Need for Speed – Most Wanted

Need for Speed – Most Wanted is a single-player car-racing game. The car-racing in this game, however, is street racing rather than formal track racing. In Need for Speed – Most Wanted, the overall objective of the game is to race as many times as possible and defeat certain racers in order to climb up the hierarchy of racers and become the number 1 racer in the game. The entire game is played solely with cars – there are no human figures in the game. All choices are made when the user drives the car to certain predetermined areas and presses a key to activate a certain response from the game. Owing to the fact that it is a car-racing game, the controls are fairly simple: the player uses the arrow keys to move the car in the directions of the arrow keys and uses the spacebar to handbrake.

This game does well to incorporate real-world aspects into the gameplay and offers an overall feeling of real racing. Despite the fact that the player is well aware that things that are possible in the game are in no way possible in real life, the player at the same time doesn’t feel too disconnected from reality. This is because, the game space was designed to look like a real city, with buildings, roads, street signs, real cars in production, etc. The striking difference is seen in the kinds of interactions that the player has with the elements in the game. The game is designed to encourage reckless driving in the sense that the player needs to drive at a very high speed and in a very dangerous manner (swerving oncoming vehicles, making sharp turns, crashing into other racers) in order to win races. Also, when a player crashes into a building or any immobile object, the game just restarts from where the crash happened and everything is restored whereas in reality, such crashes may have fatal consequences. Also, time is the game is sped up. In the sense that there is regular day and night, but the intervals they last for is drastically shortened. Day and night each last for approximately 30 minutes. However, there is no measure of days, weeks and years simply because it is not relevant to the game. Everything happens in the moment and there is no need to keep track of dates. In fact, the representation of day and night is just present to offer different racing experiences to the player in that when it is night, there is less visibility and so the player has to drive more carefully in order not to crash. Also, races done at night have a slightly higher difficulty for the same reasons.

Altogether, the fabrication of the game space in this manner makes the game more enjoyable to play since it mimics reality to a large extent minus the fatal consequences. This gives the player more room to explore certain stunts like driving off a bridge or over a rump at high speeds just for the thrill of it. Obviously, this is not something that would be done in real life but in the game, the player is able to do it without the need for second-guessing his/her actions.