Need for Speed: Most Wanted

The Need for Speed games were escapism into a fantasy world based on parts of Europe and Asia with exotic cars from around the world. Being one of the best implementations of a multicultural agenda that was so prevent in the 1990s, Need for Speed was a joy to play with families and friends, with your American Ford GT90 and your cousins Japanese Subaru racing on the road in Germany. It makes the players participants in a global struggle for justice and peace without realizing it.

Then came Underground, and everything I liked about Need for Speed vanished. Previously there was a disembodied American male announcer that could be applied to any race or creed, but with Underground we were introduced to characters that are one-dimensional stereotypes. In Most Wanted (2005), they became more fleshed out by the fact that a live-action crew filmed the game's cutscenes and we finally see multiculturalism in the eyes of people and not just the cars. The narrative objectifies women in a way in that it is a prize to gain, through racing. Most of the women are fairly attractive, even the cop bares her midriff! This is a male fantasy when the previous Need for Speed titles are fairly unisexual in its appeal.

In the career mode of Porsche Unleashed, you get to choose different portraits of people to represent yourself. That's it. It's equality like this that is not questioned by anyone.

Most Wanted takes the Hot Pursuit element of Need for Speed and adds it into the open world that was introduced in Underground 2. For one thing the open world is much more realistic than that of Underground 2, and that gives it props but what are props when the game does not excel at them? The cops do not really chase you as well as they did in Carbon, an underrated, if even as problematic as this game. Referring to future games, Forza Horizon (the first one) appropriately starts you out with a shit car that can only be used in some events. The difficulty is balanced.

Even if you consider the game's contemporaries, like the Burnout series, also by EA, that reinvent the driving game, Need for Speed lacks in speed when it comes to reinventing the genre.

The EA Games Trax, introduced in Hot Pursuit 2, are licensed songs that play as you race or in the menu. They are inappropriate