“Guess who’s back” – Need for Speed: Carbon

**Need for Speed: Carbon** (EA, Xbox 360, 2006)

The long-held prominence of the pop charts in British culture is not that hard to explain. We had a national broadcaster which gave prominent roles to the singles chart on both the radio and TV; it’s not surprising that a lot of people grew up caring about what was in it. The phenomenon of the Christmas #1 is a slightly tougher one. Lots of people buying music as Christmas presents has to go in there, plus a big role for the ‘70s heyday of Slade and Wizzard duking it out with Christmas songs that are still played today (unlike in the US where most seasonal standards date from seven decades ago, you have to go back a mere five for ours). The race to be #1 in the last chart before Christmas is a minor news event every year, and anyone attempting it more than once in a row even more so. Three in a row is something which has only ever been achieved by The Beatles, The Spice Girls, and apolitical sausage rolls.

Video game sales hit their own big Christmas peak every year, with the release schedules even more skewed with that in mind than for music. There hasn’t traditionally been the same kind of fuss about the Christmas #1 game, but in 2006 it was enough of a thing for at least one publicity-hungry bookmaker to take bets on it. And there was a distinct possibility of another hat-trick, to follow up FIFA’s five-in-a-row-from 1994-1998. The big 8/13 favourite in 2006, after the overwhelming success the last two years of Need for Speed: Underground 2 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted, was Need for Speed: Carbon. But in the event, it didn’t quite play out that way.

A look at the list of Christmas #1s that UK game chart compilers GfK shared last year, in a rare attempt to make this a thing, shows that FIFA 07 was the winner in 2006. This was, in fact, through somewhat of a technicality. Need for Speed: Carbon sold the most in the week up to 23 December, when the largest number of people would have been buying their presents. But because the compilers take a couple of days to publish the chart each week and wouldn’t put that one out until the other side of Christmas, they officially designated the previous week as the big one. That is in itself a giveaway about the low interest in this event, since there is no way pop fans would stand for that shit.

Technicality or otherwise, it seems highly appropriate for Need for Speed: Carbon to both be the Christmas bestseller and not. It was both the best Need for Speed game to top the charts so far and the one with the least compelling reason to exist. As a popular juggernaut, the series was reaching the end of the road. Need for Speed: Underground had its whole Gran-Turismo-career-mode-as-The–Fast–and–the–Furious concept as novelty. Its sequel brought in an open world on top of that. Most Wanted added sophisticated police chases onto a change of location. Carbon pretty much tinkered around the edges, without any particular theme to its additions. Even the vague title is telling.

The handling and racing works the best it ever has, if not generally subject to the same white-knuckle precariousness of Need for Speed: Underground. There are some obvious throwbacks, with races taking in green-lit underpasses straight out of that game. Since the series got in early on neon aesthetic and motion-blurred power, there isn’t much room for expansion there, but the Xbox 360 version of Carbon looks fantastic. Police chases are less central or developed than in Most Wanted, but the police intervening part way through a race works well. It’s like Midnight Club 3 except that they actually have an impact, and once the race is done you can properly focus on leading them a merry dance. You can control the look of your car in more detail than ever, both in terms of the variety of shades of each colour and the exact shape of wings and things. There is a big range of quasi-achievements and rewards to give you a constant supply of challenges, even if the Xbox achievements themselves are oddly misjudged and you can play career for many hours without hitting any of them.

The biggest twist, I guess, is in a switch to the idea of crews and of being part of a competition for territory. You get assorted dweebs basking in your glory to play as wingman, which amounts to some encouraging words during the races and the ability to press a button to hopefully make them do something. Sometimes they bail you out by winning races when you don’t, which is nice and not so frequent as to feel unfairly stacked in your favour. The gameplay mechanic is adequate, though the presentation is hideous even compared to previous story bits in the series. And winning different events changes the colour of different bits of the map to show them under your control. You face up to challenges against your existing holds, and work your way towards taking over another crew’s territory and taking on their boss.

Those boss battles are one of the highlights of Carbon and why it’s my favourite so far. More widely, the game’s rulesets for its races are very well done. I particularly like the speedtrap races where you have to try to get the highest aggregate speed at specific points, accelerating up to those traps taking precedence over anything else. The climactic Canyon Duels are something else. Not since Cool Boarders 2 have I felt a game so enhanced by its approach to scoring.

In the Canyon Duel, you have to follow your rival’s car down a treacherous downhill road, filled with sharp corners and flimsy barriers that are all that stand between you and a plunge into instant defeat. The closer you stay to your opponent, the more points you accumulate, with a colour-coded indication of your current position available at all times. Make it to the bottom of that exhilarating challenge, and you go again but this time you’re the one in front. Your accumulated score is shown again, but this time it counts down based on how small your lead is, and you need to get to the bottom before it gets to zero. As a means of generating tension, thrills and a sense of gladiatorial battle to a race between cars, it’s exceptional.

For all of its impressive tweaks like that, I can see how the game wasn’t enough to keep the series at its peak success. Need for Speed: Carbon didn’t even do badly except in comparison to its two predecessors, but keeping up excitement about yearly releases of new versions of the same thing is hard. Especially if you keep upping the stakes when it comes to being the biggest thing around. There’s a reason companies are starting to try to switch over to infinite subscription models instead. Back in the world of the UK pop charts, in 2006 we were two years into a succession of Christmas #1 singles by X Factor winners. This would culminate in a successful campaign in 2009 to defeat the latest such song by making “Killing in the Name” by Rage Against the Machine the Christmas bestseller.

Need for Speed fatigue hadn’t reached quite that level, but it was growing. And there was a similarity in the beneficiary. The X Factor vs Rage fight was one between two different songs which were both released on Sony labels. Need for Speed: Carbon vs FIFA 07 was an all-EA affair, as the charts frequently were during 2006 when almost half the year had an EA game on top. If there was a lesson they took away, it was that even with the whole football marketing machine working in their favour on FIFA, they might want bigger things to tie players into it longer term.