vince, rocking the same vest and tattooed look. Everyone sneers at you and your crappy car, all the arrogance and bravado from the films are running through the game characters.
In a series first, you’re placed into a cutscene that establishes the story of the game you’re a new driver at a street racing party, complete with show cars, pumping hip hop, and neon - it’s a scene straight out of The Fast and the Furious. As you win, you get snapped out of your daydream by your friend Samantha. You easily beat your opponents as you race at night through neon-drenched Olympic City. Underground also embraces this culture and throws you straight into the racing seat of a heavily modified Honda Integra R. street gatherings to the dusty desert raves, people congregate to express their shared love of cars, neon, and music. Racing is just one element of tuner culture presented in the film. We get a look under the hood and get to glimpse the parties, the friendships, the rivalries, and the crime. The Fast and the Furious isn’t just a film about fast cars, it’s a film about the culture that surrounds them. Related: Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit Remastered - 10 Things To Know Before You Play In 2003 - just two years after the success of the first Fast and Furious film - Need for Speed: Underground was released on the PS2, Xbox, PC, GameCube, and GBA. Need for Speed - an already established franchise - opted to move away from its tried and tested formula in (hot) pursuit of new horizons. The film sped its way to the top of the box office when it released in 2001 and game developers clearly wanted to ride that slipstream and taste the success of first place themselves. I think it manages to steer clear of copaganda, valourising only Brian himself - who eventually turns into a criminal racer - not the other cops. The Fast and the Furious is about an undercover cop - Brian - who has to infiltrate a gang of street racers - Dom, Letty, Vince, Mia, and the rest.