Then I heard about Need For Speed World, again I thought ”Could this be the return to grace Black Box’s NFS series needs?” It had all the elements of a good game, a massive online world, free to play, and best of all, it actually looked somewhat decent, at least according to the screenshots”. I signed up for the beta which I was never able to play but I came across this game again and I decided to try it out, to see what Black Box had in store for me. What Black Box had not what I had expected, I played it alot, over and over again, trying to see what was so special about NFSW but what I found good was the initial tutorial, the fact that traffic drove past game made barriers and the initial fun of the first few races. What I found bad was everything else…

What was EA/Black Box thinking when they made this game. Games are made for entertainment, not to frustrate and have you pull your hair out in total frustration, this is what the game did to me. First off, the game is good when you have a Tier 1 cars and you’re racing the tracks which are initially new but as you progress, you find new tracks which are longer and completely non-existent in terms of anybody playing the track in multiplayer. I got all these tracks that I’ve unlocked and the only way I can get an 8-car race going is in single-player, you’d think they’d make it easier to reach level 20 or something? Very few people are even around Level 20, there usually level 8 or 17 or 15 or something finding someone to play on those tracks can take a long, long time, making those unlocked tracks a waste of your hard earned grinding. Which brings me to the following two problems, the world is absolutely devoid of any sort of players, it feels like there are hundreds rather then the proported millions that EA claim populate this world, it makes me feel like I’m part of this world which exhibits the same lack of life as in Undercover. It’s very disappointing.

Second problem, you gain very little EXP from racing, leaving you to grind the same track over and over again to raise through the ranks, and when you want to race on other tracks, the competition is usually of a lower level then you, leading to you being the head of the pack and making the whole race feel boring as shit, the EXP you get is nonexistant which makes me wonder, what’s the point of racing on older tracks when you’re of a higher level? They used to be fun before but now, it’s just rediciolusly easy and overpowered. Anyway, the common MMORPG theory doesn’t work in this game, it works when you do something exciting like fight or team up but you’re racing all the time and you don’t get to team up. It can get boring, even if you win against a bunch of higher level opponents.

Speaking of which, did you know that statistics lie in this game, that you can easily get beaten by a Mazda RX-7, Lotus Elise (which should be a Teir 3 car in my opinion) or a Nissan Supara (those damned Supara’s) with inferior stats then yours? If you think no then you are 100% wrong, you will get beaten by one of those cars in almost any high level race (even when they’re a lower level), you’re be asking yourself this, how can they beat a car which has a higher top speed, acceleration and hacking? It’s simple, you pay real world money for BOOST, which is the in-game currency for anything involving enhancements. They get BOOST and then they buy card packs that allow HIGH PERFORMANCE PARTS WHICH I HAVE ONLY WON 4 TIMES, I know I shouldn’t be complaining about this but what use is racing fairly when you can use BOOST to buy card packs, get high performance parts that make your car ridiculously fast and win every possible race? As far as I know, EA has thrown out the book regarding fair gameplay, it’s all about da benjamins G! You gotta spend money to win! If you don’t then you know, can’t say it because it violates Bluehost’s TOS.

Additionally, they also grind across the wall and hit traffic and it does not affect their speed at all. This happens in every possible race so far, they pull back and then they RAM you at forces even Need For Speed shouldn’t be able to do. It frustrates me that they ram me into the wall and I lose all of my speed while their car goes speeding off at 100MPH, something people in the forum call wallriding. Apparently in the Need For Speed World, scientists have discovered an F-ed up version of physics, one that does not follow BASIC REAL WORLD RULES THAT ALL BASIC RACING GAMES AT LEAST FOLLOW. I have somewhat tried to resolve this situation by driving the opposite side of where they’re going to turn but this is inexcusable, the cars should be handling the same, not gain the sudden power of invincibility. Speaking of which, most of this is tied to poorly made networking code which fails at events almost 75% of the time. It doesn’t start up, it just dumps you back into the open world, forced to try again. And when your racing, then all bets are off, the cars can sometimes lag ahead of you even though you got a fast network speed and it also has the strange side effect of disconnecting you just when you think you’re about to win. I suspect that it has something to do with the rammers as well, it’s that bad.

There’s also the minor problem of the power ups, the rest of the power ups I can live with but Traffic Magnet angers me, not as much in a race because it’s easily blockable using Juggernaut or Shield but because multiple people can call Traffic Shield on you multiple times, I feel like they should of limited it to only 1 Traffic Magnet usage until the self imposed timeout runs out, makes it easier to race because you’re not constantly being baragged with Traffic Magnet and you’re not waiting patiently for your Juggernaut or Shield or Ready power ups to charge up. There’s also the problem of useless power ups such as One More Lap or Ready, while the Ready might be useful. One More Lap is something I barely use and yet I win it mostly every time in the lucky card draw, just goes to show how lucky I can be. There’s also a missing powerup that many forum readers have requested, a ghost powerup, if they implement that into the game then maybe, maybe there might be a shred of fairness in the world.

Additionally, the pursuit mode (which you can only access while hitting a police car, not when you’re driving on the streets or during a race), while cool, has lots of flaws. First off, the police AI still focuses on sucking and it shows when trying to ram you, the only thing it knows how to does. It foolishly drives itself into hazard zones and it easily lost my car during a pursuit tons of times. What gets me pissed off is the fact that instead of improving the police AI. they have the SUV’s that cannot be rammed, even with a powerup that ram you and send your car flying and it exhibits the same poor AI as the rest of the game, usually you can escape because it flips your car and the game spawns it outside of where they trapped you, allowing you to escape. It can also have the unintended side affect of sending you the right way or just at 100MPH, that’s not what pisses me off. What pissed me off is the sheer numbers that the police spawn in, instead of relying on AI which could actually make a police chase difficult, they have tons of SUVs that ram you from every direction, trapping you in a spot you cannot escape from even if you manage to squeeze your way out. It feels like in order to evade the police, I have to spend tons of money on power ups, therefore reinforcing the whole pay to win approach, which EA forces on you with it’s constant messages that you can buy stuff to make yourself feel like #1. I get that I can spend my money to recharge my power ups or have the cars before a certain level, guess what EA, I’m not falling for your mindtricks any time soon.

There are minor flaws such as the game not having enough game modes as before and the fact that you have to buy a second car slot in order to buy a more powerful car because you’re getting beaten by unusually powerful cars and you discovered that your old car was better because the stats misleaded you, which it can do in this game so beware. (Additionally I had accidently spend the boost on Money and Rep enhancers (they shouldn’t make those entire parts clickable, only the button) so I was forced to use up the 7 days of the amplifiers, hence my overall impressions of the game, it was also the worst $5 I have ever spent.) There is also a lame meeting place which is in actuality, a photo mode and a bad photo mode at that. It didn’t discard the UI when I took pictures of my custom designed Mitsubishi which I sold because I needed a more powerful car apparently. Also the traffic in this game stupid, as in it drives  in your way instead of out. I lost many races this way and I know it ain’t worth complaining about but really, they should make the AI cars at least smarter instead of dumbasses relying on guessing which direction the car is coming in. I mean come on, do they give out licenses to drivers without having to take a test, I mean who is running the virtual DMV in this virtual world! Come on, teach your damn drivers left from right, or do you not have elementary school in Need For Speed World?

In closing, this is the worst street racing game in history, they did everything wrong, they focused on the fact thay force the whole pay to win mentality on you and the fact that skill means jack shit when you can pay real world money to enhance your e-penis which nobody cares about in real life. I mean seriously, EA should force all their players to design their cars in the color scheme of money, add money symbols and add text that says I’m rich biatch! This is as stupid as companies having to force you to share the story, TAKE A PHOTO OF THE STORY YOU SHARED and place it on your Facebook page, and if whoring didn’t get bad enough. I don’t want my Facebook profile to be a whoring spot for various companies due to the fact that you have to do this to enter the contest. Whatever happened to just entering your email address and just having it randomly drawn out of a hat I mean come on, I know Facebook is a privacy hole and I should care but I don’t because of the fact that I have never even posted anything about myself on the website, except for a few photos but I don’t think they matter much to Facebook, at least I know what to post on my Facebook profile from now on.

Anyways, (even if it is free, it’s still bad). Flawed MMO concept (they should of had you drive to the races), lack of things to do in NFSW, lack of fairness in the game and a lack of general polish in general. This is officially the worst arcade street racing game by far. If you want my opinion, get Midnight Club Los Angeles, harder difficulty, more traffic, better multiplayer mode with an open world you can do anything with (unlike NFSW), better graphics, a cockpit view for those of you who enjoy it  and an overall feel of completeness and enjoyment. Trust me, you’ll enjoy driving around their Los Angeles more so then the world of Need For Speed.

Okay, he says he understands that he understands bug fixes and taking the time to make sure it’s ready for mass consumption and the entire thing was created to show a community that they’re ready for Windows 7 and they’re apparently proud of it. Really, this doesn’t make any sense. If you wanted to create a group that shows people that are truly excited for Windows 7 then you’d probably create a Facebook group on it or join some Windows forum or create an IRC chatroom titled #windows7, that would of make tons more sense then this publicity grabbing site there is. Really, there should be some community to release Duke Nukem Forever, that’s being developed for a long time and should of flown a long time ago, that way the game would be released and Duke Nukem Forever would finally not be identified as vaporware. Seriously creating a community with the basis that you want to release Windows 7 now is stupid, instead you should of been entirely honest and just said that you were just excited for Windows 7.

Honestly, releasing a product now would be utter chaos, just look at the premature release of Windows ME, there were lots of flaws, bugs, and most importantly lots of crashes and BSoD’s which drove people to the near brink of insanity. Windows Vista was similar due to the fact that there were lots of incompatible hardware and software out there, people had to buy much more powerful hardware due to the higher system requirements and the 7 confusing editions. If Windows 7 were released now, then it’d be a nightmare for everyone to see that Windows 7 has disappointed everyone who believed in it. Software needs time to perfect (though I do say that they’re capable of making it to RC faster), to make a perfect experience for everybody, to make it sell and to make it exceed everyone’s expectations like every release of Mac OS X.

The site has even got some publicity due to the because of the avidness of the Windows fan and the impossibility of releasing Windows 7, and most of it seems to be making fun of it. Even though he does not get the idea, he still appreciates all of the publicity he’s getting and even posts it on his website. He’s even proud of a mention on MacBreak Weekly (if you’ve gotten a mention on a Mac specific podcast, that means they’re really taking you “seriously”) and “Microsoft” is reaching out to interview him… I’ll take this with a grain of salt because when Windows 7 is released which is to most people late 2009/early 2010 and after his 15 minutes of internet fame are up then Kelly Poe will go back to obscurity and this will be just another internet meme by 4chan but will instantly spread across the internet within a few weeks, which is what may happen due to the fact that releasing stuff now will likely be the new internet catchphrase mixed in with lots of products we wished got released.

So that’s it in a nutshell. I want to say a few words before I end this, why does he ™ everything. It’s not a big problem but it definitely isn’t required. I use a lot of words without trademarks at the end generally because it doesn’t matter whether it’s at the end, because nobody’s going to sue for a word that’s being used in a general context. They’ll only sue when it’s used in an inappropriate and infringing context. Also he’s trying to start a community about people excited about Windows 7. To me, a community is where people can hang out, make new friends, talk about anything, share stuff with them and have a good time while doing it. Mostly all I see is a petition for people who want Windows 7 released now and the only thing that resembles a community is that Facebook group page a fan created. If he’s serious about making a community then he’ll have to rethink everything and take down that stupid petition in the first place. I appreciate what he’s trying to do but I don’t think it’ll work.

Now we’re expecting the release of the latest OS’ from Microsoft and Apple, Windows 7 and Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Normally they’d include some new features and some major improvements into these releases (with the Mac OS X releases coming yearly as new versions but I don’t mind one bit). But these are positioned as incremental (a.k.a minor upgrades) which slightly lowers my expectations. This may be reasonable due to the fact that Vista and Leopard were slightly disappointing and didn’t feel exactly like they were getting what they thought they were getting, with some or lots of features being cut from Vista and Leopard (this may not be entirely true, if you think what I said is wrong, email me.), Specifically Vista’s 6 confusing and unnecessary editions being placed on the market and Vista, being marketed poorly and the Vista compatible lawsuit, might of hindered it’s impact and gave people a bad impression of Vista that continues even to this day.

So what’s new? Making everything run, boot and install faster, that is one of the main focuses of both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard, removing unnecessary services, reducing the initial space it takes up and also reducing how much memory it uses and introducing new boot technologies, including one in Windows 7 that allows it to boot up in 15 seconds (it’s not included in the current Windows 7 beta but I think it may be included in the upcoming release candidate version, again, I’m not sure). This has been what everyone has been clamoring up for the past year or so, an OS that doesn’t take up that much space and boots up in a short time. The space these OS’s take up currently is absurd. Both Windows Vista and Mac OS X takes up to around 7.00 GBs of space with everything included and people with small hard drive space have had trouble adopting them because it would be a hard drive space hog with all of the stuff included on it, now that problem may be history. Also the speed enhancements are nice because people with slower computer will be able to use the system like the developers indented. I predict that those with older Pentium 4 processers will be excited beyond belief.

Also new is the new multi-touch stuff that they’re adding, ever since the iPhone popularized multi-touch beyond belief, everyone’s been trying to create or hype their next touch-based product (I’m looking at you Microsoft Surface). But I’m surprised that their including multi-touch into both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard, really. This brings a lot of possible for both systems because you can resize and move windows, documents, slide between individual screens, move back and forward between pages, scroll through pages easier, highlight text, it’s even useful for a new generation of games (which you can already download and play on the iPhone but for Windows and Mac OS X, this is new). The upcoming multi-touch monitors that are being released and prepped for Windows 7 and Snow Leopard will bring multi-touch to the masses, expect them to cost a lot though and make sure that you really need one before buying one, the multi-touch looks cool but think about what you’ll use it for.

The most surprising thing I’ve seen is the new versions of QuickTime (X) and Windows Media Player (12) supporting a vast array of codecs beyond WMV (for Windows Media Player), MOV, MPG4 (for QuickTime) and raw AVI (for both players). From what I’ve used, they now support a vast array of modern codecs that you had to manually download and install before to get the Media Player to be compatible with most media files and play them out of the box. I truly appreciate them for including support for nearly every video codec and file there is, really saves me a lot of trouble whenever I reinstall my OS or one of my codecs mysteriously stop working. This has been long wished for but they were afraid that something was blocking them from including it, but they’ve been able to find a way to create their own way to play DiVx, MP4, WMV, AAC or whatever codecs these Media Players don’t currently support.

Still, even though their file managers are the same, their interfaces the same and also some things remain the same. These operating systems do have different features that separate them from being entirely similar. So these are not Service Packs or anything because these usually contain fixes to bugs already in the operating system as well as some new features specific to that operating system. These are bringing something to the table that we have mostly not seen before or we requested that it be put in there. It may be something new like native support for a file system or something entirely new altogether. It still shows that they’re interested in putting new stuff that’s revolutionary and cool and it also sorta increases the value of it, here’s what each OS will contain.

Still despite it mostly being speed enhancements and new behind-the-hood technologies, there is nothing mostly different between good releases. Still, based on what I’ve tried, they are better then their initial predecessors and it should be on every geek’s wish list. Basing from what I tried of Windows 7, it’s better then Windows Vista and I’m sure that Snow Leopard will blow away Leopard. Still, I think these companies may be saying that they’re sorry and that they want you to fall in love all over again (For Leopard users, they may be happier that the system will be faster then ever before) and from everyone elses experiences and some people demanding they release Windows 7 now. I feel that these will be more then succ
essful and it might be enough to make people forget about the wobbly launches of Vista and the downsides of Leopard. Still, there’s nothing majorly different between them, but I feel like you should upgrade when they come out in 2009 or 2010, whether you’re on Mac or PC.