Need for Speed: Underground for Game Boy Adv Reviews & Ratings by IGN

Yet another elaborate current generation console design has been given the greenlight for a handheld version. Need for Speed: Underground is one of those rare titles that not only attempts some technical marvel on the Game Boy Advance hardware, it also features an incredibly playable design that actually feels like the console design. The GBA version defintely has more pros than cons in its production, only really lacking in the features department. But this element definitely shouldn't keep you from giving this fast 'n furious racer a spin on the handheld.

Features

• 14 different vehicles
• Four different race modes
• Cartridge save (one slot)
• Link cable support for four players

Need for Speed Underground for the GBA is based upon the same gritty dark-side-of-racing design released on the consoles. Here, players have the opportunity to challenge racers to different styles of driving in order to earn coin that can be spent on upgrades; the GBA game features a garage of fourteen different licensed vehicles from Ford, Toyota, Volkswagen, Nissan, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Subaru and Acura, and each of these cars can be customized with paint, bumpers, decals, rims, ground effects, and more. The further into the Underground you go, the more extras you can unlock in order to create the most tricked out road machine the streets have ever seen. Most of the races are the traditional kind, with players racing against as many as three other opponents in the competition. There are also Drag challenges where racers will have to blast their way down a stretch of road, and Drift challenges where players score points by powersliding around the curves. Every win awards a dollar amount which can be converted into extras for the vehicle...either for performance or cosmetic purposes.

The GBA version of Need for Speed: Underground, on a technical level, is a real stunner. Okay, so we're not going to see the moist, shiny nighttime streets and fast-paced motionblur of what Black Box pulled off on the GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox versions, but what the development team's created for the handheld should definitely impress anyone who's familiar with the GBA. The Pocketeer's 3D engine is by far the most impressive yet seen on the handheld, pushing a decent amount of geometry on the GBA's screen with a very smooth and speedy framerate. The game looks very close to some of the first generation PlayStation One racing games; it's not quite there, as the texture resolution is significantly lower than what's expected, and there are times where it's difficult to see some upcoming turns due to the low-resolution textures. But in the battle for the best 3D engine on the GBA Pocketeers is the current champion. And on top of this, the team managed to stream a nice amount of digital audio for the game's background music. Though the selection of tunes is limited to four edited songs from the console game's soundtrack, the audio quality is excellent...at least in GBA standards.

Even with the system working overtime in the graphics and audio departments, the developers focused on the actual racing engine, and Need for Speed: Underground is an extremely playable GBA racer. Each car in the game's line up has significantly different handling from one another, with a good amount of weight applied to the models as they slide around corners. There's a lot of technique to the racing design of Need for Speed Underground, and where the game starts out like a cakewalk, wait until you get deeper into the challenges. The computer AI becomes a beast to topple, and though there are the occasional behavioral oddities during some races, their AI is definitely rooted down to the same abilities (and restrictions) of what the player can do in the game.

Compared to consoles, the Game Boy Advance is a seriously restrictive handheld in controls due to its lack of action buttons, but even here the development team made it work. On default players can simply play with an auto-transmission vehicle and not worry about shifting gears, which leaves the shoulder buttons dedicated to the important "nitro boost" and "powersliding" functions. But for those who need to have more control over their car can choose the manual transmission and share the shoulder buttons with multiple commands; and while it may seem a bit clunky to have shifting on the same toggle as the powerbreaks and boost, the way the team worked it on the button layout of the GBA system actually works and makes controlling the vehicle a lot more fun...if you can handle the extra complexity, of course.

But where the game impresses on its technical and control marks, it's lacking in features and presentation elements that are considered standard fare for racing titles. The line-up of tracks and competitors are offered in extremely bland text menus; it's almost impossible to know which is which and who is who beyond remembering their names in an uncreative list of track and competitor labels. The game features cartridge save, but the best race times for each track aren't among the data that Need for Speed Underground actually records. And, probably due to cartridge limitations, most of the cityscapes look absolutely identical to one another, and the only alterations to their appearances are in the actual track layout. There are other minor oddities that rear their heads during gameplay; it just feels odd not having the ability to use a custom vehicle during a Quick Race. If only the team focused as much on the little things as it did on the graphics and racing engines...but as it stands points had to be deducted.

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