Need for Speed 11 (ProStreet) - Nevada Highway Speed Challenge C with Ford GT
164With Need for Speed Heat on the horizon I decided to do a quick revisit of the 21 previous NFS games leading up to the launch of Heat. Here you can see Need for Speed 11 (ProStreet), which was released in 2007 for various platforms. In this game I recorded a Speed Challenge run on Nevada Highway C with a Ford GT.
ProStreet was a big change from the previous games. Instead of a big open city we now had closed tracks in various obscure locations and decorated with some weird hipster artwork. Circuit, Drag and Drift were joined by Speed Challenge events, which were sprint races on high speed tracks.
Unfortunately this is where the Need for Speed series became bad. The car list in ProStreet was good and the tracks were actually interesting but sadly the physics were suddenly quite bad, unless you were using a wheel. With gamepad it is shocking how much worse the driving feels compared to in the previous games.
There was also a very questionable patch for the game. On the one hand it added additional track locations but on the other hand it for whatever reason locked the FPS to 30 and disabled the bonus code that allowed you to buy the best performance parts, so after applying the patch you couldn't get fully upgraded cars anymore.
The game also introduced paid DLC cars to the series but on PC they were never actually released, even though the cars are in the game files, so you have to use a third party mod to unlock them.
Like all 21 main NFS games Need for Speed ProStreet can be played on a modern PC with Windows 10, although you probably have to set it to run on a single CPU to prevent it from freezing.
I did play ProStreet in tournaments back in 2008 and I actually had my biggest success in this game, winning season 5 of a tournament series called EA Masters, where my prize was a big monitor from Samsung worth about 300 bucks.
The multiplayer races in ProStreet were also quite close very often, since the game had drafting even when collision was turned off (nope, The Crew didn't invent this :P).
After all the ProStreet tournaments were over I abandoned the game very quickly though and hardly played it again ever since, since the handling with gamepad is just awful and I would only use a wheel to be able to compete in tournaments and not when playing for fun.
Another annoying thing in competitive play in this game is that certain wallrides have a random chance to flip your car, which actually once caused a certain player to rage and smash a keyboard in a tournament that I attended.
In this video here I just used one of the premade bonus cars but if you want to see a run with a fully upgraded car you can check out this video by VGSpeedPro, who was one of the world's best players in this game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpOnbmFfRW0 (oh yeah, the position of the hood cam in this game is also quite unusual and I couldn't play like this)
Here a bunch of tournament videos from back in 2008:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIOwHR-9hqI (Texas)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RylaDDOZKZo (Chicago)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSj0_KJN7XE (Autopolis)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwgq7rw4eN0 (Willow)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EW7dCK-H18A (Infineon)
These were the 5 WCG tracks in ProStreet. Willow and Infineon had the wallride flip RNG and Autopolis and Texas had drafting finishes, so you could lose if you entered the final straight in the lead. Overall a lot of nonsense in this game. :P
I will attempt to show you all 21 existing NFS games before the release of Heat, so expect to see a video almost every day from now until the release of Heat and on some days even two. :)