The Need For Speed Porsche 2000 Page

Genre: Racing.

System Requirements:
OS: Windows ’95, ’98 or 2000. It will work in XP also.
Minimum: 200 MHz Pentium CPU, 32 MB of RAM, 150 MB of hard drive space, 4 × speed CD-ROM drive, 3D accelerator with 4 MB of RAM.
Recommended: 300 MHz Pentium CPU, 64 MB of RAM, 8 × speed CD-ROM drive, 3D accelerator with 16 MB of RAM.
My Recommendation: 1 GHz AMD Athlon CPU, 64 MB of RAM, GeForce type accelerator.

(This game installs and runs fine in the 64 bit version of Windows 7 with no further tweaking of anything. On my HP laptop PC with the Intel GMA video processor, it did not work passed the loading screen.)

Electronic Arts’ “The Need For Speed” series has included some of the greatest racing games ever. NFS Porsche 2000 is the 5th in the series, (not including Special Editions,) and has improved graphics, more cars than ever (over 80 of them!) and some great new tracks.
There are 14 tracks in all, 5 of which are the closed circuit Monte Carlo ones, and 9 other European open ended tracks with multiple routes.
At the start of the game you won’t have many cars to choose from, but by competing in the Evolution Mode and downloading new cars off the Internet, you’ll soon have the chance to have a whole showroom full of beauties.
Adding to the lastability of the game, is the new Factory Driver Mode, where you must complete certain tricky driving missions in order to get to the top of the company ranks.
Driving through Monte Carlo Course 3
Going through a tunnel in Auvergne
Heading towards the dark tunnel in Corsica
A tunnel on the Corsica track

The game also features a new “4-point” physics model to ensure each car feels more unique, although personally, I still prefer the handling of Need For Speed: High Stakes over this. Never the less, you can tweak nearly every aspect of your chosen car, to the types of tyres, wheel rims, toe-in, etc, etc.
Once again, EA has included damage on your cars, so when you clobber a wall, or just completely flip the thing, you’re going to seriously affect the handling, not mention the car’s good looks. In the Evolution Mode, obtaining no damage earns you extra points. But damage the car, and you’ll have to pay up! 2nd hand wrecks are available to buy also.
Graphically there are some quite lovely touches. 3D tree trunks, top notch reflection effects on the cars which respond to the environment, (but not true reflections,) coronas, lens flares, flashing car indicator lights, headlight beams, water mist, rain, snow, realistic tree shadows that move, coloured fog, water reflections — the list goes on…
As usual, you can choose your own car colour scheme, and even the types of wheels, and stripes. Plus most cars have a convertible option as well that opens & closes the roof. However this option has different effects on some of the other cars.
The village in Shwarzwald
Cote De Azur

All in all, this is quite a good game, and it’s definitely worth a purchase, especially if you’re a NFS fan. You can pick it up quite cheap now too, so that’s a bonus.

Wanna see some nifty replays by me? Get them here. Most of them are from the Evolution or Factory Driver mode, but you get yourself about 1.3 MB worth in 12 replays here. Seeing as the replays compress well. Check out my psycho Horno one where I just go off my nut. Some of the replays have peculiar names as they’re from a few in house jokes.

Graphics: Pretty awesome all round. More effects than you’d care to mention, excellent looking cars that crumple up when you give ’em a whack and some great detail to the geometry. Lovely! Plus yummy weather effects also. 97%
Sound: The music isn’t out of this world but it’s okay. Plenty of ambient sounds, top engine noises, gear change clicks and nice horn tooty toots. Clear speech too. 94%
Animation: Apart from the road signs flipping off wildy when you clobber them and the flowing water, there isn’t much non-car related action going on in the background. As far as smoothness goes, you should get this running fine in a low resolution with a medium draw distance on a Pentium 3, 450 MHz CPU with a 3Dfx Banshee, which is what I had when I bought the game. With the GeForce 2, crank the resolution up to about 1024 × 768 pixels with a far draw distance and it’s great. 1 GHz processors and above with the same video card, and you should be getting over 30 frames per second in 1600 × 1200 pixels, easy. Although the list of screen modes available in 32-bit was chopped off a bit short. Maybe some programmer didn’t allow it to be long enough. 90%
Playability: All Need For Speed games have been great to play, (apart from Need For Speed 3: Hot Pursuit) and this is just as fun. 89%
Lastability: Lots to do with the Evolution Mode and Factory Driver mode, which’ll keep you going for ages. You’ll need a fast modem to play this on the Internet, and a top notch LAN card if you’re playing on a network, otherwise it gets a bit out of sync’. 90%
Overall: Okay, so it only has Porsches, but if you want other cars, don’t buy it - simple as that. A great tribute to a top sports car company, and some fine gaming. Worth getting, I say. 85%