The idea for this post came to me while playing the 2015 game Need for Speed. This game has many problems with the actual racing gameplay, but nevertheless it remains unique and worthwhile due to the concept chosen by the authors.
The authors of NFS, using various tools, tried to immerse the player in atmosphere street racing as a subculture, demonstrating its various sides besides the racing itself. Hence, by arcade standards, a huge number of parts for tuning (namely tuning, not styling), each of which is accompanied by a brief description of how it works and what it is responsible for, and each of which must be installed manually, without having a magic “pump everything” button. Hence the detailed tuning of the car’s behavior by adjusting the suspension, differential, steering, brakes and other parameters (all this, however, comes down to creating a universal assembly and only, perhaps, allocating a separate car for drifting). Hence the atmospheric and most believable city: due to well-chosen post-effects and customized lighting, the graphics look photorealistic and impressive even after 9 years (on the hardware of the original XOne and PS4!), and the local roads, instead of the highways and jumps typical for arcade racing, consist of overpasses, branching junctions and narrow winding streets that are not very suitable for racing (or I’m just looking for excuses for the level designers who made so location unsuitable for local physics). And it’s out of this desire to immerse the player in the shoes of a street racer that Ghost Games has put a lot of emphasis on first-person cutscenes that combine CGI and live-action footage to tell the story of the path to success of the player’s alter ego and his teammates.
Many players among GG’s team of friends especially liked red-haired Amy
… who is the most successful actress of the entire cast, having played a prominent role as the Tramp in Game of Thrones
The logical development of the last point was the addition of real celebrities from the automotive world to the game, attracting whose attention is the ultimate goal of a local career.
And here I would like to dwell in more detail on this point.
Celebrities have long and fruitfully interacted with the gaming industry. This could be voicing characters, using appearances, using a popular name in a game title, or even a full-fledged game of the name of your loved one.
But NFS 2015, due to its immersiveness and mundane setting, gives a special experience – the experience of meeting you in person you with a star. If you’ve ever been behind the scenes of a concert of your favorite musicians, attended a Meet & Greet, or just met your idol on the street, you know what I’m talking about.
In this post, we’ll discuss how well https://gamexch567casino.co.uk/ it turned out for this particular NFS, another needforspeed, and one much older and now forgotten game. Well, in general, let’s say a few words about the potential of such a video game element. So, let’s go.
Need for Speed (2015)
In this game, gamers will meet five popular representatives of the automotive scene: Porshe tuner Akira Nakai-San, Porshe collector Magnus Walker, drift team (no, not in a Porshe) Risky Devil, Lamborghini tuner Shinichi Morohoshi-San and rally driver and car stunt performer Ken Block.
I, of course, cannot call myself an experienced person in automotive culture, but it would be wrong to say that it is completely alien to me. Some personalities from the automotive world are familiar to me (not personally, but in the sense that I know who they are and what they are famous for): the canonical trio of Top Gear (plus the Stig), Steve Saleen, John DeLorean, Carroll Shelby, Sebastian Loeb, Carlos Sainz and others. Of the NFS heroes, I only know Ken Block (Good Night, Sweet Prince), and to be honest, largely because at the turn of the 2000s he actively appeared in video games, and in particular in the DiRT series. But his tricks on the Impreza and Focus look really impressive, this cannot be taken away. The names of the other “celebrities” didn’t mean anything to me, and even after their appearance in the game and searching for information about them, only Nakai-San aroused some interest and sympathy in me. Well, like, the fact that Magnus Walker has a rare Porsche collection is, of course, cool, but the same Richard Hammond and Jeremy Clarkson also own fairly well-known car collections, but in addition to this, they film large-scale entertainment shows and participate in many third-party projects. A lover of glamorous Lamborghinis, Morohoshi, who boasts of his connections with the Yakuza, completely caused antipathy – on the other hand, it is clear that it was necessary to invite some outlaw star to the police chase mode, and this is not an easy task (it’s time to write a comment that it would be better to cut out the cops altogether, rather than leave the misunderstanding that is present in the release version of the game).
But from our personal assessment of the stars, let’s move on to how interaction with them is implemented in the game. The first encounter with at least some of them occurs early in the game, when the protagonist visits a club and spots them out of the corner of his eye. This is quite atmospheric and believable – personally, at concerts of foreign groups, I also sometimes noticed domestic celebrities in the crowd. Then either personal calls from the idol begin, or one of GG’s comrades begins to compare his wits with the star via the Internet, sending him our lap records and collections of tricks. At the end of their branch, each star will have to pay the team and me a personal visit, shake hands, show respect and hand over the keys to their branded car as a sign of this respect. And, I admit, with Ken Block this trick worked out for me personally in some way.
Need for Speed: Unbound
In the latest (at the time of writing this material) part of “Need for Speed,” rapper A$AP Rocky was invited as a star. The musician is the organizer of the Takeover racing mode (essentially a local gymkhana), acts as one of our opponents in several races, and also participates in one exclusive story mission. Let’s dwell on it in more detail.
One fine moment, Rakim (the rapper’s real name) calls us, gives us respect, and asks us to pick him up. After this, we first need to demonstrate our driving skill by driving the route for a while, and then push Rocky to the point he needs. And both of these races are accompanied by a dialogue between our hero and the musician. More precisely, almost a monologue by A$AP Rocky in the style of a typical motivational cart with a pinch of “I’m just like you, it’s hard for the rich too”.
And you know, specifically with A$AP Rocky, this event did not make the right impression on me. First of all, because I’m not a fan of him: in the game his tracks served as a good background and I didn’t want to switch them, but in the soundtrack to Unbound there were performers that I liked much more. The same Amir Obe.
At the same time, if such a mission had been with some star from the golden (in my opinion) era of NFS soundtracks – for example, Wayne Static, Chad Gray, Mike Shinoda or David Draiman – I am sure that such a trip would have been very impressive.
Therefore, considering who Today target audience of current NFSs – EA did everything right.
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories
Meanwhile, Rockstar Leeds, in its second PSP exclusive from the best game series in the world, took an uncharacteristic step for the studio and added a real celebrity to the parody-satirical world of GTA. Of course, famous musical compositions were heard on the radio back in GTA III, and in GTA IV the DJs were the real Iggy Pop and Max Cavalera as themselves. But in VSC, in the shoes of Victor Vance, we will have to work as the driver and bodyguard of the very real Phil Collins!
With the transfer of sensations from “meeting a star,” the situation here is twofold. On the one hand, one of the main advantages of the games in the Grand Theft Auto series is the conveyance of the atmosphere of the chosen era, and the Vice City subseries, according to many fans, does this best of all, and Phil, with his concert and the iconic “In the Air Tonight,” perfectly complements the atmosphere of the eighties. On the other hand, the world of GTA (especially the 3D universe) is too grotesque, and even a real star will not be able to “ground” it enough for the player to feel like he is behind the scenes of a real concert in the image of himself, and not a caricature gangster.
Therefore, I believe that Phil could be replaced in this game by someone like Love Fist without any losses.
Worth mentioning
In this section, I would like to recall two more games that, in one way or another, try to organize a meeting between the player and the star. And again we will have to return to car culture.
In DiRT 5, in career mode, podcasts constantly play in the background of the menu, the content of which changes depending on the player’s progress. In addition to fictional characters, guests of the podcast include race car driver Jamie Chadwick and YouTuber SLAPTrain (a quick search gives the impression that this is someone like the Canadian Bulkin). There is no interaction with the player as such, podcasts as a trend got to me already five years ago, and the fifth DiRT itself is such a default and dull game that I don’t want to talk about it for a long time.
However, the hosts of this podcast are the guys from the YouTube channel Donut Media, and we personally encounter them in another racing series – Forza Horizon. And here it would seem that everything is the same as with NFS Unbound – an alter ego painstakingly created in the editor, a realistic setting and stars communicating with us personally. However, firstly, Donut Media themselves are not familiar to me personally, and do not evoke any emotions when I meet them (although they seem to be popular on English-language YouTube – a kind of Zoomer Top Gear). Secondly, in Fourza (at least in the last two parts that are currently available), we initially do not play the role of a simple boy (or girl) starting his racing career, but on the contrary, from the very beginning we ourselves find ourselves a star, whom everyone around us loves and knows. Maybe it wasn’t like this in previous Horizons (from the first to the third), but now you can’t buy them or touch them in Gamepass.
In my opinion, such a game design technique as conveying the experience of meeting a star has great potential in certain settings and genres. People tend to be fans of people, and many of us have idols.
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