Need for Speed: Underground

aka: Jipin Feiche: Dixia Chehui, NFSU1
Moby ID: 11175
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

Need For Speed: Underground is the seventh game in the long running Need For Speed racing series.

The game revolves around illegal night time street racing with heavily modified import cars and has been greatly influenced by the movie the Fast And The Furious and its sequel. Players get the chance to build their own racing machine almost from the ground up, with hundreds of real licensed parts and lots of licensed cars, including the Mazda RX-7 and the Nissan Skyline GT-R. The game also features over 100 single player races and a hip hop/hard rock soundtrack including artists such as Mystikal, Rob Zombie, and the Crystal Method.

Spellings

  • 极品飞车:地下车会 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

328 People (318 developers, 10 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 82% (based on 52 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.6 out of 5 (based on 134 ratings with 7 reviews)

Make your car look great, then show everyone who owns the roads

The Good
First of all, I like the ability to really customize your car. There are so many combinations you can have for your car's looks that it would be very difficult to ever find someone with a car just like yours. You have the ability to not only customize various performance parts on your car (engine/exhaust, turbo, nitrous, tires, etc), but also how your car looks visually.

After choosing your car, you can change the hood, the front and rear bumpers, the spoiler, the roof scoop, and the ground effects along the doors. You can also change the head lights and tail lights, the muffler, and rims. After all that, you get to paint your car from a wide choice of colors, tint the glass, add neon ground effects, and add vinyls and logos. The vinyls can be four layers deep... and there are many different styles of vinyls, such as flames, lightning, "wild", logos such as HP Racing, and Unique vinyls such as a purple rose, a racing skeleton, and more. Within those styles, there can be up to around 20-30 different kinds of vinyls. Overall, there are way over 100 different vinyls to choose from to make your car unique.

After customizing your car, you get to race. This is where you get even more choices. Rather than a single kind of race that you see in many racing games, you have many choices. You get to choose from circuit (multiple lap races), drag racing (shift at the right times to win), sprint (start to finish; no laps), drifting (slide your car around the track to get points... don't hit the walls), and knockout (be the last standing). You are also able to take part in tournaments in the campaign mode as you work your way up. In this campaign mode, you are able to get your car pictured on the covers of tons of magazines. So get your car looking great and then get on those magazines!

Besides single player modes, which include the campaign (underground) and the quick race, you can also race online with your friends. However, you'll need to unlock the cars and tracks in the single player mode first or you'll be limited on what you can do.

The game tracks also your stats, which lets you keep track of how well you do in the different types of races you enter.

One other thing I really enjoyed with the game was the graphics. The reflections were well done and the cars just look great. The only bad thing is that you appear to always be racing on roads that were just rained on.

The Bad
The game is completely arcade-style racing. There is no damage to your car in the game. The closest thing to damage is if you're in drag racing -- if you crash, your car is said to be totaled. Other than that, you can flip, roll, crash, and still have a perfect-looking car. Although this can be fun, I enjoy having damage affect the car's performance... and seeing pieces flying off your broken car would be great.

Also, the cars tend to handle more like you would expect in arcade... at least whenever you hit anything. For one, you really can't land on your roof (at least I've not been able to...), also you tend to bounce off things when you hit them. You might end up flying through the air, but it's still unrealistic. Besides those, you will be very hard-pressed to spin out an opponent. You can slam into the back corner of their cars and it won't spin them out. You are left to run them into objects that will stop them.

Another bad part is that the opponents appear to cheat. You can slam the opponents into stuff causing them to stop until they get going again, and run a close to perfect race, yet very often the car(s) you crash into stuff are right on your bumper, or ahead of you, when you finish the race. Yet if they are ahead of you, their cars are not any faster than yours.

Finally, you are racing in the streets... where are the cops? I have never heard of people racing 120mph and higher down city streets, jumping drawbridges, jumping over cars on hills, and more without a cop noticing. There should have been cops in the game, in my opinion... even if they were optional.

The Bottom Line
This game is a great addition to the Need For Speed series of games. The Need For Speed series really has not been that great since the first Hot Pursuit. That was a great game, and then the rest of the series that came out were good, but nothing really special. This game lives up to the series name.

Although the game is arcade-style racing, with no cops, everything else about the games is great. If you enjoy racing games, and especially if you enjoyed the 2Fast 2Furious movies, this is a must-have game.

Windows · by Riamus (8480) · 2003

The worst game in the series, by far.

The Good
There was almost NOTHING good about this game. Forget it.

The Bad
The graphics looked like super-shiny, unrealistic, crap. I can't even continue on the graphics. And who really wants to tune the car your Grandma drives? So, you buy a terrible Dodge Neon, put some stickers on it, and add some NOS that doesn't work. Yey! We get to put that ugly car in a race that makes one want to commit suicide. These races get extremely repetitive, and, thanks to the fact that there are only about 10 tracks that are early identical, it gets boring after, what, the twentieth race. And, on top of all that, the physics model feels so unrealistic that all the cars feel the same, and, because of the poor sense of speed, they all feel like they are going 30 mph, even when it says you're going 150. The customization is a waste of time, and the game requires you to do it. The storyline is bogus. Just a bunch of jackasses talking smack in an alley.

The Bottom Line
Overall, this game would be a waste of your time, ad if you bought it, I feel sorry for you.

Windows · by Michael Cobb (1) · 2008

One of the best NFS games so far

The Good
Almost everything.

The game's graphics are very nice, and the cars look "hot". A tuned up car looks absolutely impressive. The environment (the city) looks okay, and I liked the idea of night driving.

The user interface is simple, and easy to use. I liked the event selection, and career advancement system, which is simple, and "user-friendly". To advance in your career you must win some races. After you win those races, you will be "transported" to a new tier. Where, again you must win other races. This may sound boring at first, but it is one of the most fun career advancement ways i've ever seen.

The game's soundtrack is, as usual, PERFECT. Most of the ST's singles are to my liking.

The actor's voice-acting is OK. Maybe a little bit too much ghetto talk... but still OK.

The Nitrous Oxide car addon helps alot, but there are no graphical effects for it... .

The Bad
The storyline is kind of boring... nothing special about it.

The Motion Blur display option isn't that cool. If you like driving while drunk, then you should use this :)

The car control is a little to simple, but I suppose it's ok that way. Underground was never supposed to be a perfect sim.

The opponent's AI is mediocre. They usually crash near most difficult turns, and they can be easily taken out from the road.

The Bottom Line
Almost a masterpiece.

Windows · by Hypercake (1310) · 2007

[ View all 7 player reviews ]

Trivia

Multiplayer

EA astonished the entire gaming world by supporting online gameplay in the Windows version of Need for Speed UndergroundNFSU, but leaving out LAN play. Often, games only get LAN play because developers don't want to deal with latency issues and different networks. EA on the other hand, developed a "Cross Platform Online Gaming" feature, which allows gamers to compete online on different platforms (e.g. PS2 vs PC), but there's a catch: no LAN play on PC. This means that players have go through an external network connection just to join a server sitting right next to them.

Soon after the game's release,a tool making LAN play possible appeared on various fansites. It also features an option to play over the Internet without using EA's server.

Server shutdown

As of 13th January 2006, The EA servers for the game are no longer in service. Of course this does not effect peer-to-peer games. The PS2 servers were closed on 1st November 2007.

Awards

  • 4Players
    • 2003 – Best PC Racing Game of the Year
  • Computer Gaming World
    • March 2004 (Issue #236) – Racing Game of the Year
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • February 13, 2004 - Best PC Sports Game in 2003 (Readers' Vote)
  • PC Games (Germany)
    • Issue 02/2004– Best Sports/Racing Game in 2003 (Readers' Vote)
  • Shacknews
    • 2003 - WTF!? Award (more details in "Multiplayer" section)

Information also contributed by Mr._Sefe.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Mattias Kreku.

PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube added by Corn Popper.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, Jeanne, tarmo888, Sciere, Aaron A., Cantillon, Patrick Bregger, Victor Vance.

Game added December 2, 2003. Last modified March 6, 2024.