Stryx-9

@idadeerz has created a monster

I made a couple posts about NFS being a little important to me. I wasn't kidding, this rabbit hole goes really, really fuckin deep.

And this tunnel continues with, as the title states, spreadsheets and graphs.

Need for Speed Underground came out in 2003 as a response to the dramatic shift in car culture from exotics and sports cars lauded by magazine editors, to Japanese imports and street racing. Directly inspired by the The Fast and the Furious, NFS Underground became an extremely important pivot from living out fantasies to personalization and self-expression. You could take a crappy Dodge Neon and give it a complete facelift - an ugly one by modern standards, for sure, but at the time having total control over what your car looked like as you raced it was a ridiculously smart innovation in the racing genre.

This was expanded upon further in Underground 2 with the inclusion of a dynamometer and tuning. When you enter the setup menu, you'd be shown an in-game cutscene of your car driving into a garage at the side of a race track and onto a dyno. Here, your car would run a simple test of its power and torque and the results would be shown on a graph as the test was run. Then you'd be given the option of choosing what discipline to tune your car for.

Generally in NFSU2, the advanced strat is to change the engine tuning so all the power was distributed around the top end of the car's rev range as much as possible. For an example, in the Turbo tuning menu you'd want to drop all the bars from the left side of the graph to make all the bars on the right side of the graph as high as possible. This means your turbocharger is going to push out the most boost in the higher rev ranges, which is exactly where your engine is spending the most time in racing conditions. More boost means more air can flow into each cylinder of your engine, which means more fuel can be added to the cylinder in tandem, which means bigger explosions in the cylinder, which means more power.

This oversimplification of setup tuning through easy-to-understand graphs completely revolutionized racing for me. It took me a couple years after initially playing this game to even realize it was there, but taking the time to tweak my car to my own tastes and get the most performance out of the car was fucking huge. You could easily make a wimpy, poor-handling car into a purebred racing machine with just a few careful minutes in the setup shop.

This introduced me to the concept of setups, which would carry on into my sim racing hobby later in life. Once you find your footing in sim racing and start Getting Good, the next step is to eek out tenths of a second by adjusting how your car behaves on track - not through driving style, but through setups. Tuning the suspension's behavior to suit each track can make the difference between the top step of the podium or missing the podium entirely, especially at the higher echelons of competition. Adjusting your gearing to have just a little more top speed at the end of a straight can help make passing a little easier, camber adjustments can give you just a little more grip through the corners at the expense of tire longevity, and even how much fuel you have in the car can affect how nimble and responsive the car might be throughout the race because of its weight and fluid dynamics. Gas in your gas tank doesn't stay stationary, after all; it's constantly sloshing and splashing around, especially in performance driving conditions.

So, that's three NFS games now that play some major role in my life. NFS 2 opened my eyes to the wonderful world of sports cars, Prostreet fostered my graphic design skillset, and Underground 2 taught me how to make fast cars go even faster without adding any new parts to the car.

And it doesn't stop here, either.

the
list
keeps
fucking
going.

i spewed words about NFS 2 being the kickstart to my obsession with racing games, but there is another NFS game that holds a very important spot in my life. Without it I never would have learned graphic design, and ultimately might never have done the incredible work I did for the motion graphics design during last season of Esports Drift Association.

NFS Prostreet was a huge departure from previous entries, where the series would dip its toes head-first into closed-course legal racing. with no cops or traffic to worry about, it was all about you, your car and your opponents battling it out on course. It took really heavy inspiration from racing festivals of the time period, specifically NOPI motorsports events that featured many live concerts, swimsuit models everywhere and street cars turned into racing cars on a variety of budgets. While the game received mixed reviews because of its heavy departure from police-infested open world gameplay, it quickly cemented itself as one of my favorite games thanks to one of its strongest features - it's atmosphere.

Not a single racing game since Prostreet has ever given me the same bigger-than-life feeling of the racing festivals in Prostreet. Super Promotion, Battle Machine, React Team Sessions and so many more festivals all had their own unique style, and they were voiced by one of three real-life motorsports commentators; Formula Drift commentator Jarod Deanda, Radio LeMans commentator John Hindbaugh and NOPI Tunervision drag racing commentator J Bird. Their voice lines were very heavily influenced by your actions in the game; if you purchased and built a Ford Cosworth and brought it to a European circuit, Hindbaugh would excitedly say "he's brought a Cossie! Don't see many of those around anymore!"

The commentary voice actors did fucking incredible, too. Every single performance by these real-life announcers translate perfectly to the atmosphere of the game, with excited shouting and sad, subdued speech based on whether you'd won the race or spun the car. You can even hear them commentating the race as it happens through the speakers placed around the race track, so you would sometimes drive by a speaker and hear Jarod Deanda excitedly talking about an opponent who wrecked on track and get out of earshot in the middle of the voice line. It was genuinely really fucking cool! it was extremely immersive!

By far the biggest, most important facet of the atmosphere, however, was its graphic design. There was nothing cooler to me than a scuffed-up street car that's seen its fair share of wall taps and fender benders. Your own starter car has different coloured body panels, a frequent occurrence at racing festivals of the time with drivers replacing broken and dented bodywork with panels donated from a parts car they'd purchased on the cheap without repainting them to match the car they were placed onto. That look is, genuinely, my favorite of all time. If I ever owned a project car, it would look exactly like Ryan Cooper's scuffed up 240SX.

The best thing about this design on the race cars was that idiots like me who didn't have a sense for graphic design at all could do literally anything to the car in the livery editor and it would all just work. nothing would look out of place, even if it was a hot pink and lime green mess of haphazard lines and shapes. every car on the grid looked some level of fucked up, so my 13-year-old ass could play the part of a prostreet circuit racer.

The game's livery editor was robust enough to allow me to spend hours designing paint jobs for all my cars, and it's somethign I would end up spending a shitload of time doing in other games too. When Forza Motorsport 7 came to PC, I immediately spent days designing liveries, recreating designs and even got paid to recreate people's fursonas with Forza's vinyl group designer.

Eventually, those skills translated to sim racing. Learning how wireframes worked to effectively design liveries in 2D via Paint Dot Net was a very difficult task, but it was one that I found incredibly rewarding and fun. My skill as a livery designer can be directly attributed to the time I spent in Prostreet fucking around and finding out.

So like, while NFS 2 set me on the path of loving cars, Prostreet pushed me into an actually useful skill that I would eventually make a little bit of money from occasionally. As important as I think NFS 2 was to me, Prostreet has easily become the most impactful just because of this.

rip saki kaskas you fucking legend. you made me the metalhead i am today. o7