NFS Killer from 2005 – Forgotten Games

Remember those days when the Fast and Furious franchise films were about fast cars and street racing, and not about Dominic Torreto’s big family?. At the same time, the Need For Speed ​​series was at the peak of its popularity, which, starting with Underground, actively exploited the theme of illegal racing. Need For Speed ​​was then one of the most popular games, on a level with CS 1.6, Warcraft III and Heroes of Might and Magic III. Street racing in the mid-2000s was as integral a part of youth culture as TikTok or rap is for modern teenagers.

Video version of the blog – duration 16:40

Juiced was originally supposed to come out at the end of 2004. However, the publishing house Acclaim Entertainment, which was responsible for releasing the game, went bankrupt. Then the development studio was bought by THQ and six months later the game was finally put into print, in the summer of 2005. And if you haven’t figured it out yet, Juiced is a street racing game that was supposed to be a direct competitor to the super-successful Underground.

Music and graphics

The first thing that greets you and doesn’t let you go throughout the entire game is just a great soundtrack. Juiced has one of the best soundtracks of any game I’ve played. The tracks not only sound awesome in themselves, but also fit perfectly into various game moments. You will constantly catch yourself that the chorus fits perfectly during the intense part of the race, the breakdown will be in a calm moment, and overtaking and drifts are accompanied by the most striking moments of the song. It is the sound from the game that you will hear in the background of the entire video.

Visually the game looks quite normal too. Nothing supernatural for 2005, but the graphics can’t be called outdated either. The game has nice colors, bright and rich, but not acidic. The picture itself is quite clear, without unnecessary effects or color filters. What really adds life to the game is different weather conditions and changing time of day. The same tracks feel different during the day and at night, during sunset or cloudy mornings. And how beautiful everything looks during the rain, and even realistic reflections in the water were brought in.

Game modes

Juiced has three game modes – career, arcade and free run. The last one, with a very comprehensive name, is a mode where you can choose any car, track and other conditions. In the arcade we have to go through various championships with a pre-installed car and track. There are, like regular circuit races, sprints, a fight against time and a perfect circle. To advance to the next stage, it is enough to complete three of the five tests, but to open all possible cars and tracks you need to complete all five. It is in the arcade that we open materials for free entry.

Career

Everything gets more interesting with career mode. When you first enter your career, you will be asked to choose a logo and… a mobile phone? At this moment I also became fascinated and shed a stingy nostalgic tear. After the first race, you will be given some money, with which you will buy your first car. Unlike Need For Speed, there is no story or sequential story missions. Career progress is determined by rating, you earn a rating separately from each of the eight racers. At first they will allow you to come to them only as a spectator, then as a participant, and finally they will agree to participate in your races. Yes, here you can organize races yourself – set the rules and prize fund for them. At the same time, each of the racers has his own priorities, one loves circuit racing more, the other clean driving, the third drifting, and the last one respects the collection of cars.

All the events here take https://euphoriawins.uk/mobile-app/ place in the form of a calendar, which marks the various races and events in which you can participate. For winning races, you get money and new parts for tuning, you can also earn money on bets. You can compete with any racer for very serious sums, and whoever comes first will receive the winnings. Even if you come second to last, but your opponent comes last, you will still receive money.

The dollars you earn can and should be spent on tuning your swallow. It is made perfectly, the game has a lot of different body kits and all kinds of car customization, you can even choose the interface style and radio! In general, tuning in the game is divided into three sections. In the first one, you customize the appearance of the car, put all sorts of body kits on it, choose wheels, body color and patterns on it. It’s funny that here you can choose a spoiler, which in reality greatly affects the aerodynamics of the car, but in the game it performs a purely decorative function. In the second section, you are already delving into the insides of the car; changes here are not reflected visually, but they greatly affect the characteristics of the car. All parts, from radios to wheels, correspond to real auto parts manufacturers that were licensed in the game. Finally, you can more individually customize certain aspects of the car, such as engine balance or suspension height. All this will also affect the behavior of the car, a lower suspension will give you an advantage when accelerating, but any curb or uneven surface will throw you up more and cause you to skid.

Vehicle fleet

No matter how cool the tuning is, you still can’t go far with one car. Therefore, welcome to the auto store. Juiced features more than 50 officially licensed cars, the game fleet is impressive, there are cars for every taste, American classics, European small cars, Japanese sports cars. Of course, this is not a Gran Turismo, but it’s still a worthy choice. I’ve never understood lovers of all kinds of supercars; not only are you unlikely to ever become the owner of such a unit, but it’s difficult to even call it a full-fledged car. This is a car that is only designed to go 400 km/h on a specially designed track. Therefore, I am very impressed that most of the cars in the game are the most ordinary sedans and coupes that can be seen on the street every day. It’s nice to see cars that are familiar to the eye in the game, it adds some believability to it. In a career, all cars are divided into 8 classes, and cars of only one class can participate in one race. So you will have to win on skill, and not due to a powerful engine. With the help of tuning, you can upgrade your car, so if you, for example, bought a 5th class car, you can upgrade it to 2-3rd class.

Another interesting point. Cars can be bought either new or used; in the second case they will cost less, but the initial characteristics will be worse. You can even buy a damaged car and restore it with your own money.

Gameplay and physics

The vehicle fleet is recreated with due authenticity to real prototypes, the design of various models is recognizable at first sight. All cars are noticeably different from each other in handling. Probably the main feature of the game is the very realistic and well-developed physics of vehicles. Juiced takes into account details such as the vehicle’s drive, its mass, inertia force, road surface, and so on. There are different weather conditions in the game, and during rain the road grip will be much worse than in clear weather. In a collision, cars are damaged, not only visually, but also gameplay. So, with minor damage, you will start to leak nitro, which, by the way, is not restored here. In case of more serious problems, the maximum speed of the vehicle will be reduced, and critical damage will disable the vehicle. Thus, the game goes much more into the territory of a racing simulator than a simple arcade game.

But is it really that good?? The issue is controversial. Still, the physics in the game are not 100% reliable. Here the situation is similar to GTA IV, where all the cars handle like irons on ice. And this is true if we are talking about heavy muscle cars, but why do modern, lightweight sports cars also feel bulky and clumsy?? And the theme of the game does not really correspond to this behavior of cars. After all, I’m playing a video game about street racing, not a serious car simulator.

On the other hand, I understand that without realistic physics the game would lose all its uniqueness. In the same NFS or Midnight Club you could crash into a fence at a speed of 300 km/h and calmly drive on, collect all the oncoming traffic and so on. And after all, Juiced was precisely a direct competitor to these series, and releasing a game that would be no different from its more well-known competitors is somehow stupid. Juiced turned out to be much more thoughtful and down-to-earth than Most Wanted, released the same year. Here you need to think much more with your head, and not with your reflexes. At what speed to enter the turn?? How hard to turn the steering wheel? Where can I cut and stuff like that?. Over time, you begin to memorize the routes, look for the most optimal trajectory, and get used to your own car. Plus, when the physics works correctly, you really enjoy it. So I won’t consider physics to be a plus or minus of the game. It largely depends on your subjective perception.

But the game also has enough objective disadvantages.

Game problems

Let’s start with the same career. The progression system in it does not work. If in NFS you clearly understand that you are moving forward when you complete story missions, then in Juiced it feels like you are marking time. The game doesn’t let you know, which is basically an indicator of your career progress. Global ranking? Rating from other drivers? It’s just that it’s gaining extremely unevenly. And it’s clear why, it’s much easier to get a rating from a driver who respects lap racing than from someone who needs a collection of cars. Because there’s no way you can buy a lot of cool cars at the beginning of the game. And the last driver on the list generally only respects car racing. Yes, you can challenge any driver to a 1v1 race where the winner takes the loser’s car, but they will always refuse this race. And this guy’s rating will be around zero the entire game. Then maybe the progression is expressed in an improvement in the class of the car? But it doesn’t really affect anything. You can upgrade your car to first class, accumulate a million dollars, raise the rating almost to the maximum, but the game will not let you know that you have completed it or at least somehow advanced further.

The system for selecting races is also idiotically designed. As I said earlier, there are no preset story competitions, they are all randomly generated and marked on the calendar. But here the system works like generating a stream in old GTA, when if you find some rare car, then soon ALL the cars in the city will be exactly the same model. So if you do a circuit race in the woods, the game will be like, "Oh, he loves racing in the woods" and will ONLY generate competitions for you on that track. And if you continue to participate in them, then she will continue to give you only this type of races. And in order to get out of this vicious circle, you have to skip several months and look for something different from this race.

Some time after the start of your career, a couple more racers will join you, so you will form a team and be able to participate in team races 2x2x2 or 3×3. You can even put them in a regular race instead of yourself. But your partners are armless degenerates, unable to win a single race. In a good way, you should bet your friend on races, which he will lose over and over again until he improves his skill, and then, maybe he will win something. But why do you need this? Watching him trudge along at the end of the column is depressing, and you can’t miss his race, you have to watch everything from beginning to end, there is no “simulation” mode here. You can go through your entire career alone without any problems, so this is just an unnecessary feature that for some reason is in the game.

The game also has a clearly overloaded interface. Why do I always need to display the best and current lap time on the screen, and also these constantly popping up notifications – how far ahead or behind you are from your opponents?. Well, in principle, the interface elements could be made more compact.

The game is also difficult – unfairly difficult for the player. You won’t be able to break away from your opponents, no matter how perfectly you drive, they will always be somewhere on your tail, but they may well go half a circle ahead and you won’t catch up with them. Artificial intelligence does not always obey the laws of physics; it can perfectly enter a turn at full speed, and when you decide to repeat this after it, you will immediately get stuck in the fence. The cars of your opponents sometimes stick to the track and cannot be cut off or pushed, but you can easily be slammed into the wall with a light touch. This is especially annoying in career mode, where there is no restart button. I ruined the race – that’s it, good luck next time. And this is provided that to participate in the race you need to pay an entry fee, and only the first three places receive prize money. This is how you get situations like this: You are first the whole race, you sweat, you try, but at the penultimate turn some guy catches up with you, turns you 360 degrees and all the remaining racers crash into you. You finish in last place, get disapproved of by all the racers because you hit their car (The game doesn’t understand the difference when you crashed into someone or when they crash into you), lose money for the race and for repairing your car. Yes, you also need to pay for your own money to repair the iron horse.

And finally, the game has an indecent number of loading screens. We went into the garage – loading, started the race – loading, finished the race – loading, and so on. When I looked at the footage for this video, I calculated that out of the five hours of recording, 45 minutes were just loading screens. A bit too much even for 2005.

Continuation and ports

Despite all its disadvantages and average ratings from critics, Juiced found its buyer and sold 2.5 million copies. In 2006, a port of the game was released on the PSP portable console. True, the game could not be adequately transferred to a pocket console; it suffered from frame drops and crooked controls. And the very next year a full-fledged sequel was released, with the subtitle Hot Import Nights. Which has definitely already failed. There were three reasons for this.

Firstly, Juiced has lost all its uniqueness, realistic physics has gone under the knife, like many other features. The tracks became more primitive, the artificial intelligence was dumber, in general the game was rendered, and it became a faceless clone of Need For Speed, of which by 2007 a cart and a small cart had already been released. Secondly, the publisher THQ insisted that the game be released on six platforms at once, including the same PSP and the then new Xbox360 and PS3. The small team of developers was not up to the task, and as a result, technical problems were added to the gameplay problems. And finally, Juiced 2 is just too late. The fashion for street racing quickly faded. Fast and the Furious, with which I started this video, took a three-year break after Tokyo Drift and returned in 2009 with our usual focus on action, and not on street racing. In 2006 and 2007, the controversial Carbon and ProStreet were released, but if these two games were controversial, then Undercover was already a serious failure, after which the series did not return to the theme of illegal racing for a long time. Somewhere around the same time, the last parts of Midnight Club and Burnout were released.