As everybody knows it's a damn frustrating game and for some moments I was willing to throw my PC out the window but at some point I actually got the hang of the game. Most importantly I understood something that isn't really explained anywhere in the game itself: the way you make big cash. Once I read in the manual that the money you earn is a combination of how fast you passed the radars (there's three on every map) and a percentage based on your final place the game turned out to be fun. And what surprised me most: once I started focussing on being fast when passing the radars (and saving nitro for these points) the whole races have turned out to be much easier.

Now I'm really enjoying the thing. It's still pretty hard but now at least I get nice rewards. :)

After POD worked amazingly well (game from my childhood that stopped working on newer sytems) I decided to give another racing game on GOG a go, I've been having that feeling lately.

I cannot get any game pads of any sort (and I have a few believe me) to work with this game, and if there is one thing I cannot do is play a driving game with a keyboard, it really hurts my hands after about 15 minutes.

The game doesn't look that impressive anyway so it doesn't look like I am missing much.

This game was one of the most underrated game ever. In a time when internet connection was quite rare, it featured a great multiplayer emphasis with Gameservice in addition to TCP/IP, local network, an amazing cars balance for a time when balance was not even a priority in people's mind.

In addition to that probably the best graphics for a game of 1998, even for today's standard it's not a bad looking game 15 years after, like most 3dfx games.
awesome playability in spite of some shortcomings, and I think this a the very first racing game with tuning ability.

Tuning ability was great and original for every car. IMO this game should have had much greater succes than need for speed 2 (I owned both) maybe it was too much in advance for its time.


P.S: soon after launching, Ubi soft released 3 new cars for free and a skin editor to make modding easy. This tool is still working today on windows seven

Forgot to mention about the damage modelling, completely unknown to the NFS series, and the mirroed/inversed functions to made the so particular circuits with shortcut get a totally new feeling.