Need for Speed 5 Porsche Unleashedpossesses
one of the worst collision-detection routines ever seen in a racing
game. Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed strays from several conventions
previously established by the popular arcade-style exotic-car racing
series. For one thing, like its name suggests, Porsche Unleashed
features automobiles exclusively from one manufacturer. What’s more, the
game has a more detailed, more realistic driving and physics model than
its predecessors, though the game’s realism is scalable. And while
Porsche Unleashed has a few minor shortcomings, it nevertheless stands
as the most ambitious game in the series since the original. As such,
it’ll more than likely make you love the Porsche on the off chance you
don’t already.
Porsche
Unleashed looks good enough to do justice to its prestigious German
sponsor. The game includes many dozens of different Porsche models from
the manufacturer’s 50-year product line, and each one bears the
unmistakable curvature of a Porsche. The 3D car models are highly
detailed: The cars all have working turn signals, brake lights, and
headlights, and when you look at them in the garage, you can even check
the engine under the hood, pop the trunk, or view the car’s interior.
The cars shine in the sunlight and reflect street lamps at nighttime,
and they can also get noticeably damaged. You can clearly see their
independent suspension at work as they corner, thanks to the game’s
realistic four-point physics model, and you can even see their drivers
turning the wheel and shifting gears. You can drive the cars from a 3D
cockpit view, from which you get a great sense of speed, but the cockpit
view’s limited visibility and slower frame rate – as well as the
muffled engine noise – make the cutaway first-person view preferable,
though you can also select from two external perspectives. The cars in
Porsche Unleashed don’t look totally perfect, as some of the minor
details such as the door handles are part of the texture maps, rather
than part of the polygonal geometry. But such details are only evident
if you spend a lot of time gawking at your cars in the garage, rather
than racing them out on the streets of Europe.
System= Pentium III CPU 733 MHz
RAM= 256 MB
Size= 189 MB
Video Memory= 32 MB
OS= Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 and Windows 8
