Many of the popular games series of the early 2000s are still with us. As I continue on to 2006 and 2007 even more of today’s yearly regulars will emerge or become pre-eminent. With Need for Speed’s record of year-end #1 three years running with runs of six weeks, ten weeks and ten weeks at the top of the chart, it’s one of the last of the really big beasts to not be among those reliable series of today. Its time producing bestsellers would be over by the end of the ‘00s. Need for Speed: Most Wanted is interesting for its considered efforts to avoid that fate, and all the more so for not ultimately succeeding.
A big part of it, of course, is that a yearly release is excessive and difficult. EA Black Box continued to work on a Need for Speed game each year, and while they didn’t end up as obviously jaded as Core doing Tomb Raider, that didn’t leave a lot of space for innovation. In the circumstances, it’s genuinely impressive how different Most Wanted is from Underground. The handling feels noticeably different, more suited to getting around a city in a leisurely way and not as prone to disaster, while not going to the same extremes of weightiness as Midnight Club 3. And the title indicates a whole new mode, one with more than a nod to Grand Theft Auto, and specifically San Andreas, which Most Wanted takes numerous aesthetic cues from.
Need for Speed: Most Wanted gives you the chance to engage in police car chases, and does a nice job of combining fun and a bit of depth. Dramatic music steps up but you also hear all of the police radio communications, giving lots more chance to stay a step ahead and keep them guessing where you are Plus hearing an officer sigh “I just… I just got T-boned” as he reports back is properly funny. The set pieces where you drive into specific hazard spots highlighted on your map in order to, for instance, send a giant donut from the top of a shop rolling into the path of your pursuers, are too artificial to provide much of the glee they’re going for. But the experience of driving around is good and the assortment of associated points and targets work well. And police develop their approach and accompanying gadgets throughout the game too.
That’s a good new mechanic, but not a whole game of course, so there’s plenty else there. Most Wanted starts with some cut scenes shot in a weird style with lifelike footage of actors on stylised backgrounds. Hateful police officers lose out on their chance to get you. The sexist suggestion of women as prizes gets amped up several notches from previous games. There are flashbacks on flashbacks. It’s never particularly clear what the point is of the bits where you do get to drive. It’s a mess, but it does at least build up anticipation for when you get to the actual game. Which is structured as a series of challenges to beat other racers and move up the ‘most wanted list’, requiring you to win races and earn ‘bounty’ points from those police chases, all handily selectable from a menu if you don’t fancy navigating the map.
Racing against other cars at high speed is still fun, the rubberbanding is a bit less primitive, and there’s a surprising amount of novelty in doing so in suburban daylight rather than city midnight neon. But that’s not even all. All of the ways of upgrading your car are still there and you are still earning money to do so. It’s just no longer neatly tied into the game’s other systems like before. It’s an awkward halfway house between freshening up the series and maintaining continuity, and while it’s a less drastic example of the results of rushing to a yearly schedule that still feels like the culprit. The undirected mess of new and old elements feels a fair bit like EA’s floundering turn-of-the-millennium FIFAs before they got back into focus.
That can’t have helped the future of the series, for all that Most Wanted was a massive success. The other factor there, though, is the same one that stood out for Medal of Honor: European Assault. The most popular version of Most Wanted, the PS2 one, doesn’t include any online component at all. Online was going to be increasingly standard very soon, and would prove the single biggest aid in games being able to stay on a yearly success loop, even ahead of the ongoing appeal of popular sports. Need for Speed was doing well to avoid roadblocks so far, but the muddled direction meant that it was even more vulnerable to bigger ones down the road.
Need for Speed: Most Wanted spent a total of ten weeks at the top of the UK chart. Details of what else was #1 during that time after the page break…