Looking Less Shifty: Need For Speed

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.

Pretty and fast and crunchy and all that, but... the knee-jerk thought is that this is EA having a crack at being more like Codemaster's GRID and/or the Xbox's Project Gotham series. Which is fine, as people actually respect those. Does, though, seem a bit of a shame that it's elected to be rather homogenous (based on this footage at least) - the last four years' or so of NFSs may have been pretty wretched, but at least they were trying to have an identity of their own. Silly cutscenes aren't so bad when they know they're silly - trouble is the NFS ones expected us to take 'em seriously. Nuh-uh. Still, hopefully Shift isn't entirely lost to GRID-emulation.