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Need for Speed: Most Wanted Review
I smell donuts
The Fast and the Furious wasn’t an especially great film, but it did feature a scene tangentially related to Need for Speed Most Wanted. In the opening act the engine in Brian Spilner’s Eclipse self destructs when he tries to push it too hard. As the wiry mechanic assesses the damage, he looks at Brian in utter disbelief and asks, “was that fun?” Brian doesn’t answer, but destroying an expensive car by driving it too fast is probably fun.
This question also seemed to be Criterion’s design philosophy when building Most Wanted. Every aspect of their previous open-world racer, Burnout Paradise, seems to have been given the “was that fun?” treatment and adjusted accordingly. Furthermore, many new ideas, some of which are undeniably outrageous, appear to have passed that test and qualified for inclusion. Is it fun? The Fast and the Furious didn’t seem to know the answer to that question – it alternated between melodrama and popcorn amusement – but almost every aspect of Most Wanted is confident in its response; yes, everything is a lot of damn fun.
This is quickly apparent in the way Most Wanted handles its suite of vehicles. A hundred or so “jackspots” dot every side road and off-area in the fictional city of Fairhaven. Every jackspot comes with a specific car and if you find it, you can drive it. Within minutes of starting the game it’s possible to be driving everything from an Arial Atom 500 to Lamborghini Gallardo. What’s novel is how easy it is to get back into any car you find. A lesser game would plot a garage on the map or force the player to drive all the way back to where they found it, but Most Wanted skips the tedium and provides the option to hop back in the car whenever you’d like. You can still drive back across Fairhaven and find it, if that’s your thing, but this seemingly tiny decision by Criterion is a huge convenience for the player. Across almost every facet of its design, Most Wanted strives to respect your time.
Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others scramble for new top-level domains like .app, .xbox, and .book
.app is one of the most contested top-level domains, with 13 applicants including Google and Amazon. Microsoft has applied for a total of 11 domain names, including .Xbox, .Hotmail, and .Windows. Apple appears to have only applied for one, just .Apple, and Google has applied for over 100 domain names including: .Android, .Dog, and .Blog.
We already knew some applications: Google announced recently it had applied for .docs, .youtube, and .lol, and British non-profit Nominet has applied for .cymru and .wales. Organizations will have to pay a minimum of $25,000 per year to keep the domain, and not all applications will succeed. 231 domain names have more than one application, and 731 applications overlap.
Applications will be dealt with 500 at a time, and more than 1,000 could be live within a year. The first of the new top-level domains will go live in the first quarter of 2013. ICANN says “this is a historic day for the internet and for the more than 2 million people that depend on it, because the internet is about to change, forever.”
The Stick of Truth – South Park Game for Xbox 360
New South Park game; The stick of truth featuring you as the “New Kid” and you are trying to become cool and join the south park gang is officially coming to Xbox 360.
You can get your hands on South Park: The Stick of Truth on March 5th, 2013. The same day as Tomb Raider.
