Graphics

Drivers

When we first received the game I was thrilled. It was the only thing keeping me going while trying to finish off another review that shall remain nameless. Once I had the game installed, I sat down and watched the intro and all the little bits, all the way to the menu screen. Quite enjoyable I might say. Next, I figured I would go for a quick spin and check out what this game had to offer. After setting the controls, I grabbed a 911 and headed for a quick trip down the coast of Cote De Azur.

While waiting for the track to load, I was kicked back to the Windows desktop. I tried to race a few more times but to no avail. Upon a quick inspection of the readme file I found the problem: GeForce cards will not run the game unless 5.xx drivers are loaded. Regular FiringSquad readers probably know that the 5.xx drivers aren't available on the NVIDIA website. The latest official driver release at the time of this review is 3.68. Fortunately, I had no trouble finding the leaked drivers, but I'm certain some GeForce owners might not know where to get them. I just pity the poor souls who buy this game and wonder what to do next!

As you can imagine, the situation this presents makes it difficult to state whether the game is full of bugs or if it's just the beta video drivers. In any case, I also encountered problems running the game on an Athlon system paired with a GeForce card. Even my personal review system wasn't particularly stable, but, for the most part, it ran pretty well.

We're hoping these problems will be remedied either with an official driver release by NVIDIA or additional patches from EA. Since the game was released last month EA has already addressed some issues with a few patches.

Nice car

Looking good

How High Does She Go?

Despite the various graphics modes for adjusting screen resolution and level of detail I realized while playing that I could hardly tell the difference between the multiple detail settings. I'm sure if I looked at the game closely I'd see more differences. But while playing it's hard to notice anything besides the pavement in front of you and the cars you're trying to avoid. If you do enjoy playing with all the bells and whistles Porsche Unleashed is fairly forgiving. I had no trouble playing the game with the highest settings and a screen resolution of 1024x768. My Celeron 300A at 450MHz ran beautifully through all of the tracks but one: the city track. After one run through that track I feel compelled to upgrade my CPU!

Boxster butt

Ahh!

Lights Then?

The same problem I've faced in previous games in the Need for Speed series crept up in Porsche Unleashed as well: the pesky lighting problem. I've always been the type of driver who wants to have my headlights on during the day. (Safety first!) Fortunately, this feature has been present in the past few versions of this series. However, leaving your headlights on has little affect on the surrounding environment. For example, entering a tunnel during the day with your headlights on makes no difference whatsoever. I had a very difficult time navigating through one tunnel in particular, much less avoiding traffic! If I were to enter the tunnel at night with my headlights on I had no visibility problems.

On the subject of lights, one new feature added in Porsche Unleashed are controls for turn signals and hazard lights. While talking about this is always interesting, in practice, playing with them is entirely different. Unfortunately mine were usually damaged in accidents.