Since its debut in 1994, the Need for Speed Series has evolved immensely.  Every year the developers face the never-ending challenge of creating a title bigger and better than the previous.  The latest, Need for Speed Carbon, was not only faced with the challenge of topping Most Wanted, but it also had to draw in consumers as the first NFS title on all next-generation systems.

Story

After a street race gone bad, you were the one driver who was able to escape arrest.  After lying low for 10 years, you return to the city where everything went wrong only to find there is a bounty on your head and all other racers have zero respect for you.  Darius gives you a chance to regain respect and get back into the grove of the city, giving you a car, connecting you with a driver, and sending you to a place to lie low.  You start your own street gang and earn back the respect of those who shun you as you take over the city district by district, slowly uncovering what went so wrong on that fateful day.

Graphics and Design

Unfortunately for PS3 gamers, many first generation games do not utilize the full potential of Blu-ray Discs and NFS Carbon is no exception.  The game supports 720p as opposed to the systems 1080p.  While it’s obvious that the developers put a lot of emphasis on the environments, playing other PS3 games makes it obvious that they didn’t make the most of the PS3’s potential of creating the clearest and most detailed environments.  Overall, the environments were great; however, the vehicles do not look like a very big step up from the PS2.  The cars still lack an element of realism, looking more like how we want our cars to look, not how they actually look.  While that may be what the developers were shooting for, I’m looking more for realism.

The biggest disappointment of the graphics was the drastic differences between videos.  It was far too obvious which videos the developers spent the most time on.  Some of the game’s videos were so fantastic it is almost hard to believe that the characters aren’t real.  Twenty minutes and four races later, the game will cut to a video that looks like it was created for the PS2, boxy faces hidden behind pixilated and poorly layered hair.  The shifts in the video kill the game’s realism and give the feeling that the developers just got lazy.