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Smile UK Store - Need for Speed: ProStreet (PC DVD)
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List Price: £29.99
Our Price: £17.48
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Manufacturer: Electronic Arts
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Video Game
Brand: Electronic Arts
EAN: 5030930059347
Label: Electronic Arts
Manufacturer: Electronic Arts
Platform: Windows XP
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Release Date: 2007-11-23
Studio: Electronic Arts
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Editorial Reviews:
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Need for Speed ProStreet boasts impeccable precision and impressively detailed photo-realistic graphics, effectively transporting you to the center of the action. It pushes the âAutosculptâ technology to a new level, allowing you to directly impact your carâs performance for the first time as well as personalize its appearance. Need for Speed ProStreet is a true taste of raw adrenaline and racing with consequences. Every dent, every scratch and every crumpled body panel is a battle scar, proof of your commitment and competitive mettle. With an aggressive and skilled AI system, you become immersed in an unmatched believable race experience. Add in a revolutionary online mode that will redefine the meaning of competitive social play, and Need for Speed ProStreet is the ultimate formula for an emotionally charged street racing showdown.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Pretty tiresome, repetitive and inconsistent
Comment: I bought this game as a huge fan of Need for Speed: Carbon, but was very disappointed. Although the game runs fine on my old single core 3.2Ghz, 3Gb RAM, Radeon 1650, and looks nice, the storyline is less than waferthin and it's not alway very clear what you're supposed to be doing. The upgrading procedure for your car isn't always obvious - in Carbon, you knew when you started to get beaten in races that you had to upgrade or buy a new car, but in Pro Street, it doesn't seem that intuitive.
It's a nice touch that the visual modifications are free, but you have to unlock the highest grade parts which you need to really beat the game, and you can't always guarantee that you'll unlock them because of the random rewards system at the end of each race. The point system used for scoring is also frustrating - you can come first in each race on a race day, but still not dominate it to get the higher rewards, which seems counter-intuitive.
The cars handle ok, and they do seem to respond differently depending on the upgrades you get. The drag racing is a nice touch, and the speed challenge where you try to get through the race and maintain as high a speed as possible over a long period of time, is particularly nerve-wracking.
The race order is a bit annoying as well - in the middle, you seem to have to repeat races. At the end, you also have to do three race days of the same race in order to challenge the 'king' of that kind of race. I do like a good race, but doing three drifts per race, for example, six races per race day, three race days and then nine to challenge the drift king is really monotonous - that's over fifty drift races in a row to beat him. Some of the 'kings' are also ridiculously easy - the (haha) drag king barely finishes a quarter mile in fourteen seconds, and the overall Street King only has one car, which really limits him on the drag racing and grip racing.
Although some of the races are run, the tracks are fairly boring and you have to be quite committed to finish it. Overall, some nice touches, but really, it's monotonous, dull, inconsistent, frustrating and not much fun a lot of the time.
If you don't have Carbon, buy that instead. If you do, then think twice before you buy this one.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Dull as Ditch-water...
Comment: I promised myself that after the total let-down of Carbon I wouldn't buy another NFS... What a mistake I made forgetting that promise. Whilst I applaud the damage element of the game the rest is just dull dull dull. The story line is pathetic, the tuning of the cars is pointless and has very little actual effect on the handling, in the fact the whole 'realism' is as contrived as it is possible to be and is about as real as the bit-mapped track babe.
Whilst other racing games are embracing the free-romm like NFS Most Wanted, Pro Street leaves the racer stuck on track after track with cars that handle like milk floats, accelerate with all the speed and agility of startled slugs and brake like the QE2.
I fervently wish I could get my money back for being terminally bored... twice, but as the games are locked to your user name it's not even possible to sell them on. If it were possible to give a negative value to this game, and Carbon, I would.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Awful
Comment: Not a great buy. I rarely review items I've bought but this is very disappointing. They've totally ruined the fun of the old NFS games without adding anything new. The graphics are very good but that's worth nothing unless the gameplay is good too. And the gameplay is awful. When you turn a corner, the car wobbles like it's made of jelly. Rubbish.
Customer Rating:
Summary: definitely an improvement
Comment: Many keep on saying NFS is getting worse with every new release. However, the only instalment I thought was worse than the previous one was Carbon. This one is definitely an improvement. Now when you bang your car at full speed into a wall you can't just reverse out or if your car turns upside down, it won't just magically reset itself onto the road. If you damage your car, you pay for it, just like in the real world. Also for first time you can tune the aerodynamics of your car.
Graphics are also great. They finally got rid of the annoying blur effect. I am running it on a high-end laptop though so I don't know how it will run on a mid/low-range computer.
Basically, EA has made the franchise more realistic. If you're looking for a realistic car racing game/simulator, this is for you. If you just want a fun game in which you can just keep your finger on the accelerator all the time, go for something else.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The best racing game ever? I think so!
Comment: This is one hell of a racing game. I'm totally hooked. The graphics are slick, the racing is brilliant, the customisation and tuning add a very real element to the game.
I read other reviews for this game and I have to say I cannot understand why some people find the very real aspect of this game a bad thing! OK there are no more street races, but the tracks you get to run on are really challenging, nearly every one has a corner or two that has you tuning and retuning the car to get around it quick without having to sacrifice the straight line speed. That is RACING. The only oversight I can see in this is that you cannot set the spoiler angle anywhere other than the garage, once in a race day you'll have to leave, to go reset you spoiler angle in your garage then play it again, but that's a small gripe.
There's no cops is another gripe, personally I don't care with a racer this good, I owned the very NFS1 & NFS2 where the second edition ditched the cops, that was not liked. The problem back then was that the game couldn't really carry itself without them, you selected a car and drove it around a track, then you did it again and again, there was no real competition at all. That's seriously fixed in Pro Street, this game does NOT need cops.
It's not like I don't suffer for playing this, my processor is below minimum spec, I own an AMD 64 Athlon @ 2.2Ghz, they recommended level is 2.8Ghz (and a multicore processor wouldn't hurt). So in between races during loading and saving I can end up waiting literally minutes to get where I'm going, that's frustrating and I have to restart the system sometimes to clear the choke. However I'm not going drop the maxed out levels down a bit, I will wait because every aspect of this game is amazing. The great thing is that the races run at full speed with almost the full frame rate and don't seem to suffer from the slow down, so it's a small price to pay.
So if you're thinking of buying this game, check to see that you've got the required spec or that you have the patience of a saint, because you'll need it if you don't have the hardware. The car doesn't handle like previous editions of NFS, you'll get a nasty surprise (I know I did), until you get the hang of things, but the hurdle is not a great one. You CANNOT drive these cars properly without a Force Feedback Steering Wheel, it's the only way to really FEEL what the car is doing, so invest in one - You won't regret it. Game Controllers and Keyboards just don't cut it, not with this game - Sorry Game Console fans, (Can you buy something similar?) Lastly you will have to TUNE the car to make it run properly around a race track, I have two sublime Grip Racers - a Nissan 240SX & 350Z. They didn't start out with the handling credentials they have now, with the exception of one or two corners in the entire Battle Machine series, these cars a blindingly fast and a nailed to the road surface. Maybe I'll share the blueprint, but I don't think I'm quite finished tuning it yet.
This game is not like Most Wanted or Carbon, it's more like a race simulator than the arcade racer that the other two were. You can wreck you car if you crash in this, that's pretty realistic. All told, with the huge customisation options, the tuning options, the Practise laps where you can tune the car on the fly to maximise it's potential. To the mind boggling array or race types - Grip, Grip Class, Grip Time Attack, Grip Sector Shootout, Quarter & Half Mile Drag. Drift, Dual Drift. Speed King - You won't be bored. The Visual Customisations are all free and you immediately have access to all of it, so now you can make a really sick looking machine from the word go. Even in the Bodywork you get a couple of freebies at the start to help sculpt the car. The Cartoon graphics of Carbon are gone and in my opinion are even better than those in Most Wanted. This game has a story to follow that seems much bigger than Carbon too and that's a good thing. The computer opponents could be better, by that I mean make you work for your win, once you get ahead you can simply leave them miles behind, which makes the track records a bit too easy to break. On a half mile drag race I'm posting 185mph in a Cobalt SS, the next nearest guy is only doing 104mph they should be much faster - That's Sunday Driving right there. Perhaps if they do Pro Street 2 (Pleeeeeeaaaaassssseeee do it - EA) they might let the users set the difficulty the opponents can provide, more so than in this game. If you're a Motor Racing fan, this is the game for you, if you expect this game to be like previous version of NFS then you might want to give this a miss.
10/10 EA - This is one totally slick racing game (Better than Forza 2 easily).
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