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It was always possible. It was always the billionaires needing more money more than they needed their slave studios to make good entertainment
Hot Pursuit was better
No way. No shade to Hot Pursuit (also a banger), but this game was right place, right time. Probably the best timed game in history. NFSU1 has a special place in my heart too, but this one was next level.
I've been a part of the modding scene for these games for about a decade now.
As easy as this is to get running, which is a great thing, I feel the effort to make this has been misplaced and that this is a fad which will die off in a month's time.
There are many better ways to go about this and, more importantly, there are much bigger issues to solve (such as lack of any meaningful new content for these games). It's historically always been limited due to the lack of tooling that is functional and user-friendly enough to craft mods for this game.
And that is changing for the better, for sure. But all of these slopped up mods and ports are just made for clout to ask for donos. It doesn't feel right because there's almost always no passion (or even any effort) put into this.
It works really well on mobile! Very smooth and playable. You have to use Chrome for WebGPU support sadly.
IDK on Android. But on PC i just had to activate WebGPU in the about:config in Firefox to make it work.
edit: Yeah and it works really well for what it is. Seeing thousands of other cars on your map is really fun. I highly recommend to deactivate collisions though. Otherwise its constant carnage. The netcode for this slopped together port of a 20 years old game is obviously pretty poor. Especially because there isnt regional instancing. But there is fun to be had with a few online races. I played through UG2 probably four to five times through the years but never had the chance to play the multiplayer. So i'm pretty happy to have had the chance to experience that for once.
I never thought I'd see the day.
Why do "news" sites always forget to put links to external resources?
Because you might click the link and leave the news site.
Source: worked in the industry, literally told this.
Publisher relations is another reason. I don't think EA appreciates this.
Been there too. I think it was Warner Brothers (at the time) that had a hissy fit about a review of a game. They didn't like the review: they wanted advertising rather than editorial. We told them to talk to the sales department.
Do you remember which game it was?
A very early Harry Potter game, 2001. Surprise, it was EA.
Interesting. I actually remember this game very fondly. It's a well made mid-budget game for kids, in my opinion. Nothing groundbreaking, but charming, atmospheric and with fun gameplay. I was young when it came out, definitely part of the target audience (despite not caring about Harry Potter), but even revisiting it as an adult, I still found it to be enjoyable. Reading the Wikipedia article, I'm actually surprised by how low its review scores are.
How did your magazine cover it?
Pretty much what you said, but that's from memory. The site and the review is long gone now.
Yeah whenever I link to a science article I always include a link to the paper that it is written about if it is open access in my lemmy posts and yet in the damn popscience articles I am linking to from reputable websites they hide the links to the actual research as if to condescend you or send the message it isn't for you... even when the research is OPEN ACCESS.
Why is it hidden in a blue link in the body of the article amid 40 other tangentially relevant blue links? ...or why is the link put as a fineprint at the bottom of the article rather than being emphasized as the thing the article is talking about??!????
It is pathetic and it pisses me off. It is one of the reasons I am so motivated to link directly to open access research when covering it in a general news context.
longer bit on my perspective about public science advocacy
I don't know who someone reading my post is, they could be a dog, a PHD, a bot, a farmer... who knows why should I assume they wouldn't be interested in taking a glance at the actual paper? Do you even know yourself well enough to know you aren't the kind of person that might be interested in the actual science until we design media so that the link to papers is displayed clearly and naturally, not to pressure anyone into it but rather as a trap to lure in and grab onto curious minds and send them on a journey?!
I genuinely think this changes how people perceive science in general when they can peak in, flip through a couple of current scientific papers, ask a couple of questions and be like "cool, I never thought about that!" and then move on. The status quo of Elsevier slapping you with a $45 price tag to read an article you might find useless or indecipherable is just insulting and in my opinion pushes the general public towards feeling fundamentally seperated from science. I also find it insufferable when scientists and writers claim the average person isn't going to read a complex scientific paper to which again I reiterate I don't like to assume I know who the people will be that read my posts/links, I have no idea! Maybe they don't know either, so why not? Don't we all win just a tiny bit if someone checks out a scientific paper just briefly out of mild curiousity? I think we do....
I never thought I'd see the day.
Instead of playing this AI slop that has to play on chrome, according to one comment, why not help GOG get it. It's currently near the top for most votes on the GOG wishlist.
Oh damn, was the original a mmo that anyone could just grab real quick and start playing?
Edit: I just checked. Lol this is an old game made by EA! Won't someone think of EA?! Give them your money for an unsupported and inferior product so that they can put that money into their own AI powered games!
Your "support EA, not slop" comment, is wild. Are you on drugs? Do you need sleep? Or does your anti-AI stance only apply to the poors? Brb, I'm going to download a car.
Because playing nfsu2 is fun.
Playing on Firefox with no issues. I’d love a natively running program, though.
You can get it from archive.org. There even is a lutris install script which downloads and patches it:
Not gonna happen. Car, music and other licensing makes this practically impossible. These licenses are only for a limited number of years - renewing them is often ridiculously expensive, to the point of usually making no economic sense. It's the main reason why old racing games like this one are not available digitally.
Even Rockstar was forced to re-release their older GTAs with some music tracks removed (and they had to patch it for existing owners as well). If it's too expensive for them and far higher profile titles, you know it's not going to happen for a game like Underground 2.
I have my old PS2 and the disc still sitting around :D
My biggest regret is selling my old game consoles because it was becoming a burden to store them in our old place. Our new place is much bigger and I could easily have them all in my office.
You can easily emulate them all these days. I know it's not the same, but often times, that's actually a good thing. It's far less of a hassle to play older titles on modern devices than to hook up an analog output era console to a modern TV and getting a good image quality out of the combination. Not to mention, performance and resolution were often much worse than you remember. Hell, some emulators even fix bugs and you can easily play ROM hacks or other mods that way - which sometimes also fix bugs, like a fan-patched version of Gran Turismo 2, which makes it actually possible to complete the game.
True. I was going to start getting into Pokemon Rom hacks.
It doesn't have to play on chrome, and the game isn't AI slop, it was made in 2005.
The net code is AI slop. Original game was very limited in online play.
This is SOOOO SICK. I’ve never played any NFS games, and this is a blast so far. Thank you for this!
I grew up on NFS:U2
it's a great game. speed done right, car controls done right. atmosphere done right. progression done well.
it's a good game.
It's alright. It's no Burnout 3 though.
Glorious.
I played through this entire game several times using an SNES controller that my brother rigged up to an old printer cable. It worked perfectly.
That's certainly a unique sentence no other person has ever uttered before.
Wrong. Shoehorning controllers (and some other protocols like Nokia phone flashing) to serial and parallel ports has been around since when the ports were invented.
Example: https://www.raphnet.net/electronique/psx_adaptor/psx_adaptor_en.php
It enjoys crashing almost as much as I do in Burnout 3.