'NEED FOR SPEED: MOST WANTED' (2005) KICKS ASS, OKAY?!? [WARNING: POLITICS]
I don't need your permission to like a video game!!! it's GOOD!!!
Somewhere between 2005 and 2007 a disgruntled employee stole a copy of Electronic Art’s Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2005) for the Nintendo Gamecube from an EB Games in Oakville, Ontario. He - for some unknowable reason - handed it to the first person he saw: a young boy named Andrew. Andrew was my best friend at the time, and one fateful summer afternoon, on my way out of his house, I came into possession of what I now call my copy of Need for Speed: Most Wanted.
Such a tale of wanton disregard for the law is fit for Most Wanted. You play as an unnamed street racer, new to the fictional city of Rockport, jumped in hard as the venomous Razor Callahan sabotages you, steals your car, and kicks you to the curb. You’re forced to crawl your way back up from the bottom, climbing your way through the most wanted list until you earn the right to face Razor again.
Now, don’t get it twisted, Most Wanted is not a good game (at least not on the Gamecube). It is a fantastic example of how a bad game can be so, so fun to play.
Its cutscenes are hilarious, green-screen-screaming full-motion video, the enemy AI is dumb as a brick until it’s not, and the soundtrack is a rap-rock symphony that - if it tells you anything - tells you that no, EA was not trying to make a funny game.
Most Wanted is one of only two Gamecube games to use full-motion video, the other being another Need for Speed title. Imagine the amount of blur and light bloom it takes to make a human man and a 2005 Gamecube Ford Mustang look like they belong in the same universe, and then double it. It looks like a comic book car accident, and with the actors doing more hamming than the cops (ba-dum-tss), once you figure out how to poke your head out above irony, the effect is absolutely fucking Shakespearean.
Cop AI has never been good in driving games. This probably stems in part from real-life cops not being that smart, but nevertheless, it is hilarious. The only move a video game police officer seems to know - from Chase H.Q. up through The Simpsons: Hit and Run, Hotline Miami and whatever number GTA we’re on - is: go really fast directly at the player.
What makes Most Wanted special in that regard are the moments where a cocksure maverick in a lightweight police impala hits you head on going 160 and ends up stuck on some invisible part of the level geometry, directly followed by your favourite car getting corralled like a feeding trough. It is the only game that has ever made me say “Really? This absolute fucking dipshit caught me?”
And rap-rock? There is nothing that sounds more like the apartment of your 5th grade best friend whose parents let him watch South Park. Styles of Beyond, Suni Clay, Juvenile: If these names invoke nothing in you, sorry, but you may never be cool.
It’s getting on in years, it’s janky as hell, and to be quite frank, the Gamecube version looks like mud, but in a modern context where police violence against the civilian population is getting more and more acceptable by the minute, it’s the perfect game for getting really high, blowing off some steam, and running into a cop car really, really fast.