Buy a house, buy a car and race around Oahu island of Hawaii. Win races, get money and buy more cars to race around.
Release Date:
Pros:
Ferraris! Lots and lots of Ferraris.
Has other supercars too including Lamborghini, Saleen, Lotus and Jaguar.
If you purchase the MegaPack you will also be blessed with the Ferrari 512 TR.
Apart from racing against other cars, there are other types of events like speed trap, time trials, car transportation and ferrying hitch-hikers.
The online mode seamlessly blends single player events with multiplayer events. You just free form drive around the island and enter whatever events you want. As you are driving you will also encounter other people online and you can choose to have a duel if you like.
Everything in the game looks good. The environment looks good. The cars look good. Even the interior of the cars look good.
The inbuilt speech communication works well. The only problem is, some people have their game running on speakers so loud that the sound gets to the microphone on their end and you can hear it over the speech communicator.
You can actually “test drive” cars before buying them.
The stock music is pretty standard, but the good thing is you can add your own music to played on the radio in the car when driving around.
Cons:
Everyone connects to one main online server. When the server goes down, no online game. Luckily I have only experienced this twice so far.
The police are quite stupid. They will only chase you if you hit them or other cars. They won’t chase you if you overtake them at 300km/h.
Sometimes your profile will just get corrupted and you got to start all over again. Good idea to keep backups of the profile.
There are replays but only for some events. They should have put it for all events.
Other Points:
You can play the game single player only. In this mode you can only take part in all the single player events. There are also AI cars driving around to make it feel like the online people driving around.
There are motor bikes in this game but I have not unlocked them yet.
You can damage other cars, but your car will always be in pristine condition. Not sure if this is a good or a bad thing because I stack it quite a bit.
The driving model can be tweaked between hard core mode and easy mode, where hard core mode is where you need the steering wheel and pedal kit if you want to stay on the road.
Biases:
Reviewed version 1.66A with the Megapack.
I like Ferraris. Especially the 512 TR.
I have not driven a real super car in real life.
I really liked the original Test Drive, Test Drive 3: The Passion, Need For Speed 2, Need For Speed Hot Pursuit(the old one), Need For Speed High Stakes, Need For Speed Most Wanted, Trackmania: Sunrise, Burnout 3 and Gran Turismo 1-4.
I did not like Need For Speed Underground. I haven’t tried the other Need for Speeds.
I played with keyboard on the easiest driving mode.
DRM:
- A CD key must be entered when installing the game.
- The disc must be in the drive to play the game.
Patches:
- 1.66A – Fixes some stuff and also adds the Audi RS4 and Nissan Skyline R34 cars.
Minimum Requirements (as stated on box):
- Operating System: Windows 2000/XP and above
- Processor: Intel P4 @ 2.4GHz or AMD Athlon 2800+
- Memory: 512MB – 1GB recommended
- Hard Disk Space: 8 GB
- DVD-ROM Drive: 8X minimum
- Video: ATI Radeon 9800 256MB VRAM or Nvidia 6600 GT with 256 MB of VRAM. Video Cards with vertex/pixel shaders 2.x and above are recommended
- Sound: DirectX 9.0 compatible Sound Card
- DirectX: DirectX version 9.0c (included) or higher
Computer Played On:
- Core 2 Duo 2.16GHz
- 2Gb RAM
- ATI Radeon X1600 256Mb RAM
- Realtek HD Audio(no idea what model) with Altec Lansing ACS41 speakers or Logitech ClearChat Premium PC Headset.
- Win XP Pro
- Graphics settings are set to whatever I feel comfortable with playing on this PC. They are usually not set to the highest settings. All screenshots are taken with my settings.
