NFS: Carbon is the latest in the interminable graphics-engine-and-player-lineup-updates from EA.
EA is a company well known for holding a franchise down and pummeling every last bit of tasty money out of the twitching agonized pulp left after the first couple 'sequels'.
NFS: Carbon is no different. On the Wii side, we have a piece of shovelware that _might_ have been able to be done properly on the Wii, given a very experienced programming team dedicated to wringing every pixel possible out of the Wii.
This team, however, was busy working for someone else, so they shoe-horned a game that can give a good workout to anything except a GeForce 8800 series card into the poor, poor Wii. The lag and spotty framerates resulting are not surprising.
However, the various control interfaces available on the Wii do make full use of the Wiimote/Nunchuk, and the variety allows the user to play very intuitively and easily.
The UI is intrusive, requiring far too many acknowledgements and confirmations for simple acts, and having too many layers and levels for a console-based game.
On the PC Side Of The Farce, EA has taken the sheer power inherent in the modern PC Gaming platform, and ignored it in favor of excessive motion blur, a poor UI, and shoddy controls (no porportional brakes, WTF?). Playing with a keyboard is nigh-impossible, which is understandable.
Playing with a gamepad is also difficult, given the absolutely horrible farce-feedback (keyed off the horizontal position of the driving axis, NOT off of in-game status) and the binary brakes (full lock or nothing).
The sheer joy of slotting a perfectly driven powerslid, tires screaming, scenery sliding, engine howling corner, however, remains. Just be careful with the brakes..
On a new (~3 months old) Windows XP install with good drivers and good DirectX, making a working game should be easy, and EA manages to fail this - NFS Carbon is known for fail-starts and random crashes to desktop under many, many configs, and I have experienced multiple random crashes to desktop, without any sort of error message, log, windows event, or anything to indicate _why_ the crash occured.
If you're a racing game fanatic and need something else to bleed of a little adrenaline, pick this game up used. Failing that, go buy Flatout 2 instead, or pick up Midnight Club Dub Edition Remix for 15 bux for the Xbox - it may lag, but it's shiny, fast, and _works_.Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979
EA is a company well known for holding a franchise down and pummeling every last bit of tasty money out of the twitching agonized pulp left after the first couple 'sequels'.
NFS: Carbon is no different. On the Wii side, we have a piece of shovelware that _might_ have been able to be done properly on the Wii, given a very experienced programming team dedicated to wringing every pixel possible out of the Wii.
This team, however, was busy working for someone else, so they shoe-horned a game that can give a good workout to anything except a GeForce 8800 series card into the poor, poor Wii. The lag and spotty framerates resulting are not surprising.
However, the various control interfaces available on the Wii do make full use of the Wiimote/Nunchuk, and the variety allows the user to play very intuitively and easily.
The UI is intrusive, requiring far too many acknowledgements and confirmations for simple acts, and having too many layers and levels for a console-based game.
On the PC Side Of The Farce, EA has taken the sheer power inherent in the modern PC Gaming platform, and ignored it in favor of excessive motion blur, a poor UI, and shoddy controls (no porportional brakes, WTF?). Playing with a keyboard is nigh-impossible, which is understandable.
Playing with a gamepad is also difficult, given the absolutely horrible farce-feedback (keyed off the horizontal position of the driving axis, NOT off of in-game status) and the binary brakes (full lock or nothing).
The sheer joy of slotting a perfectly driven powerslid, tires screaming, scenery sliding, engine howling corner, however, remains. Just be careful with the brakes..
On a new (~3 months old) Windows XP install with good drivers and good DirectX, making a working game should be easy, and EA manages to fail this - NFS Carbon is known for fail-starts and random crashes to desktop under many, many configs, and I have experienced multiple random crashes to desktop, without any sort of error message, log, windows event, or anything to indicate _why_ the crash occured.
If you're a racing game fanatic and need something else to bleed of a little adrenaline, pick this game up used. Failing that, go buy Flatout 2 instead, or pick up Midnight Club Dub Edition Remix for 15 bux for the Xbox - it may lag, but it's shiny, fast, and _works_.Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979
