Everyone's familiar with, or at least heard of the Need For Speed series. High quality arcade-style racing games since 1995. They pretty much started the police chase aspect of racing games and NFS III capitalized on it. The series hit its peak with 2002's Hot Pursuit 2, one of the best non-simulation racing games, if not the best. But then The Fast and the Furious(the movie) happened. And all of a sudden, you could just see the dollar signs popping up in everyone's eyes.

The next Need For Speed game was Need For Speed: Underground, and they might as well have dropped the NFS name. Gone were the exotic sports cars I'd never see in the real world, replaced with Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas. Gone are the beautiful mountainsides and Greek sunsets, replaced with narrow city streets and no long stretches to completely floor your car(But when you're driving a Dodge Neon, it's not like it'll get that fast anyway). And honestly, trying to give a racing game a story? It works in other genres...no one plays RPGs because they love a million and one menus and cutscenes, they play for the stories. But people play racing games because they want to take a car and drive. I don't care about the underground gang that runs the streets, and the ragtag group that just needs someone to come in and lead them to respectability. And why was this all added in? The cashcow of course. The people behind the movie neglected to plan ahead and make a videogame, so every other game company stepped up to the plate with their own offering.

In basically every genre of gaming, there's always been variety. No matter what your preference, you were never really limited to the exact same experience over and over. If you liked shooters, you had the war games(Medal of Honor), humorous shooters(Timesplitters), and the ones with depth, aka staying power(Half Life). Racing games were no different. Extreme simulation fanatics had Gran Turismo, gamers that question the purpose of a brake button had the Burnout series, import fans had Midnight Club, and the casual crowd in between had the Need for Speed games. But instead of building on the amazing Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, EA completely abandoned that game and jumped into the tuner business...aka, where the money was. So the next time you're driving around Tokyo in your Nissan, do a few donuts in honor of the Hot Pursuit games.