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⬅️ Previous capture (2024-02-05)
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And now for a game that my hardware can handle...
An older entry in the NFS franchise, released in the year 2000. Belongs firmly in the "classic era" of the franchise, featuring sports cars on picturesque European roads, ranging from the rainy Autobahn to the snowy Alps. The game is partly an advertisement for the newer (at the time) Porsche car models, and partly a historical piece featuring older models.
Actually, yes, the game is surprisingly deep! I loved the historical aspect of the career mode: starting the game in the 50s (skipping past Porsche's roots in Nazi Germany, but I will ignore that...), buying cars of that era, then purchasing newer and faster car models as time progresses, while maintaining your older now-retro cars and eventually turning a massive profit by selling them at auctions. I've played a few single-car-manufacturer-advertisement games and none of them were nearly as interesting as Porsche Unleashed.
The tracks are fun and environments are varied, that is one thing that was missing in some of the later open-world games which were confined to a single city. The car list is, well, limited, but makes up for it in great level of detail, even going as far as being able to repair your '87 944 S Coupe by swapping some of its parts with your older base model '82 944. The handling is... challenging, I will say that the rear-engine layout is pure evil and makes the car over-steer and go out of control easily, so having all-wheel drive in the later Porsche models feels like a god send. Anyway, the game was actually pretty enjoyable, another *8 out of 10* for me. The game feels more like a labor of life than an actual advertisement.
I used Verok's patch as was recommended by PCGamingWiki, though other unofficial patches are also available. The game (with the modern patch) had zero issues when running on Linux using Wine, you can read my WineHQ App Database entry for more info.
NFS: Porsche Unleashed on PCGamingWiki
Game finished 2023-09-29 - 27h
gardenapple - 2024-01-07