the Guru 3D - review

An Electronic Arts game.

System Requirements:

Windows® 95/98

200 MHz CPU

32MB Ram

2MB PCI or AGP gfx card

16-bit Sound Card

4x CD-ROM drive

DirectX 6.1

50MB HD space

Testing Machine:

Windows 98 SE

PII 350 o/c @ 400MHz

128mb RAM

Asus V3800 TNT2 o/c @ 175/200

Diamond MX-300 Sound Card

36x CD-ROM

DirectX 6.x

Nvidia Detonator Drivers Ver. 2.08

Fast! Yup, that just about sums up the game. Even the slow cars are fast. I almost feel like I should be wearing a helmet when I play this. What a ride! When you hit the 4th sequel to a game, no matter how popular the predecessors were, you have to make sure there're enough improvements to keep people coming back. EA have done it. The graphics keep getting better, the scenery prettier, the gameplay faster and the opponents nastier. Personally, I never really got into NFS 1, 2 or 3, but I aim to finish this bugger. If anything, it'll at least improve my reflexes.

That La Nina is fast!

To start off with you get a choice of a few different games. Career (the full game), Single Race and Multiplayer (duh). Career first. You start off with $25000 to spend on a car. This limits you to a BMW Z3 or Merc 230 SLK. I recommend the SLK. It's faster and handles better. You then get a choice of two competitions. One, you race 5 tracks, scoring points for position, and at the end you wins bucks for position. Your other option is to race in the knockout competition. 5 races and the person in last place in each race is eliminated until you end up with two cars dicing it out in the last race for the first prize. You still win bucks for position though i.e. if you lose in the second last race, you come third. You have to complete both competitions in the top 3 to advance to the next tournament.

Wussy little SLK

Your next tournament you have another two competitions as before (the points one and the knockout one) and a new addition. High Stakes. In high stakes you get to race your car against another car and the winner gets their opponents car. You can't use your only car, so you have to race the other competitions first to get enough money to buy another car. Don't worry, the winnings get higher and higher as you go on. I waited til I had enough money for a car one step up from the original two (Corvette) and bought that, then gambled the SLK and won. Was quite easy actually. As you go through and start winning more money, you can buy better and faster cars til you eventually end up with the La Nina or McLaren F1.

Last, but I look good

In single race mode, you can choose everything including race mode, car and track. This is also very cool. You can choose super fast tracks, like Hometown, and blast your way around in an F1. I also found it handy for practising. Going around a track first in an F1 makes it a lot easier when you have to go around later in a SLK. You also get the Hot Pursuit mode, which you can play in 3 different modes. Basically hot pursuit involves racing against an opponent and the cops. Like trying to become most wanted, beating an opponent in a specific time or over specific amount of laps, all whilst avoiding the bastard cops. They do cute things too, like setting up road blocks or laying spikes across the road, bith of which will earn you a ticket if you get caught by them.

Inside the McLaren F1

Multiplayer is very cool as well. You can choose any track and any car. Mostly you would choose the same cars, but if one person is better than another, you can choose a slower car to offset the difference. There were one or two things I didn't like and/or couldn't figure out. One is that there doesn't seem to be an option to race with just the multiplayers. You always end up with other cars in the race as well which sometimes stuffs things up a bit. Another one is that I can't figure out how to play hot Pursuit in multiplayer. EA support is taking bloody ages to get back to me on how, but there must be a way to do it. It would totally rock to be able to play cops vs. cars or dice against eachother against AI cops etc. F1's around Hometown with 6 players kicks a fair amount of ass though!


		85%
		90%
		80%
		75%
		82%

Overall, I'd recommend this to anyone. It's fun, fast and furious and there're enough different cars, tracks and game modes to keep you going for hours. If there's a NFS 5 in the pipeline, I'd be interested to see how they plan on improving it.