Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Shocking, isn’t it? Here’s how this earth-shattering story went down. Imagine your best friends have just told you that they are expecting a child but don’t want the news to spread because they were planning to tell their families in person. Then imagine that your Twitter account immediately shared any information you had learned, thus ruining everything. What I’m trying to say is, Game have just told everyone who was watching: “EA presentation was great. Had mentions of a new Medal of Honour and Need for Speed 13! EA have an exciting year ahead.” Only problem is, the presentation was confidential and the tweet is now gone. I guess if we return to the pregnant couple, their families wouldn’t care all that much in this case because they already have 714 children, following each birth with immediate conception.

You know the worst thing about racing? All that turning. Left, right, left, more left – who needs it? Best not to worry about those finer details and stick to what’s in front of you. This new Speedhunters DLC pack for SHIFT 2 should help with all that bother, adding the ability to go very fast in a straight line. Six tracks covering the Quarter Mile and Standing Mile disciplines, with fourteen new specialised cars, are landing June 30th alongside the Legends DLC, which features five tracks with the more traditional curvy parts and a dozen new cars of its own.

Both have been out for a couple of months in console land but us PC types will be getting them for free, via Origin. The excitable trailer’s eyeing the horizon after the jump.
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Walker lamented a couple of weeks ago that EA were mysteriously promoting Shift, their oh-so-knowingly-named reboot of the horribly tarnished Need For Speed series, by showing almost nothing of the game. In the wake of EA’s press conference at this year’s GamesCom, that’s changed. Now we get to see lots of pretend cars.
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It’s been interesting to watch EA’s ongoing approach with the Need For Speed series over the past few years, and it now seems to be getting rather more complex. The past couple of generations of the series (it’s up to around a dozen games now) had each game delivered with a new “angle”, beyond simply being the next generation in the franchise, with ideas such as career structures, silly plots, realistic damage modeling, or open-world play. The last NFS game I played, Need For Speed Undercover, didn’t really seem to deliver any of these notions convincingly, so it’ll be interesting to see if the two-pronged reboot of Need For Speed: Shift and free racing MMO, Need For Speed: World Online, create something worth paying attention to, and breath new fumes into the series. Continued below…
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Hello you. The demo for the latest Need For Speed game (and I believe that makes it the thirteenth unique Need For Speed game?) is now available, at a data-weight of 795mb. Here it is doing it speedy, waxed-car, wheel-spinning stuff:

It was my intention to pen some demo impressions and discuss whether Need For Speed’s reinvention in the post-GT world has faltered, or continue at its previously commendable pace. Unfortunately, this demo seems to have taken exception to some nuance of my hardware configuration and decided to run at under 10fps, no matter how low I push the settings. So, racing readers – assuming the game works on your PC – is there still a Need For Speed?