E-Mail This Article to a Friend 2 fast, 2 furious Need for Speed goes Underground and comes up big BY MITCH KRPATA
	Need for Speed Underground 2 Published by EA Games. Developed by EA Canada. For PlayStation 2, Xbox, Nintendo GameCube, and PC. Rated E for Everyone.

In terms of the gameplay-to-price ratio, it's hard to do much better than EA's Need for Speed Underground 2. This is a massive racing game, offering a sprawling environment with more than 125 miles of road, a half-dozen unique gameplay modes, and an astonishing 70 billion possible customization combinations for your vehicle. I can't even venture a guess as to how many hours it would take to accomplish every goal the game provides. The bells and whistles would mean little if the racing weren't up to par, but NFSU2 couches solid gameplay inside a rich package.

The game is a celebration of the "tuner" lifestyle, which is apparently the word for people who spend upwards of thirty thousand dollars tricking out cars that retail for a third of that amount. You play as a nameless, faceless street racer who arrives in the city of Bayview (imagine a combination of equal parts Los Angeles and San Francisco, with a dash of Vegas thrown in for good measure) looking to gain cash and cred in the underground racing scene. Your chief ally is none other than cable television bombshell Brooke Burke, whose strengths do not lie in voice-over work (hey, at least they didn't cast Carmen Electra). That's about all there is to the storyline, but the many wrinkles of the gameplay are the real draw here.

The game confines you to your car, in which you can tool around Bayview at will, looking for race events, performance shops, and impromptu duels with other tuners. The city is an impressive creation: the difference in architecture from one neighborhood to another feels realistic, and the inclusion of familiar establishments like Best Buy and Burger King adds veracity (though I still chafe at such blatant product placement in games). I'm not sure if the road layout was based on any real cities, but it certainly appears to be the work of a competent city planner. Though you can turn on your GPS to direct you to a specific location – this appears as a giant blue arrow above your car – it's often simple enough to find your destination by following street signs.

NFSU2 offers several race modes. Many take place on city streets, forcing you to contend with traffic. There's the old standby, circuit mode, which consists of several laps around a neighborhood. Sprint races simply go from one place to another, and whoever gets there first wins. A new feature is drag racing, which, while not the most fun way to race, does employ a completely different skill set than the rest of the competitions. There are also races on actual tracks, including Street X (races on small tracks with tight, acute turns) and drift (amass more points than your opponents by stringing together huge power slides). None of these modes feel redundant, and all serve to keep the gameplay fresh no matter how long you've been playing.

Winning races nets you the money necessary to upgrade your car. Several brand-name performance parts are available, allowing you to choose from your favorite company's tires, transmissions, nitrous systems, and more. While I don't believe any particular brand offers an advantage over another in the gameplay, real-life tuners will probably be able to maintain their allegiances within the game. Naturally, improving your wheels will also make it easier to win races, thereby gaining more cash. You can also put your funds towards jazzing up your car's look.

It's amazing how addictive ricing out your car can be. The number of options available is almost overwhelming. NFSU2 offers an endless array of skirts, ground lights, decals, and even some things I've never heard of before ("roof scoops?"). What the game lacks in storyline and characterization, it makes up for by allowing you to personalize your ride to an incredible extent. I'm not a car guy by any means, but even I couldn't resist pimping out my Civic to the point where if I saw it in real life, I would definitely make fun of the guy behind the wheel. Especially when the hydraulics started bumping.

There are rewards for sweetening your car's look. Adding new parts raises your ride's visual rating, which is calculated on a scale of 1 to 10. Each new ranking allows you to get your car on the cover of a magazine or a DVD, both of which pay handsomely.

That leads to the game's most appealing dynamic: it's almost impossible to stop playing, because every small thing you do allows you to do another small thing. If you win one more race, you can afford a better engine. With more power under the hood, you can win another race. When you win that race, you can finally get those tinted windows you've been coveting. And so on. This is a very difficult game to walk away from.

Still, there are a few things keeping the game from greatness. EA was also responsible for this year's stellar Burnout 3, with which NFSU2 shares much in common – to this title's detriment. In Burnout, crashing one's car switched the perspective to a slow-motion, cinematic view of the accident – which was an integral part of gameplay, since you could steer your wreck into the path of oncoming racers. Here, the same thing happens, but serves no end beyond slowing down the race. It's frustrating. Plus, much of the city is garishly lit, making it difficult to distinguish neon signs denoting the direction of the racetrack from those hawking burgers. And I really don't think it was necessary to have to press a button to start the save game process after already confirming that I wanted to save.

Even when Need for Speed Underground 2's flaws come briefly to the fore, the overall experience is a deep and compelling one. Control is tight and the races are frenetic. Most importantly, the plethora of features and customization options ensure that there's plenty here to keep fans of the series – and of the culture – happy for a long time.

Score: 8.0 (out of 10)