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 Episodes           Current Location: New York City, NY Playlist (Image WIP) Need for Speed: The Run was released in 2011 by EA Black Box to lukewarm reception, as one of three (!!!) Need for Speed games released that year (the others being the MMO Need for Speed: World and vaguely-sim-like-but-not-really Shift 2: Unleashed). At the time, EA was trying to diversify the franchise's appeal by going after different markets, and gave Black Box two years from 2009's Need for Speed: Undercover to make sure they got the simcade story-driving experience right. They didn't, and Black Box was promptly shut down, but that isn't what this LP is about. The Run has a lot of flaws, but underneath the thin story, questionable RPG leveling mechanics, and some truly awful drifting physics, this game is going places. Not to the VGAs, but places. Who are you?  Shaken after the abrupt and violent conclusion of the Split/Second Season Championship, Diacorn went back to doing what he does best: running from problems. Equipped with an outdated smartphone and a sneering disregard for traffic laws, Diacorn is out to convince himself that the Super Snake is somehow an acceptable car. ModeWondershot has never been a co-driver before, but he brings an extensive knowledge of car films both spectacular and awful, and can spot a well-worn trope from ten miles. His knowledge of cars is informed by his previous Need for Speed experience.Cool. So how's this going to work? Since The Run is a story-driven game, we'll be playing through the single-player experience. To make things interesting, I'll be playing through the game on Extreme mode, which is normally unlocked after beating the game at least once on Hard mode. I'll be doing this on the PC port of the game using an Xbox 360 controller. There's a surprising amount of depth to the core driving engine here, which is best explored at 180 MPH or more in a variety of vehicles, so I'll also be swapping cars more frequently than I normally would. The Run is divided into ten Stages, for ten videos of between fifteen to twenty-five minutes, depending on how liberal the game wants to be with its in-engine cutscenes. How about updates? I'm shooting for weekly updates this time around, posted late Wednesday evenings EST. Spoilers? Please keep discussion of story stuff we haven't gotten to yet in spoiler tags, but otherwise, go nuts. diacorn fucked around with this message at 01:11 on May 5, 2018 |
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Feb 28, 2018 08:39
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GIFs! 
diacorn fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Mar 8, 2018 |
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Feb 28, 2018 08:42
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Current Location: Altamont Pass, CA The Run starts off a little unusually in that we don't actually start driving when we first get control. We'd normally have a little intro sequence, but instead we're introduced to Jack Rourke, who could just as easily be from literally any other game. Since the game give us a lot of opportunity to talk about things as we tear up the roads of America, I'll be posting my ancillary notes in these updates, as well as other stuff I didn't get to talk about in the videos. Like the music. This game really does have an amazing soundtrack, which is a huge asset for a game that's one big American road trip. The soundtrack goes from early-80s into the '10s and samples from a variety of genres, but most of them revolve around bluesy rock in one form or another, which brings us to our first two songs. For the run up to Nob Hill, Black Box chose Heartbroken, in Disrepair, by Dan Auerbach. Auerbach is one of the two Auerbachs that make up The Black Keys, and you can definitely feel that Black Keys influence here. His solo work tends to be a little less standardized, though. Heartbroken, in Disrepair makes use of an extensive arrangement that involves two drummers, a rhythm and lead guitar, and a bass, in addition to Auerbach on vocals. The guitar work here has a very raw sound, and they make use of feedback and crooning backing vocals to give the song its atmosphere. Since the lead guitar solo comes in well after we reach Nob Hill in the game, I suspect the song was chosen here because of the way it takes time building the sound by leading the guitar in. When we get into the first "real" event, Altamont Pass Rd., we're treated to Don't Owe You a Thang, by Gary Clark, Jr. Clark is sort of a rock and roll legend: he played with Eric Clapton at Madison Square Garden in 2013, and his work shows up regularly in film. This song was in the Clint Eastwood-directed Trouble with the Curve, which came out in 2012, a year after The Run. For last year's Justice League, Clark also did a cover of Come Together with Junkie XL, another film composer who contributed to the soundtracks for Need for Speed through 2007's ProStreet. Don't Owe You a Thang is a very old-school sort of blues song that's all about energy and enthusiasm, which pairs well with all the wide-open roads we're discovering in-game as we leave San Francisco. diacorn fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Mar 8, 2018 |
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Feb 28, 2018 09:34
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This game has a lot to live up to after the standards set by Split/Second, the best racing game ever 
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Feb 28, 2018 12:43
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CommissarMega posted:This game has a lot to live up to after the standards set by Split/Second, the best racing game ever
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Mar 1, 2018 02:50
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I don't know if you noticed, but one of the other racers you're matched against very briefly in either the prelude or the first race was apparently famous underwear manufacturer Calvin Klein. (Or C. Klein, anyway!)
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Mar 1, 2018 06:23
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malkav11 posted:I don't know if you noticed, but one of the other racers you're matched against very briefly in either the prelude or the first race was apparently famous underwear manufacturer Calvin Klein. (Or C. Klein, anyway!)
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Mar 1, 2018 06:58
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Does the car you're using being Rear Wheel Drive have a significant impact on how you control it, or is it just more sluggish on turns?
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Mar 1, 2018 13:20
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bewilderment posted:Does the car you're using being Rear Wheel Drive have a significant impact on how you control it, or is it just more sluggish on turns? The Super Snake is RWD, but it isn't bad in turns because it's RWD, it's bad in turns because it's an enormously heavy piece of machinery, with poor weight distribution, on a suspension that clearly wasn't designed with these ludicrous horsepower numbers in mind. A quick Google says the 2011 GT500 has between 3800 and 3950 lb. of curb weight, but that may or may not be including the beefier engine of the Super Snake edition of that year, which included a supercharger among other things. (I assume that this is the version of the vehicle depicted in-game, as that kit puts the car at exactly the 750 HP the NFS Edition has.) diacorn fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Mar 2, 2018 |
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Mar 2, 2018 04:13
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As dumb as a lot of this game is I did enjoy it (Disclaimer: I paid $5 for it). For the time it really was pretty, especially in some of the stages that aren't just regular highways and cities. I remember getting more enjoyment out of the one-off challenge stages than the story mode though. And the "make up time" stages make a bit more sense later in the race at least for story reasons.
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Mar 4, 2018 22:43
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Kibayasu posted:As dumb as a lot of this game is I did enjoy it Kibayasu posted:I remember getting more enjoyment out of the one-off challenge stages than the story mode though.
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Mar 5, 2018 07:42
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This is the only Need for Speed game I ever finished. I thought it was fun as well in the same don't-take-this-seriously way. Watching you play it makes me cringe at the number of times I had to redo some of the stages to get past them -- impressive skills on display.
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Mar 7, 2018 01:06
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This game has lots of stuff I like (car racing, road trips etc) and I played it a ton and loved it, image searching the places you drive through all the way. Good luck with the later Make Up Times on expert mode, and dealing with the other cars when they all dive into the same shortcuts at the same time. Also re: the Mick Gordon music, I think he samples from Brian Tyler's F&F tunes or something which is why they might have been omitted from the official soundtrack? I dunno this game's development story has as many holes as its plot
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Mar 7, 2018 02:36
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Current Location: Tioga Pass, CA Our path through Yosemite is fraught with peril. Stage 2 is the first stage with real technical driving, but National Park rewards our bravery with some scenic roads. I promise that Stage 2 isn't that bad in the right car, but the Super Snake definitely isn't it. Since the Super Snake's engine is very torquey, the car has a tendency to put down all its power in the low end, and just too much of it for what we're doing. This means in turn that taking hairpins and technical turns at low speed requires fighting the car and preventing it from spinning out, none of which is more obvious than in our first Battle event. We've only got one new tune today, "Treat Me Like Your Mother" by The Dead Weather. The Dead Weather started out as another side project of Jack White, the rock mogul behind The White Stripes (with Meg) and The Raconteurs. The Kills toured with the latter band, and the partnership between White and Alison Mosshart, the vocalist for The Kills grew from that. The vocals on this song have the characteristic clipped sound of White's previous work, but their overall sound is more polished bluesy rock, though of a less groovy variety than that of Dan Auerbach from last episode. They tend to make use of more dynamic, harder-hitting guitars; see "I Feel Love (Every Million Miles)" for a good example of this. diacorn fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Mar 8, 2018 |
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Mar 8, 2018 04:27
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Thotimx posted:This is the only Need for Speed game I ever finished. I thought it was fun as well in the same don't-take-this-seriously way. Watching you play it makes me cringe at the number of times I had to redo some of the stages to get past them -- impressive skills on display. tomanton posted:This game has lots of stuff I like (car racing, road trips etc) and I played it a ton and loved it, image searching the places you drive through all the way. Good luck with the later Make Up Times on expert mode, and dealing with the other cars when they all dive into the same shortcuts at the same time. Make Up Time events do get more difficult, but my experience was that the Make Up Time difficulty curve is less straightforward on Extreme, and more that certain ones we've encountered have elements that make them overly punishing given the strict time limits. For example, I think El Portal Rd., from Stage 2, is made more difficult than it needs to be by putting the last two sections on dirt, with non-ideal approaches that force players to jump or drift straight into complex corner sequences. diacorn fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Mar 8, 2018 |
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Mar 8, 2018 04:39
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It's a shame because the Make Up Time tracks are really good, and for some reason the other one is only played at about half volume in-game.  Also, I'm pretty sure the yellow FD is an Initial D reference, your first overtake of the previous segment was a black and white AE86 and that'd be a heck of a coincidence.Now that I think about it, I think the only Expert part that was unduly difficult was maybe the last half of Stage 6? I could ramble forever but don't know your spoiler policy.
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Mar 8, 2018 14:27
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Around 7:10 into the video, one of your opponents passes either under or near a petrol station, and I was actually a little bummed out that it didn't explode 
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Mar 8, 2018 16:07
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tomanton posted:It's a shame because the Make Up Time tracks are really good, and for some reason the other one is only played at about half volume in-game. Every segment of the Make Up Time event in Stage 6 is uniquely awful in its own way, but every segment is made more difficult than it has to be because of how incredibly narrow the route is throughout the stage. Combine this with some technical driving and you have a real bear of a race that tests your endurance and car knowledge. And you're absolutely right. I noticed the AE86 in editing and completely forgot to mention it during live commentary with MW. CommissarMega posted:Around 7:10 into the video, one of your opponents passes either under or near a petrol station, and I was actually a little bummed out that it didn't explode In a B-roll run, I actually started trying to get into that gas station before promptly being slammed into the wall by the green Mustang. (I thought about throwing it up after the event, but a weird recording issue prevented me from using the footage.)
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Mar 9, 2018 03:22
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diacorn posted:Thank you! What cars did you like when you played through? Did you have a favorite? Honestly I don't recall most of them, it's been almost three years. I know I used the BMW at first, and for the first half-ish of things I tended to favor those with better handling. That's a bias of mine in racing games period, not losing time in the corners. I seem to recall later though I needed to adjust as the more agile ones didn't seem fast enough to get the job done, at least not while being handicapped by me driving them :P.
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Mar 12, 2018 03:22
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Thotimx posted:Honestly I don't recall most of them, it's been almost three years. I know I used the BMW at first, and for the first half-ish of things I tended to favor those with better handling. That's a bias of mine in racing games period, not losing time in the corners. I seem to recall later though I needed to adjust as the more agile ones didn't seem fast enough to get the job done, at least not while being handicapped by me driving them :P. It's kind of weird that all three of the choices provided in San Francisco are very slow cars for the class. I don't know why Jack doesn't at least keep the Audi he jacked from Oakland, or why Christina Hendricks couldn't pull some strings to get him something faster, in spite of Jack saying he's got the car situation covered. After all, she has nine times the financial stake in him winning as he does.
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Mar 12, 2018 04:37
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Christina Hendricks is actually in this?
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Mar 12, 2018 04:53
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As diacorn posted:The game's skill floor definitely increases as we go deeper into The Run, so that's not unexpected. At least in T4, I found that a lot of the vehicles I personally find easiest to control (the Lamborghini Gallardo, the 911 GT3, and the Nissan GT-R) have either good top speeds or good acceleration, so oftentimes there hasn't been a huge need to compromise. However, the M3 and Datsun 240Z fit that agile-but-slow template.
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Mar 12, 2018 08:43
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They could have just shown that it's blown an alternator or some other bit of the electrics to say "Hey, this requires a repair that would take too much time for us to deal with at the moment so pick a back-up car"
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Mar 12, 2018 23:06
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tomanton posted:The Audi is only a T3 before your second chance to steal it so all of Jack's cars are a slight upgrade. Triple A posted:They could have just shown that it's blown an alternator or some other bit of the electrics to say "Hey, this requires a repair that would take too much time for us to deal with at the moment so pick a back-up car"
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Mar 13, 2018 02:26
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Current Location: Las Vegas, NV We've made our way out of Tioga Pass. Now that we're out of the twisties, we can get back to doing what the Super Snake does best: highway races with gentle sweeping turns and few cars. Or, we would if we weren't exchanging the Super Snake for a shiny new Porsche 911 GT3, a car that'll become our new best friend. Like the Super Snake, the Porsche is rear-wheel drive (RWD), but the engine's in the back this time, meaning that extra weight keeps the car's drive wheels planted when we speed through turns at 150. The Porsche happens to be very good at this, with minimal speed loss but incredible dodge potential in the upper gears. With its thin profile and small size, we can make near misses in this car that the Super Snake would struggle with, or at least need a straight running start for. Once we reach outer Vegas, we're introduced to our first Rivals, Nikki and Mila. They're not actually twins, but they have all the twin tropes going on, including the one where Jack gets distracted by them. Their 370Zs aren't very fast, but they do provide us with some entertainment on our way to the strip. I put that lack of challenge less on the general difficulty of the AI (which is always at 100 percent in Rival events), and more on the unique obstacles we face on Interstate 15, a route with narrow gaps and hoppable medians our opponents don't take advantage of. The Rivals aren't the only ones chasing us, though. The game's bringing out some new tunes for us, too. When we get into the Rival event with Nikki and Mila, we're treated to C'mon Let's Go by Girlschool, a great example of late-70s/early-80s British heavy metal. This song is loud, high-energy, and frantic, and starts with "Speeding down the motorway" to boot, so it works out well for our first Rival event. It's also the second-oldest song on the soundtrack, beaten out by a fair margin by a song we haven't listened to yet. Our first major brush with the law nets us a listen of "N.W.O." by Ministry, a band that codified industrial metal before the genre became more commercialized in the 90s (and after the genre was first codified by bands like KMFDM). Ministry textures the despair of a growling, angry man with the sound of urban chaos, most notably a siren sample from Apocalypse Now to fill out the percussion. I don't know if it's intentional, but the cutscene whose sound I replaced has basically no audio of its own-- the sounds of yelling cops are actually part of the song, and come in at just the right time to make the whole cutscene work. diacorn fucked around with this message at 02:48 on Mar 22, 2018 |
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Mar 15, 2018 02:03
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diacorn posted:
Your link is to Episode 1, and the actual Episode 3 has some weird audio bug in the first several seconds. Wow, that QTE at the end. It's still super weird that anyone thought those are what a racing game needed.
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Mar 15, 2018 02:45
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Oblivion4568238 posted:Your link is to Episode 1, and the actual Episode 3 has some weird audio bug in the first several seconds.  I'm not hearing any kind of weird audio bug in the YouTube upload, though. What does it sound like for you?
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Mar 15, 2018 02:55
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No audio bug for me either. I got to say though, this race course has to be laid out by the organizers of the event. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure that there are faster ways to go through/around Vegas. And ... uh... isn't this the Cannonball Run in reverse? or am I just imagining things?
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Mar 15, 2018 03:13
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A younger and more naive me thought that ever since about Most Wanted(?) Need For Speed got into bed with Porsche for some reason, but now I'm pretty sure EA has the exclusive license to use their cars. Similarly, Microsoft may also have an exclusive license for Ferrari in Forza and that's why Steam pulled their Outrun games. Death Valley is a pretty fun stage between the dust storms and the LVPD scrambling to deal with 150 street racers appearing all of a sudden. In more cut content, the two rivals were supposed to "interrogate Jack about his skills" or something, I don't know why all three of those dummies didn't just drive five more miles and get gas after they reached Vegas. Too much heat maybe? Also Christina Hendricks begging Jack to race while he chugs gamer fuel and gets passed like crazy is nice insight into why they broke up. Speaking of cut/reduced content, we passed a named rival in Panamint Valley without so much as a mention from the game. 
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Mar 15, 2018 03:25
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berryjon posted:No audio bug for me either. I'm not actually sure what the deal with the down-and-back is in the context of The Run. Since the menu screen is the same one that shows up on the tablet that Christina Hendricks gave Jack in the restaurant in Oakland, it's possible that she's giving him bad directions. I think Black Box was going for a cops-shutting-down-the-city scenario like what happened in San Francisco. If we're coming north from I15 (i.e. in the direction that we would have been coming had we been going east on Old Spanish Trail Hwy, which crosses from California to Nevada) and hit S Las Vegas Blvd going north, then we'd have turned around and started heading south at the roadblock, and then turned west.  We could keep going in the right direction just by staying on I15.
diacorn fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Mar 15, 2018 |
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Mar 15, 2018 03:26
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tomanton posted:A younger and more naive me thought that ever since about Most Wanted(?) Need For Speed got into bed with Porsche for some reason, but now I'm pretty sure EA has the exclusive license to use their cars. Similarly, Microsoft may also have an exclusive license for Ferrari in Forza and that's why Steam pulled their Outrun games. And what named rival was that? I must have missed it.
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Mar 15, 2018 03:39
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diacorn posted:I'm not hearing any kind of weird audio bug in the YouTube upload, though. What does it sound like for you? Just checked again, and it wasn't there this time. Must have been on my end.
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Mar 15, 2018 10:09
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diacorn posted:Actually EA's had an exclusive license to use Porsche's marque since the late 90s to early 2000s. It was one of the holdovers from VW Group's financial issues around that period, though the contract itself expired in 2016. I'm not sure what the deal is with Ferrari, as Ferraris do show up regularly in newer NFS games. I know Rivals, at least, has plenty of them. As for the rival, in 169th place was a T6 Audi called Teknik (Technik?) with a "special edition" ride just like Nikki, Mila and Jack. There are a few other rivals like him in the Run, but Teknik actually shows up in a cutscene later.
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Mar 15, 2018 14:07
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tomanton posted:As for the rival, in 169th place was a T6 Audi called Teknik (Technik?) with a "special edition" ride just like Nikki, Mila and Jack. There are a few other rivals like him in the Run, but Teknik actually shows up in a cutscene later. I don't think that each Signature Edition vehicle corresponds to a character in the game, but certain ones do-- Nikki and Mila, Cesar, Calvin, and Eddie all have Signature Edition versions of their cars. Looking through the list of vehicles, I don't see a version by this name. The car is drivable in T6, but it's not a Signature Edition, just a generic NFS Edition-- weirdly, one of two NFS Editions of the R8. It shows up again later to 1v1 us down a mountain.
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Mar 17, 2018 20:17
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Minus the QTE's (which is what you have to say about everything in The Run) the road into Vegas after San Francisco and the park is where the driving gets a lot more fun. All the hairpin turns and offroad section of the park wasn't really enjoyable but barely avoiding traffic and cops while tearing through suburbia and Las Vegas is good fun.
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Mar 18, 2018 01:49
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Kibayasu posted:Minus the QTE's (which is what you have to say about everything in The Run) the road into Vegas after San Francisco and the park is where the driving gets a lot more fun. All the hairpin turns and offroad section of the park wasn't really enjoyable but barely avoiding traffic and cops while tearing through suburbia and Las Vegas is good fun. I think that's honestly kind of the biggest problem with the Run, at least compared to other Need for Speed games like Most Wanted or Carbon. You don't have to wait for those moments where you're tearing through a city with a dozen cops hot on your tail; you can basically make that happen whenever you feel like it and there's a good chance that you'll transition straight from a race to a high-speed pursuit almost seamlessly. And without any QTEs in sight for that matter...
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Mar 18, 2018 04:46
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I figured it is also worth mentioning that Jack is also played by actor Sean Faris in his only (to date) video game role. Faris also played the protagonist of high-school-based MMA sports action flick Never Back Down in 2008, and portrayed Kyo Kusanagi of all people in the Hollywood The King of Fighters movie that came out in 2010. Beyond that he has multiple minor roles in other films and TV shows, some of which apparently don't have Wikipedia articles. All this to say that he was a perfect choice to portray our utterly forgettable protagonist (hilarious reactions to the sight of women notwithstanding).
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Mar 20, 2018 04:10
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Current Location: Million Dollar Highway, CO We can finally leave Vegas, and our now-impounded Porsche, behind and get back onto the open roads. We now have a new objective: Top 50 at Chicago. Chicago is a straight shot along I80, but Jack is an intrepid type, so we're going to be seeing a lot more than just boring highway for the next 1000+ miles. Things were looking pretty bad for us toward the end of the last episode, but we picked up some high roller's Lamborghini Gallardo on our way out of Vegas. I can't emphasize enough how much I like this car. This particular Lambo is RWD, but it's also rear-engined, so like the Porsche, the weight bears down on the drive wheels to add traction. This means the Gallardo grips like a total monster at any speed. At a top speed of 197 MPH, it's also one of the fastest T4 vehicles by a decent margin (trailed by the Nissan GT-R and Audi R8 at 195, and tied with the Corvette Z06, which is locked behind DLC that's no longer available). The car's handling is rated as Challenging, but it's anything but, and I hope that this episode demonstrates why I think this car is so good. We get the full listen of "N.W.O." by Ministry in Loghill, which is great, because the cops' rubber-banding and general competence will make you angry on Extreme mode. Loghill can be either an amazing event or a terrible event because the cops' general behavior is totally AI-driven; where and how they wreck you is not scripted or predetermined. This is what I would call a charitable performance by the cop AI. And now, Frostbite Physics!  One other thing: The Run's over in 10 stages, but each stage has an accompanying stage in the Challenge Series. Each Challenge Series event rehashes roads from the campaign, but locks you to alternate routes or versions of tracks, a certain car (some unique to the Challenge Series), and so on. Would anyone be interested in a run through the Challenge Series after the main story is over to show this content off? diacorn fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Mar 22, 2018 |
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Mar 22, 2018 02:06
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DIdn't this basically come around the same time as the Need for Speed movie?
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Mar 22, 2018 02:55
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Calax posted:DIdn't this basically come around the same time as the Need for Speed movie?
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Mar 22, 2018 03:01
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