A week with Need For Speed: SHIFT (PC Review)

EA’s Need For Speed has been “reinventing” itself since NFS: Underground. Cashing in on the ricer/tuner craze laid down by The Fast and The Furious franchise, NFS drastically changed the theme and setting of the series. First was the obvious and controversial change of car line-up. Then came the ‘open’ world of Underground (something I really welcomed, I’ve always like the scenery of NFS and would like to get a more relaxed eyeful of it. And before all this Microsoft’s Midtown Madness was one my fave racing games.) When Most Wanted came along I was very excited because it came with a refreshing change of feel – a less ricer-centered line-up and the beloved return of the Police Hot Pursuit force. Then it was Carbon and it brought little new. ProStreet had very nice environments but was stuck in between the realm of arcade and simulation, with bad results. EA went back to the Most Wanted formula with Undercover but it was already apparent that they were running out of ideas.

Now EA is diversifying the franchise instead of doing a one-fits-all approach. With World Online doing the MMO thing and NFS: Nitro going for the informal, Mario Kart audience, Need For Speed: Shift finishes what ProStreet has started and ups the ante.

You start with your ‘team’ evaluating you so you can be given a recommendation of difficulty and realism level. You then race a borrowed E96 M3 and win a corresponding amount of money from your finishing position. You start out your actual career with a basic ‘Tier 1’ car (there are 4 car tiers). You race in different events like drift and time trials to earn stars and money, which are indicative of the race results. More stars gets you into higher tier events. As you race you also earn points based on either your level of precision or aggression. Doing clean laps and overtakes and following the visual race line (a la Forza 2) earns you precision points while bumping and taking out opponents will earn you aggression points. These points accumulate to race your driver level. Higher driver levels can mean sponsorship money or new paint and vinyl unlocks.

Shift is developed by Slightly Mad Studios, the same brilliant minds behind the GTR franchise. I’ve a copy of GTR2 and its a very well thought out simulator - hardcore and realistic. As I’ve started to play Shift, it’s apparent the the basic core of the game operates much like GTR, including the rather challenging keyboard controls (I gave away my bloody wheel.) As this is a simulator, one just cannot have a binary “on” or “off” approach to control, everything is very logarithmic in feel and response. If one is getting this game, a wheel is a good investment.

As for the driving dynamics, it is very spot on when the realism is turned all the way up. If one wants less of a handful of an experience, Shift includes driver aids that were transplanted from GTR. I’ve played Gran Turismo (2, 4 and 5: Prologue) on PlayStations and emulators and Shift can hold a candle to them. My only gripe with the drivers aids is the traction control: it seems that turning it on increases the adhesiveness of the tires and track and doesn’t to what TCs actually do: reduce engine speed or apply selective braking.

If one is to compare Shift with the big games like Forza and Gran Turismo, its biggest weakness would be its rather miserly and confused car collection. If NFS is going to have a limited selection of cars, the NFS team should’ve made sure it was a though-out compromise. Some of the “new” cars date back from Hot Pursuit 2 and the Underground series. Some of the models aren’t even of the highest specification and some of the models aren’t even in the right tiers. Here’s a bullet-point list trivial* grievances:

• The BMW 135i coupe isn’t in M-Sport trim (a great car anyways, a nice little sleeper that tricks and shames bigger cars in real life)
• The new VW Scirocco is on the game but not the current Mk6 Golf GTI (were stuck with the mumsy-looking, MW-era Mk5)
• Why the Audi TT 3.2 and not the epic TT RS?
• Same goes for the Corvette. Even Gran Turismo: PSP has the almighty ZR1!
• If NFS used the Focus RS and the Megane R22 instead of the Focus ST and Megane RS, I would’ve had the chance to do a Top Gear face-off between them :(
• The Murcielago is on its last legs. NFS should celebrate having Lamborghini with the SuperVeloce… would’ve surely kicked the “Tier 4” Reventon’s stealth ass.
• The Dodge Challenger is the oldest of the new wave of retro-tastic American muscle cars (both the Camaro SS and the Mustang GT500 are featured), yet Shift only has the concept version.
• The Nordschleife features an advert about the new Audi R8 V10. Shift only has the RS4-engined R8 V8.
• Again, the Nordschleife has a prominent Opel Performance Center (OPC) Race Camp board beside the start/finish line... and no Blitzes to drive! I love that Shift has the Escort Cosworth, why not the Lotus-Opel Omega or the new Insignia OPC?
• The Nissan GT-R and the GT-R V-Spec are both in Tier 3 and the Lexus LF-A (Concept) is in the higher Tier 4. The V-Spec would’ve done much better than the LF-A in Tier 4.
• The torque-y V8 noise is world-beatin’ epic but why the older Mercedes SL65?
• The Koenigsegg CCX is a hard beast to handle. Why not learn from Top Gear’s lesson and used the one with the greatly helpful rear spoiler+handling package? If not why not use the even more beastly CCXR?
• If Shift can readily do left-hand drive models like the GT-R and the Aston N400, why won’t they dump the USDM Civic Si in favor of the more hardcore JDM Type R? Or make the consumer choose and pit the Japanese, American and European Civics against each other? :D

*Yes, I’m definitely nitpicking. I’ve been spoiled by Polyphony and Turn 10. Here’s the official car list of Shift.

Aside from ProStreet, Shift is also similar to Porsche Unleashed (best Need for Speed, ever.) Along with Forza 3 and Gran Turismo 5, Shift brings back the in-car view. I’m very pleased with how Slightly Mad Studios have transitioned their GTR technology onto Shift and increased the level of attention to detail. One can see fully functioning odometers, the G-Meter of the GT-R, the oil pressure gauge of the 370Z and the wood-topped gear lever of the Carrera GT. It even gets better as there is a virtual driver that simulates the rigors of full-throttle driving. Your periphery diffuses into a blur as you ‘focus’ on the ever increasing speeds. You can see him (or her?) slam on the accelerator and react to the collisions and extreme forces of longitudinal and lateral gravity as you accelerate and decelerate. Your virtual vision blurs and even turns into black-and-white when you careen of to a tire wall.

I have some reserves about the collisions though. As Shift doesn’t adopt a full-on impact physics systems the cars can’t completely disintegrate (you can turn on ‘actual’ damage though. Impacts will reduce your cars performance for the rest of the race until you total it.) Despite the spectacular graphics of Shift, the suspension of disbelief ends when you see the a clump of cars crashing about. It’s very uncanny. Aside from that, the 2 other problems I have about the animation are the gear changes: the paddles and the gears shift a moment before the hands actually actuate them; the other niggling oversight is that the extraneous elements of some of the cars don’t work.**

** Like the retractable rear spoilers/brakes of the SLR, Veyron and TT.

One element of the game that I can’t put a flaw into is the audio. By default (except for drift sessions) the in-game music is disabled. As Shift focuses on driving, the audio grabs your ears with an aural assault of whirring superchargers, whining turbochargers and the extremely satisfying blip when downshifting, among many things. The audio is so good that engine noise is a factor I take into account when buying a new virtual car!

It’s two biggest downfalls unknowingly affect each other and, in my opinion, nearly destroys the “driving experience” of Shift. Because Shift allows aggressive driving and rewards it, the otherwise unremarkable A.I. can be overly aggressive too. The A.I. doesn’t form a robotic line like it does in the previous installments of Gran Turismo, but they don’t drive defensively too. They will plow right through you and they won’t respect your racing line. This makes the rather packed starting sequence in a race very frustrating. Even as you try to go with the flow, A.I. opponents will shunt you off the track, even in parts of the track where the road is perfectly straight and can sufficiently wide to accommodate two cars! In some tracks, especially the ones with limited width and variable speed corners like the Nordschliefe, London and Laguna Seca, I am forced to restart the race multiple times. It’s fine when it happens once, or even twice (hey, I watch Formula One and NASCAR), but with Shift having aggressive driving as a core of its gameplay, it’s really frustrating.

All in all, I recommend Need For Speed: Shift for the PC racers out there as Shift strikes a good balance between realism and accessibility***. It’s a bit more casual and a lot more multiplayer-friendly than games like GTR or TOCA and there’s a lot more “car” going on than games like Burnout or Blur. EA should definitely keep this up and commend Slightly Mad Studios for their work. EA should stop constantly changing their strategy and stick with this formula. All Shift needs right now is a lot more polish and a lot more cars.

***Maybe a bit too “accessible”: the Endurance races are too short, there are no Race Weekends and the there’s no Formula D type multi-car drifts.

Pros:

• Near photo-realistic graphics at reasonable system requirements. (See my specs here and here.)
• Excellent cockpit view adds to the immersion.
• Unparalleled audio effects.
• Need For Speed goes back to its core. None of the cheesy story line.
• Veritably accurate driving physics that can be turned down with helpful assists.

Cons:

• Hair-pullingly, aggravating, demolition derby A.I.
• Limited car and track selection.
• Limited options regarding race types.
• Flawed “tier” system. I would’ve preferred power-to-weight ratio quotas like GT’s horsepower limits.
• Promotion of bad driving in a supposedly track-oriented game.

Overall:

3.5/5

If only Forza or GT had PC versions. Nonetheless, Shift deserves a sequel.

October 18, 2009

Just chiming in to say that I’ve finally bought a new GPU for our desktop. In the Gilmore branch of PC Express the clearance-bin 6600GT was unavailable and so was the HD3650. All they had aside from some poor 64-bit offerings were GPUs in the upper 4 thousand peso range (9700GT and HD4730) which obviously was way out of my price range. I went to PC-Gilmore and settled for a 512MB 128-bit 9400GT, which sold for 50 less than the unavailable HD3650.

Here’s a comparison (stats retrieved from Wikipedia):

Inno3d 9400 GT:

• 128-bit bus width
• 512MB GDDR2 Memory
• 12.8GB/s Memory Bandwidth
• 2.2 Gigapixel and 4.4 Gigatexel Fillrate
• 50 Watt TDP
• DirectX 10 Support
• 67.2 GigaFLOPS

Compared to the HD3650, the 9400GT has inferior fillrate, bandwidth and Floating Point performance but superior thermodynamic properties. It’s really unfortunate that I couldn’t procure one.

Compared to the 6600GT, the 9400GT has slightly superior fillrate and slightly inferior bandwidth. The 9’er of course has much more advanced technology from NVIDIA like DX10, 3D Vision, CUDA and better AA and AF. With a lot of new games pegging their minimum to the 7600, getting the 6600 may not be a very good idea.

In retrospect, the 9400 GT is leaps and bounds over my old ATI X1550 and NVIDIA 7200GS. Full HD playback is flawless and gaming performance has greatly improved. I could now play Medieval II: Total War with near 100% graphics at 1366x768 without AA. THQ’s Company of Heroes can be played near 90% without AA.

I’m pretty bored with Strategy games right now so I’m going to try getting Need For Speed: Shift tomorrow to try out the 9’er with current-gen graphics. I’ll also try to reinstall Call of Duty 4 to compare it with the 7200, which achieved 15-20fps on low graphics at low resolutions.

October 10, 2009

I’ve got 2 machines running on 7 already. I think my primary motivation was to use the HomeGroup (haha, Windows Live Writer doesn’t have HG on its dictionary.) feature. So far, I’ve tried out file and Windows Media Library sharing and it looks like its working as advertised. I’ll have to test Printer Sharing sooner or later.

My second machine’s (or my sibs’ primary PC, to be accurate) specs:

• ECS 945-PT Motherboard.
• 3.0GHz Dual-Core Pentium D 830. SpeedStep and NX Bit disabled. The forums at Tom’s Hardware equate it to a 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo, which is pretty sad considering it generates a lot of noise and heat. (And it’s only 1 point higher than my Celeron in the Windows Experience Index)
• 2GB of RAM – 1GB of cheapie DDR2-667 and 1GB of Kingston DDR2-800.
• 256MB NVIDIA 7200GS PCI-E with TurboCache (not my fault, dad bought it at a surplus store.) It’s not even a full point better than my Intel GMA950 in WEI (not that WEI is the best quantifier for these things), and Wikipedia says that the fillrate is worse compared to even our old DX8 Radeon 9250 AGP.
• 80GB of Storage. A 40GB Maxtor SATA and a 40GB Samsung SATA with bad sectors.
• Yeah, it’s a disaster.

I still don’t know if 7 is going to serve the 2nd machine better than XP had. I chose 7 because of the HomeGroup, DX11, better hardware detection and (presumably) better multi-core utilization. Right now, it doesn’t feel different, performance-wise to XP SP3. While the previous XP install bloated up pretty fast, ~6 months to be specific, I hope that 7 can do better.

The real problem at the moment is the GPU. Not only is the 7200 inadequate for even mid-end gaming (The Sims 3, Call of Duty 4, Medieval 2: Total War), it seems that its broken already. It works and it displays the desktop properly, but even with slight provocation from Windows Media Center, it seizes up and brings the whole machine down. This may be due to me trying to overclock it with RivaTuner in its XP days, but there’s not much evidence supporting that because it never seized up when it was OC’ed.

Window-shopping sucks.

I got a PCExpress price list from their Katipunan branch. Here are my candidates for the GPU replacement. With minimal research I picked out 5 at different price points (the last 2 in the clearance section.)

• Inno3d GeForce 9600 GSO with 512MB of DDR3, 256-bit @ Php3890.
• PowerColor Radeon HD4650 with 1GB of DDR2, 128-bit @ Php3190
• PowerColor Radeon HD3650 with 512MB of DDR2, 128-bit @ Php2000
• PowerColor Radeon X1550 with 256MB of DDR2, 64-bit @ Php810 (clearance)
• Gainward GeForce 6600 GT with 256MB of DDR2, 128-bit @ Php540 (clearance)

Unless a financial miracle happens I doubt I’ll be able to acquire the Top 2. I’ve never spent more than 2300 on a GPU :(

If it’s just a quick, cheap fix, I’m looking at the 6600. It’s not an exactly spectacular GPU, especially since it came from an era when Radeons from all points of the spectrum kicked the equivalently-priced GeForce rival. But at 540 Pesos, it’s almost painless spending for it. (Even ATI’s new owner AMD kicked Pentium 4 butt during those days. Even today, I consider AMD/ATI to be the leader in the low to mid-end sector, bang-for-buck-wise. Dad just keeps on buying Intel/NVIDIA without any research.)

At Php2000 the HD3650 is a good deal. Considering that at the HD3650’s price point, you only get a 7600 GS or 9400 GT GeForce. The 9’er is slower in throughput and the 7'er runs on old architecture. The only problem I can think of about the HD3650 is that its TDP of 78W looks pretty high compared to the generational equivalent HD4650’s 48 watts.

Spam Sizzlers

Just in case I lose it (and Spam.com doesn’t seem to have the recipe themselves). Family loves it.

(Spam® is a registered name. This recipe was acquired from the tin.)

• A tin of Spam, sliced. (I slice them thinly then slice them even more into smaller quadrants.)
• 1 small onion, slice into rings (I use a medium-sized green onion instead. Bigger and less pungent than the typical Philippine fare.)
• 2 tablespoons oil (I used vegetable and canola.)
• ½ cup vinegar [I use native (from Biliran province) all-natural cane vinegar. Unfortunately, you can’t get these from the wet market nor the grocery.]
• ½ cup water
• 2 tablespoons soy sauce (Common very dark Philippine variants or the more expensive, sweet Chinese ones work equally well, depending on preference.)
• 1 tablespoon ginger, minced
• 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tablespoon cornstarch
• 1/3 cup sugar (I normally use white sugar, but I’ve used organic brown too. No difference, the object of the sugar is to simply add the sweet part of the sweet-and-sour spiel.)
• 1 jalapeno pepper, minced (I don’t have access to these. Mild hot sauce works.)
• 1 teaspoon green onions, chopped (I guess the onion mentioned above is enough.)

Be careful with the amount of ingredients. Even the standard amounts written above can overpower the meat’s taste.

Sauté Spam and onions in oil until Spam achieves preferred doneness (let’s not forget that Spam is cooked already.) Put the Spam and onion with the rest of the ingredients in a saucepan. Cook until sauce becomes thick (more cornstarch, more viscosity.)

Mom tells me: Never stir a mixture with vinegar on it unless explicitly indicated.

5’s the new 23.

Why my Leopard partition won’t boot: Apparently, it needs to be installed on a primary partition, i.e. on the first 4 partitions.

I installed it on the fifth partition. [sda5 in Mac/Linux, (hd0,4) in GRUB parlance]

*facepalm*

Last Saturday, 4PM-ish, during the power outage due to the typhoon Ondoy, my sister and I were killing time with playing cards. She started making a house of cards, and it fell every time she put a 5 card on it. We ended up making stupid premonitions of our demise on 5:55 PM (‘pm’ having 5 strokes in some versions of Latin cursive).

And speaking of cursive, I’ve relearned how to do Russian cursive and learned a variant of Serbian cursive.

Addendum: Regarding my first post and the typhoon, I'm not really Albanian. 'Tungjatjeta' just sounds cool (ha!)

And our home PC's Samsung SATA drive is failing. I'm thinking of pitching the 320GB Western Digital to dad. Just Php2150 and only Php300 more than the 160GB model.

Didn’t go perfectly.

I’ve done what I’ve written on the previous post with mixed success. Here’s what I did:

1. Inserted OSx86 Install Disc (10.5.6).
2. Disk Utility: 7 Partitions
1. Windows 7 x64 (15GB, FAT)
2. Linux Mint + Swap, since Disk Utility won’t do partitions smaller than 1GB (7.5GB, FAT)
3. openSUSE (7GB, FAT)
4. Damn Small Linux (1GB, FAT)
5. Haiku OS (2GB, FAT)
6. Storage Partition (20GB, FAT)
7. Macintosh HD [20GB, Mac OS Extended (Journaled)]
3. Added non-vanilla patches:
1. Drivers for my laptop
2. Darwin 9.2.0 netkas sleep kernel
3. Dual Boot Time Sync
4. NTFS-3G and MacFUSE (Essential for any Mac with Windows partitions)
5. OSx86 Utilities
6. Chameleon bootloader
4. Install took 40 minutes on my noisy, transplanted Combo Drive from 2001 (probably just a 4x on the DVD-ROM side)
5. Won’t boot (boot1 error?). Maybe GRUB will fix it?
6. Windows 7’s turn. Just asked me to reformat the 15GB partition to a NTFS one. Didn’t need the 100MB that my previous 32-bit install asked for.
7. Hard drive action totaled 45 minutes. Restarted 3 times (scanned the system on one of the passes). The good part of it all was that it didn’t need much interaction from the user.
8. Damn Small Linux, then. DSL can’t see the hard drive. Ugh, I really need to read into the workings of the MBR.
9. openSUSE – first time installing it. Color scheme and overall feel better than Linux Mint/Ubuntu IMO, but nothing special. Had to do a manual partition configuration ‘cause the auto’un put /home in the partition meant for ‘Mint. Install proper took 14 minutes. It did a 3 minute-long configure after the reboot, and it didn’t even see my WiFi!
10. Haiku’s next. You can choose to use it as a LiveCD or to directly proceed to install. Partitioned 2GB FAT as BeFS. Installation is reminiscent of the Classic Mac OS install process(Except that old Mac OS can’t handle partitioning. EDIT: It can but not during installation. The live-floppies/CDs came with Disk Utilities). Very simple. Even if the .iso only took half of the space of the CD, installation took as long as openSUSE. Doesn’t come with a bootloader. That’s what Mint is for.
11. Insert ‘Mint CD, bypass LiveCD and go straight to the install. Standard Ubuntu fare. Manual partitioning: divided partition into two – ext4 for / and a 500mb linux-swap. Linux Mint achieved the best time: 13 minutes.
12. Boot into ‘Mint. Whip up Terminal.
13. $ sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
14. Add line (Mint sees Windows 7 easily enough):
• title     Haiku
• rootnoverify     (hd0,8)
• chainloader     +1
•  
• title     openSUSE 11.1 KDE
• root    (hd0,6)
• kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.27.7-9-default
• root=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-Hitachi_HTS541680J9SA00_SB2204SGCSVVSE-part7
• resume=/dev/disk/by-id/ata-Hitachi_HTS541680J9SA00_SB2204SGCSVVSE-part2
• splash=silent
• vga=0x317
• initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.27.7-9-default
•  
• title     Mac OS X Leopard
• rootnoverify     (hd0,4)
• chainloader     +1
15. Everything boots, except OS X.