I think The Need For Speed might be the great lost DSI Test Drive game

Channel:
United Kingdom TimberwolfK
Subscribers:
6,000
Published on ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUaCScs0qfM


Game:
The Need for Speed (1994)
Duration: 15:04
1,209 views
118

Road & Track Presents: The Need For Speed straddles two epochs. One is obvious: it's the first title in a multi-decade 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 CD-ROM The Need For Speed to prove to myself I can indeed win the tournament twice and my repeatedly losing to the X-Man 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 16-bit land any more
1:24 Here comes the premise
2:16 A tale of one developer
3:54 Showcases and X-men
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 A-team 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 real-world 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 pre-moderation 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.



Other Videos By TimberwolfK


2025-05-15Reviewing forgotten Tube simulation from London's forgotten Tube station ...ish | BVE2 + Aldywch
2025-03-19Car and Driver showed us what Looking Glass Technologies would become
2025-01-09Iron Roads turns railways into an optimisation puzzle by removing money and signals
2024-11-16Transport Tycoon is 30. I'm the worst person to tell you why it's great.
2024-06-20I review M25 Racer while driving around the M25
2024-05-23How one bug changed my memories of Dungeon Keeper
2024-04-12London in VGA: finding the real Sherlock Holmes behind The Case Of The Serrated Scalpel
2024-01-28What Simon the Sorcerer says about game design at point and click's creative peak
2023-12-06What were XMS, EMS and Conventional memory and why did the PC have them?
2023-11-10Adding AI to my 26 year old QBASIC game | QBASIC Rescue
2023-10-14I think The Need For Speed might be the great lost DSI Test Drive game
2023-09-14Revisiting the streets of my youth via Sierra's Police Quest
2023-08-27Is Flight Unlimited the first true modern flight sim... and should I have run it on a 486 DX2?
2023-08-09I am completely unable to review Derail Valley
2023-07-03I became captivated by this obscure German bus simulator.
2023-06-07Bad Influence!, GamesMaster, and Digitiser: British gaming TV in the 90s and its return
2023-05-10Screamer - Graffiti Software's PC answer to Ridge Racer
2023-04-26User Created Expansion Set: the free community-made expansion for Chris Saywer's RCT2 from 2003
2023-04-05Duke Nukem 3D, the Build engine, and my 1990s attempts at level creation
2023-03-01Stunt Car Racer by Geoff Crammond: a tale of clever suspension modelling and PC port disappointment
2023-02-08Revs: How Geoff Crammond squeezed a Formula 3 sim racer into just 32KB on the BBC Micro


Tags:
retrogaming
dos
trying to explain complex and subtle ideas on the Internet
failure to read the words on the box
magnets for wilful misinterpretation of what has been said


Other Statistics

The Need for Speed Statistics For TimberwolfK

TimberwolfK presently has 1,209 views for The Need for Speed across 1 video, with his channel publishing less than an hour of The Need for Speed content. This is less than 0.46% of the total video content that TimberwolfK has uploaded to YouTube.