LGR - The Need For Speed Special Edition

My grandparents got that very same Acer back in the day! Except it was black / dark blue. Did yours come with a Crayola game?

Cory M

Hey can you review Ignition? It's a 90s racing game I LOVED as a kid, and recently went back and played through the whole thing again and loved it just as much

Hot Pursuit and High Stakes were the ones I played the most. Hell, I still load up high stakes on my PS1 now and then, it has everything!

neuroflare

Although at the time I could not get enough of NFS 3. The speed, the graphics, the soundtrack, the ridiculous French dub. It is still fun in short bursts, and I am so thanful that it was reverse engineered by talented people who cracked it's DRM and fixed the numerous bugs. They are heroes in my eyes.

Maximilien Noal

I think that while recently fixing the French release of nfs2se and NFS 3 so that they run on modern windows perfectly (for a retro gaming website ;-) ), I re-discovered why I didn't play them much. I find them too easy / arcady. Also no friends means single player gets boring after a while. But I had fun fixing them and I have a lot of tips : 1. Try PCem. For beefy PCs it's a no brainer. 2.nfs2se needs some advanced App Compat administrator wizardr... BLACK MAGIC in order to run. I have the corresponding SDB file if you'd like to have it. 3.nfs3 needs to be cracked and patched. A british guy and russian guy did it. Search for NFS 3 fan patch and you should find it. I can share the exact URL.

Maximilien Noal

Definitely agree in terms of certain games holding their appeal on consoles rather than objectively superior PC versions. Something about that kinda look and feel that they had, especially if you first saw it that way.

LGR

The 3DO version is one of my favourite, most fondly remembered games from my teenage years. Sadly I don’t have a 3DO any more so I recently picked up the Saturn version. Not quite the same, and certainly not as impressive visually as the PC version, but I feel a stronger nostalgic connection with it. Oddly, I feel the same about the original Tomb Raider... while the PC version is by far the superior port, there’s something about the console version (particularly on the Saturn) I prefer.

Stuart Marshall

Dude. Dude. The Sam's Club combo box with Moto Racer is exactly how I got NFS3. That's awesome.

LGR

Personally I'm always down to see more good coverage of classic racing games. And thank you!

LGR

Glad you enjoyed it! Although I have no idea who George is :P

LGR

Excellent! DOS only or Windows 9x?

LGR

Me too man, me too. Didn't need a story or a bunch of unlockables, just some sweet tracks and sweet rides

LGR

One of my all-time favorites! Still have my boxed copy to this day and just finished building a PC to play it!

God I miss 90's racers. I used to play all the NFS's as much as I could growing up.

Justin Dotson

I have a vivid memory of the box and nothing else. My friend purchased this and invited us over in anticipation of playing it, only for us to have to change our plans as the game needed to be "installed" and would take too long. This confused me as a kid, as every game I had played up until that point was on console and played directly off the cartridge or CD. Good times. Anyway, thank you George for the content as always! I would love to see your opinions on the rest of the franchise if it's on the table. Then again, you can't go wrong with whatever you do decide to go with. :)

Christopher Foss

Love this video. This game is a bit before my time, and I have only recently played the game on the PlayStation port. Videos like this really make me want to consider making review/overview videos about racing games from my childhood and beyond... Keep up the good work! 😁

Dan Milner

We must be a similar age, because I purchased this game under pretty much the same circumstances. Though, NFS 3 was my favorite-- I snagged it at Sam's Club in a two-pack with Moto Racer. I was blown away by the concept of downloading new cars from modding websites, particularly a purple GTO.

Daniel Harder

Ain't that the truth. Any kind of media playback on a computer felt like pure sorcery, I kinda miss that.

LGR

That was a legit concern for me with the PC games I wanted, never knew when they'd just stop distributing copies and my chance to get it would be gone!

LGR

On the contrary I was psyched about Viper Racing and played it a ton. Great game, did a lot of innovative stuff.

LGR

Are you commenting on the right post? Heh, because this game definitely never came on floppy disks or had a code wheel. Unless maybe you're thinking of Test Drive, which is another series entirely :)

LGR

In a similar vein I bought Pokémon Snap for the N64 about six months before I had an N64, 'cause I knew I was gonna get one and didn't want to miss out on that game. ;)

Kris Asick

Yep it was one of my favorites for a time!

LGR

Certainly won't as it quite an exciting thing that was touted by EA every chance they got! I had a program back then to pick apart the sound archives and see how it worked. The raw files sound like a jumbled remix, haha

LGR

I love Jeff van Dyke's work on the Total War: Series. I had no idea he worked on this! You're always full of cool bits of info.

When you get to Need for Speed 2 and NFS 3: Hot Pursuit, don't forget to cover the interactive music by Rom Di Prisco! Interactive music was one of the fads of the 90s that the industry didn't really revisit outside of cartridge-based games like the DS for a while. (Interactive music? Yes! The music adapted to the situation of the race as well as the portion of the track you're on.)

Jim Leonard

I have a confession. My friend bought the original for his Tandy and it came with both 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 disks. I had a Tandy 1000 HX and so he gave me the 3.5 but I couldn’t play it without the decoder wheel. I called the company and told them I never got the wheel in the box and they sent me one. I told that story at the dinner table when I was fourteen and it caused a fight with my step dad. Lots of drama. He wasn’t happy about what I did. He got over it and I enjoyed the game.

Ryan Yoder

Need for Speed Porsche Unleashed was probably my fav from the early series. I played that game to death. Ended up giving it away to a mate who loved it too.

Bryndal Dwyre

I will never forget the first time I got to play the DOS demo of this back in the day, that Viper video blew my mind!!! When we could get it to run that is :D Great times!

Mat Cooper

Speaking of racing games, do you know of Dethkarz?

I find it adorable you bought the game as a kid and were anxiously awaiting all that time for your family to buy the PC needed to play it. Those car music videos are ridiculously 90s... my god. The cutscenes are pretty 90s too though... gotta have that FMV. Also, it seems like pretending to beat up on people you didn't like via video game is a pretty common thing, especially when you're a kid. My friends and I definitely had our real-life enemy targets represented in the games we played, haha :)

Lindsay Michelle

If you had a love for cars, particularly the Viper, then you were probably as disappointed as I was when Viper Racing came out on PC. LOVE NFSSE though!!!

Andrew Buffenmyer

I remember playing a large chunk of the demo to the original release over SE (which, if memory serves was the Viper around one of the circuits). When I did get a chance to play it properly - I really enjoyed those point-to-point races far more as well. I guess when one's behind the wheel of a fancy sports car… you kinda want to take to the road for a long drive, none of this close circuit nonsense ;) (I think I always lamented that they got rid of 'em for later instalments, because I think it's a more fun way to race sometimes. Or maybe that's because there's so many point-to-point racers I have fond memories of… *sniff*)

Rob Caporetto

My first entry was NFS2SE with my Voodoo2 card. Then my favourite NFS3 Hot Pursuit <3 Best gaming experience of the late 90s/early 2000. Gotta love that late 90s design of the menu items, where everybody had to emboss EVERYTHING just because you could in Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro! :D I did it too with my webpages at the time using MS Frontpage! ^_^ Need For Speed soundtracks were always great, I got them all and play them all the time, great for running.. or just driving! :D

Anders Enger Jensen

I remember seeing this game for the first time on my friend's Panasonic 3DO back in '95. Looked very impressive on his 32 inch Sony CRT TV.

I never played this game. But I chuckled about how you loved seeing the multimedia clips. I did too on several games during that time because it was so cool to see any sort of animated multimedia on my computer. Of course, looking back, it seems kind of ridiculous being how terrible it looked and really it wasn't the content that was so exciting as it was just marveling that it could be done at all. And now we take it for granted every day.

The 8-Bit Guy

I haven't watched yet, but it can only be pure greatness. This is one of the few PC games that I did play over and over and over. I used to be able to do a 360 degree spin with the Corvette on one of the tracks... Also, I had an epic crash video saved where I hit a corner just right with the Viper. The entire crash sequence lasted at least 20 seconds. Epic game.

Oh my! Yes, please do more videos of the NFS games. I've watched the earlier ones you did in '11 and it would be great to get an update on this topic. :) And as always, thank you very much for creating!

Mark Tbom

Only Need for Speed game we really played was Porsche Unleashed, with a Microsoft Steering Wheel set up, I am not a big racing game fan, but we had fun with it.

Douglas Holmes

It sure is. Wild to me how that's 20 years old now, ARGH

LGR

I'm referring to NFS2 and 2SE, which in my opinion are pretty huge departures for what TNFS started. Hot Pursuit was a glorious return to form.

LGR

Thanks a bunch!

LGR

NFS2SE got rid of the dashboards in 3D accelerated mode, but still had them in the normal version and 2D mode :) Haha, and yeah those fold out feet are hilarious to me, they actually make it less stable

LGR

I've been celebrating the 20th anniversary of Need For Speed 3 this year by playing through the tournament mode again. That game is still awesome to this day.

Alyxx the Rat

Hope you enjoyed it, man! It's a true classic indeed

LGR

Great video... BUT, saying this is the MAC compared to the next "couple" of NFS games... Wow. Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit is probably the most fun racing game ever made, right there with the 2010 NFS HP remake and Forza Horizon 3 with the Hot Wheels pack. I look forward to your next videos in this series.

Chris Munch

Really cool video! I honestly was waiting for you to cover this with improved video quality and such, and you did not disappoint. Keep up the good work!

I did not have this game but I remember playing it on my friends computer and being amazed at the incredible graphics and speed ( "The dashboard is photo realistic!") I did have the demo for NFS2 though, but I think they might have taken the dashboards out, which really bummed me out. Anyway, great video and I loved those fold out feet on your Acer, I had something similar on my Pentium 3 I think.

Aleksander

I could not click PLAY fast enough. LOVE this PC game!!

Metal Jesus Rocks

Yeah this game got quite a number of localizations with cool narration to along with it! Glad you enjoyed the look back :)

LGR

Crazy how hard they can be to find nowadays. So many of those Acer desktops were just trashed!

LGR

I kind of remember a cheat to make the car extra heavy so that any collision sent the computer controlled cars airborne. I remember laughing my ass off with my brother back then. Fond memories!

I remember the day when my older brother came home with that original NFS game on CD-ROM. It was the very first retail CD-ROM game we had at home in a time when floppy disks were the main source for games. I was blown by the graphics and the soundtrack and of course by the high quality footage of every car and track along with that narrator that was well known from German TV (yes, quality localization was a thing back then). It was a great time with much fun! Thank you for covering this masterpiece once again. btw: It took until NFS II SE before we played the first 1on1 match over LAN. The NFS Series was always a great bunch of games for playing together.

That Acer though! :o - Our first computer was an Acer with the 75MHz Pentium, man those were the days.

ReeseRiverson

omg the memoriessssss!

Mukul Kewalramani

I loved the NASCAR games for that reason. Especially loved Heat around that time.

LGR

I love hearing you talk about your favorite childhood games. It reminds me of my childhood playing games with my brother. We were just like you, we spent more time in NASCAR 2000 trying to crash into one another than we did actually racing :)

Zachary Outen

Haha, yeah Chrysler really dove into the parts bin with all sorts of components, it's pretty great how barebones the RT/10 comes across. I recommend this video as a fun look (he mentions the key I believe:) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhcV0UxOzdU" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhcV0UxOzdU</a>

LGR

That's awesome. Always wanted to go into auto journalism as a kid, I bought seriously every magazine I could find

LGR

Happy to have brought some back

LGR

You bet! It still looks pretty great in my lopsided nostalgic mind

LGR

Conversely, I was never into Ultima or the Quest games as a kid :) Hope you enjoyed this take from an opposite upbringing!

LGR

I love that the key in the Viper is the same kind we had in our '87 Caravan growing up &lt;3

Peter Metzger

Porsche Unleashed (the title of the US release) is my favorite of the entire franchise. I played the factory driver mode to death.

Oh, dude! I watched your NFS single video not long ago, and was monumentally bummed that you didn't much like my favorite one (Porsche Unlimited). I loved the career modes in that, I loved buying and selling cars. I can't wait to see all of the series done like this, even if we don't see eye to eye on them.

This game was instrumental in fueling my desire to become an automotive journalist, a dream I was ultimately able to achieve.

It has been so long since I have thought about this! So many memories :)

Tim Nikolajsen

I remember having that game and I played it a lot. What a marvel, unbelievable graphics! :) Thanks for the nostalgia trip.

Thomas Fuchs

Oooh. I never got into these kinds of games as a kid, I was more into like Ultima and King's Quest back then. But it's still fun to watch!

Robert Butler