Road & Track Presents: The Need For Speed straddles two epochs. One is obvious: it's the first title in a multidecade series that's spawned countless classics, duds, and pioneering oddities. (Pun unintentional). But there's another, less obvious one: the swansong of the late '80s premier driving game codesmiths, recently acquired by a publishing behemoth but still carrying enough of their own identity to make one last Test Drive.

I fear the odds of people seeing the thumbnail and clicking just to comment "no Test Drive 4 came out after this game, how can you not know this?" are high. But I'm doing it anyway, because this was my immediate impression upon firing up PC CDROM The Need For Speed to prove to myself I can indeed win the tournament twice and my repeatedly losing to the XMan on 3DO NFS is the fault of the console.

Checkpoints:

0:00 I'm right about Britpop and you know it
0:49 We're not in 16bit land any more
1:24 Here comes the premise
2:16 A tale of one developer
3:54 Showcases and Xmen
4:22 Versions upon versions
5:28 Realism, of a sort
7:48 The bit everyone replays to see if I broke the law
9:04 Graphical compromises and constraints
10:20 More Test Drive elements
11:24 Hitting the Ateam in their stupid van. Or just a wall.
12:15 Roads or set pieces
13:50 Returning and ending

Oddly, for all NFS2's tracks feel like disconnected set pieces it's one of the few games early in the series to have one based on an actual realworld location, Pacific Spirit. There's a Tom Scott video about it and everything. Somehow, other than the stretch along the coast it still feels like a bunch of disconnected set pieces to drive.

Comments, you know the premoderation drill by now. I edited out a whole section mocking bad faith misinterpretations because, y'know, I don't really get those any more. DO NOT MAKE ME FEEL MY FAITH IN HUMANITY HAS BEEN MISPLACED.

Bonus fact: The EAC RALY cheat unlocked for finishing the tournament twice mostly just changes the car handling, unless you race on Rusty Springs in which case it unlocks an alternative reskin of the track called Oasis Springs.