Road & Track Presents: The Need for Speed (1996)

Humble beginnings for this long running series does indeed do the job, but leaves room for improvement. One thing promised that it delivers however is SPEED. It feels fast and the cars are responsive enough to where you can improve your skills to grab that 1st place finish or that elusive fastest track time.

If you drive past cows without saying "cows" you're a serial killer.

There's classic Time Trial, Head to Head, Single Race and Tournament modes. Level design is wonderful and varied, with not much, but some stuff to look at along the way. Eight different cars can be tried out and tuned/customised to your liking.

I played the Playstation version today and I think I played the PC version back when I was a kid. I believe my granddad had it, which is pretty rad. Overall I enjoyed my time with the original Need for Speed, while it may not have aged like parmesan, it laid the foundation for the series and the many, many sequels to come.

[3.3] / [5]

So I'm mostly confined to my bedroom due to a foot injury and I try find some older/less hardware needy games to play on a laptop to survive the days. I always wanted to play the older entries of my favourite franchises, so I gave a chance to the Original NFS via a little DosBox magic.

While it wasn't the best time I had these days, I can see why people liked this back in the 90's. There aren't many cars or tracks, but If you had a friend by your side to play with and beat each others records and mess around, this was probably fun. I did some races with a Ferrari and a Supra, and the controls are horrible and so is the graphics, but what can I say, it was a great game, it just isn't anymore. I'm thankful though, because it laid the foundation for an arcade racing franchise. It had cops, supercars, exotic locations, crashes, so everything you need, it just needed a little polish that the many sequels provided to perfect the recipe.