Need for Speed: Underground

Bangin’ soundtrack
Awesome cars
Cheating AI

Rubberbanding the game.

Underground 1 is actually cool and I'm glad I fully completed it today, I perhaps fulfilled my childhood dreams. The cars are great (why isn't S-2000 in UG2?) and so is Olympic City. These two combined make a great duo and singlehandedly create an outstanding atmosphere in UG1. Furthermore, the game aged like wine in terms of graphics! It looks superb and in spots, I think wins over UG2.

The driving model is fairly reminiscent of UG2 (for many should be the other way around). I completed the game with 2 cars, that is MX-5 and RX-7 which are far too broken and are on an NFS pedestal alongside of UG2's Corolla.

What annoyed me the most wasn't the lack of an open world, for that feature I actually did sign. All your worries about what it actually is should be swept by the headline. Rubberbanding is a critical part of the game. While in the following Black Box productions it isn't that omnipresent, in UG1 it is prevalent in every single race. For some, it even disallows you to complete them on the first try in Easy mode (!). For reference, please check KuruHS' video "Owned by EASY Difficulty - Thanks Rubberband" (on the track Enduro Street Circuit). I myself had to replay this race over 5 times to finally win with the disgusting AI. This game stands as a challenge, it is far from being easy, but this quality could win your heart. Ignore rubberbanding and UG1 is sure to become a great addition to your game library.

The true start of the Black Box developed era of Need for Speed games.

Sure, this wasn’t their first NFS game, having already developed the PS2 version of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, but that entry was still tied to the old canon of sporty and/or exotic super cars in scenic outdoor locations and police pursuits that started with the 1994 entry for the 3DO. For 2003’s entry, Black Box became the lead developers for the main versions on console and PC and they took a direction that can only be described as an extreme facelift.

Super cars were replaced with consumer cars (with emphasis on East Asian imports), the racing confined to the fictional Olympic City always at nighttime, no cops in sight (until two games atleast) and emphasis on car customization and presentation highly inspired by the early Fast and the Furious movies and their portrayal of illegal tuner racing. The result was an entry that from what I’ve seen, seems to have left a sour taste to fans of the older canon and for some, feels like a franchise doing a change made for pandering to the burgeoning interests of tuner car culture that the Fast and the Furious brought to the forefront just to be cool with the kids or something. However, for those who gave it a try and more specifically, for newbies to the Need for Speed franchise, this marked the beginning of a different golden age of Need for Speed games led by Black Box and which for better or worse kinda gave the franchise a new perception for years to come and whose influence still carries over to new entries.

I was one of those newbies, (though not really for this entry) and let me tell you, having played both my original Xbox copy up to about 93% completion back in 2019 and then finally fully completing it on PC in 2021, this is still a pretty damn good time of a game despite some hiccups presented along the way.

To let the main negatives out of the way first, the cars lack any sort of weight that makes them feel grounded, which is tied to the physics as any sort of impact with traffic on the road sends your car flying upwards and why some beware of ramps and jumps as you can potentially have your car turned over with a badly done jump or landing. I personally found this more notable in the PC version due to the increased framerate, since on the Xbox version the lower framerate makes the cars feel grounded until the illusion gets broken when you crash at high speed with traffic. At the very least, the opponents are affected the same by the physics shenanigans, but that doesn’t impede them exploiting another aspect criticized a lot with this game, the rubber-band AI that starts to crop up during the second half of the career mode. This is one of those games where you can be as fast as possible and do near perfect driving to leave behind the opposition until the AI kicks overgear and they’re suddenly catching up to you and it’s even possible they get ahead to the point where it you may as well restart because you’re not surpassing them. The rubber-banding problem is infamously well represented in Events 95 and 103 of the Career mode, two lengthy races on very tricky circuits where mistakes can and will punish so severely you will not catch up to opponents.

My other complaints are in regards to the Career mode and how you eventually get to the point of having so much money than you know what to do with it, a problem partly coming to the fact that you don’t have the possibility of building a collection like in later games, instead you can change to another car by paying a fee, the cost dependent on the type of ride and upgrades you have since these are carried over to the next car and so on. Although can be considered a component that allows you to change your ride to suit the needs of events, some people like me prefer to stick with a single car up to the end and I think having atleast 6 slots to fill a garage with whatever cars you want is more compelling for those who also like collecting their favorites (something atleast rectified on the next game) while also adding a component of managing your money to ensure all your cars are also kept upgraded and cosmetically on par with the visual ranking. Oh, the visual rating, I’m also not big into this cause it forces people to customize their rides to progress through the Career as some events you cannot do unless your visual rating is up to a certain level. I feel this mechanic stunts creativity and freedom from the player by making them have their cars have specific components to get anywhere, when some people may not like some of the later parts and components or some for instance would like to beat the game with say, a visually stock Honda Civic. Atleast you can ignore some of the later components and revert to your previous parts once you do an event that forces a star rating.

The other stuff isn’t so much negatives as they are aspects that can feel lesser when compared to what the following Black Box NFS games introduced, especially if you played extensively those entries first. Things like the very linear career mode, no world map that you can explore, less customization options, fewer game modes, things like that, but personally with the right mindset they can still be appreciated or tolerated, because despite the gripes, there’s a lot to like in this game.

The game modes themselves have some standard fare, Circuit, Sprint (aka, race from point A to point B), lap elimination and tournament on the Career mode, coupled with two unique modes, Drag and Drift, which do give a fair bit of variety in the career mode so you don’t play constantly the same mode for a while. Drag allows you to experience really fast senses of speed in a straight line, although it does get chaotic when traffic is involved putting a lot of random and chaotic factors, so not often a mode I’m looking for in the career and I play it outside that I turn off traffic completely and focus on the speed. Drift is my catharsis mode, there’s nothing like making your car do those ludicrous and satisfying drifts that really feel good to pull off and can chain them for a lot of high scoring. The set of tracks is not very plentiful and can get repetitive on extended plays in the career mode, but once you progress and start to learn the game, you start to make your way around the tracks with expertise as you know what’s ahead and which shortcuts are available, which for me is a palatable way of showing how you’ve come to learn the ins and outs of Olympic City. A gameplay addition that enhances the experience and is very much taken from the Fast and Furious franchise is the use nitrous oxide (or NO), usable in all modes except Drift. By the press of a single button, you gain a boost of speed as a tool to get ahead from the competition or to catch up to opponents which sounds like a game breaker but it’s balanced by being limited use and unusable once the tank is empty, meaning you have to strategize around conserving NO and using it on key moments.

For the car themselves, the weight might be too light between all cars, but they are far from controlling the same as each ride have stats they excel at even with maxed out upgrades meaning that a Nissan Skyline will feel and control different than a Subaru Impreza. This is exposed well on the Drag and Drift modes, some cars like the Impreza can drift incredibly well in the second mode while the more speed focused Skyline though feels stiff when drifting, will have easier time accelerating and speeding on Drag mode, not to mention other differences that one might notice when trying different cars (like the stiff ass turning of the Dodge Neon). This makes for cars that are fun and exciting to drive and all of them also have good sense of speed on regular racing. Visually customizing the cars is one of the main draws of this game and although later entries would add much more stuff, this entry still has enough tools to pimp out your car however you want and make them different between each other.

The presentation throughout is pretty well done, emphasizing its all night setting with vibrant use of light and colors, from the blue based menu to the neon lights that sometimes liter the race tracks that all serve to give the game a recognizable visual identity. Although constrained to a tight space, Olympic City itself feels pretty well put together, with different parts like the downtown and Chinatown being well differentiated in level structure, usage of different buildings and the effective use of light sources to convey each section. Cars do seem to be very well modelled and have solid details despite the age of this game. Enhancing the game is also a pretty memorable licensed soundtrack comprised mostly of a few types of Hip-Hop, Electronic and Rock, the first genre livening up the menus and enhancing the car tuner presentation, and the other two genres giving excitement on the game modes (except Drag and Drift which intentionally don’t have the music playing) while also fitting a racing and/or night mood. Amongst the tracks, Lil Jon’s & the East Side Boyz Get Low is perhaps the most iconic track of the game, where unless you deactivate it on the options, it’s always the first song that plays when you reach the start screen, to the point where it’s synonymous with this game and possibly tuner car culture as a whole, impressive when even at the time it was already becoming the most iconic Crunk song of all. Not all offerings I like, for example Broken Promises by Element Eighty is bog standard mediocre Nu Metal even when in general I actually don’t mind Nu Metal and while eventually I’ve come to respect Get Low, the other Southern Hip-Hop offering, 24’s by T.I., I find absolutely annoying. Some would question some of the bands and music on display in general and a few songs have pretty obvious censoring for curses and such, but for my money the soundtrack I think it fits with that the game is going for and I still listen frequently to some of the songs being played, and hey, if you don’t like some of these tunes or none at all, you can disable them in the options menu.

Lastly as this text is going way too long, I’ll just mention that while the story for the Career Mode is incredibly cheesy, quite try-hard and not close to apex of storytelling, that’s honestly the charm of it, laughing at how much it takes tuner and street racing really serious, the usage of slang to make itself seem cool and you just know they are holding off from cursing due to the T Rating. That said, the rivals are quite effective in making you want to beat them to show them you’re not a “small time” as one of them says, their voice acting seems solid and convincing enough and also delighting itself in the cheese and honestly, it does have a proper progress of showing the player’s evolution to become a top-notch street racer. If it didn’t have any of this and the career was a straight-laced progression, the game would be less memorable, although it can argued that the game ends pretty suddenly.

Need for Speed: Underground is not a nigh inaccessible game to play, but it’s one that requires patience to deal with its most annoying aspects and I would not blame anyone for eventually dropping the game due to the stated deal-breakers, especially the truly awful rubber-band AI (and the later games aren’t better at rectifying this issue). Compared to later entries as well, the level of content may not be as high or varied, especially when coming from playing later games. However, either as a first timer or with an open mind, Need for Speed: Underground is a fun and engaging racer that manages to set itself apart from racing games of its era and others that also deal with the street racing formula, setting a groundwork that would end up influencing future games of the franchise and which Black Box would improve further, but that’s a story for another day.

I did not gain THXphobia, in 2003, I empathized with my blind grandmother when watching Ice Age. "That's scary!" she exclaimed. I then pondered about it, then came to the conclusion that THX is scary. I chose to be terrified by it, rather than it choosing me. Later, when I saw Need for Speed Underground at a Toys R Us, and I saw those chrome, pillars of fear on the back, I got chills. The thought of being welcomed by the thunderous Deep Note every time I loaded the game was not appealing at all. I will never play this game.

Years later, my phobia was cured through the internet, and I came across Underground again. I popped it in and wow was the THX logo completely uninteresting. And then I played it...

Oh my goodness is this the funniest "satire" of street racing and tuner car culture? Even the censored, E-rated version of Get Low that plays in the menu warrants laughs. How come in a year that brought us F-Zero GX and Kirby Air Ride with both games having wonderful sound design and the latter having this earnestly beautiful orchestral score to contrast with the cutesy graphics, decide to shit out this? The idea of having neon arrows around the track personally perplexes me. What an aesthetically ugly, piece of crap game.