Need for Speed - SuperCheats Top Five of the Game Series

Three: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit

The launch of NFS3 for Windows PC in September of 1998 was an event that, having followed the launch of the game on Sony's PlayStation gaming console that previous March, was highly-anticipated to be sure, and not just because the PC version promised a far more interesting game play experience.

Thanks to the very active modding community online at the time -- a modding community that was very well-acquainted with the game series -- the level of interest in the game was certainly helped by it, but it was the neat division of the two racing and play perspectives that really had the racing community stoked.

While the usual expression is that there are three sides to every story -- your side, their side, and what actually happened -- in the world of Need For Speed III: Hot Pursuit there are just Two Sides to the Story: What the Racer says happened, and what the Cops say happened -- and for the first time in the series you get experience both sides of the story yourself.

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Hey that was a pretty heady mix of game play elements in 1998, let us tell you!

Offering the players the opportunity to fully play both sides -- or really to put a finer point on the matter, dividing the game into equal parts of play as either the Racer, or the Police -- brought to the world of outlaw racing a twist that was both new and welcome. Seriously!

We can easily honestly recall points in our game play in NFS and NFS2 in which we often found ourselves wishing that we could play the entire game from the perspective of the other side, and just how good we would be and how much better at wrecking the outlaw street racers than that cops were in the games (which come to think upon it is more an indictment of the police AI than anything else)...

And on that subject, with a great deal of effort having been spent on creating a usable Racer AI for use when the player has taken on the role of law enforcement, it was only natural that some effort was spent in improving the AI used by the NPC Police Officers for that side of the game, and a welcome addition it was, too!

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The new 'Hot Pursuit' racing mode did more than simply formalize this new approach for the game, it also added as a new type of racing strategy both for when the player took on the traditional role of either the Racer needing to outrun (or destroy) the faster and slicker pursuit cars, or taking the measure of those dastardly outlaw street racers as you sought to stop and arrest them.

Of course none of this would have been possible if not for the new industry-standard media system that the CD drives represented -- a very robust media that was large enough to permit not just an expanded game size, but the inclusion of multimedia sideshows and CS's, room for adding more voice commentary, and the game-plus-music features that eventually became a formal style of music video.

When we revisited the games while writing this to refresh our memory of the entire series, the new tactics that were employed on the Police side including roadblocks and the new 'blocking' tactic, as well as allowing for multiple police cars to join a chase (for the first time) which permitted the Police AI to employ what is basically early examples of what would eventually become the signature ambush-style of pursuit and apprehension that would become its signature that stood out the most.

When the Police finally managed to overtake your blazing yellow supercar and then knock you off the road, the pumped voice of the female police officer screaming 'You're busted! Don't let me catch you speeding again!' reminded us of just how cool the game was for its time and the hardware we had to play with!

The hypnotic sounds of Saki Kaskas 'Little Sweaty Sow' blaring through the speakers as we navigated highways and byways in a world that, to be brutally honest, at the time stood out for its 'realism' but now is rather painful to view. It is hard to believe how impressed we were by the game and its environment at the time, but there you have it.

If you have the time - and a copy of NFS3 handy - revisiting it today and giving it a good workout is probably the most effective method for time travel you can actually obtain... Plus it really makes you appreciate the state of gaming tech in 2014 and why Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit landed in the Number Three Slot on our Top Five of the Game Series.