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OK if you want to read all of this, this is the preview for Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit II.
After nearly a two-and-a-half-year hiatus, Electronic Arts is finally bringing back its most memorable racing franchise, Need for Speed, in the form of Hot Pursuit 2 for the PlayStation 2. The game is the sequel to the original Hot Pursuit, which was released in 1998 for the PC and the PSOne, and in that same vein, it will let you play as a speed demon who's out to leave the cops in the dust. Hot Pursuit 2 will also place the shoe on the other foot, so to speak, and let you chase down and bust those dirty speeders in one of several cop cars. We recently got hold of an 80-percent-complete build of the PlayStation 2 version of Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2, and we've been impressed with what we've seen so far.
It's the cops!
Even though Hot Pursuit 2 is the follow-up to Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit, Electronic Arts has actually released two other Need for Speed games--High Stakes and Porsche Unleashed--since then. Anyone who's played Porsche Unleashed knows that it eschewed several of the conventions that have popularized the Need for Speed franchise these past years--the most noticeable deviation was its inclusion of only a single car manufacturer, Porsche. While the game was well received among fans of the series, Electronic Arts is going back to its roots with Hot Pursuit 2 by including a wide variety of cars from a number of highly respected and recognizable manufacturers like Ferrari, BMW, McLaren, and Mercedes-Benz. But fans of Stuttgart's number one export will be glad to know that Porsche is also very well represented in Hot Pursuit 2. The game also has cars from some American manufacturers. The Corvette Z06, Dodge Viper, and Ford Mustang Cobra R are all available in the game, as is the ultimate cop car, the Ford Crown Victoria. Interestingly enough, Hot Pursuit 2 doesn't have any Japanese cars, though you won't really notice when you're sitting behind the wheel of the game's 360 Spider or pulling over speeders in your Lamborghini Murcielago cop car.
Hot Pursuit II will have about 20 unique cars.
Hot Pursuit has a little more than 20 unique cars, though they're all quite exotic. In fact, the game's low-end car is the capable Opel Speedster, and cars like the powerful BMW M5 and Mercedes-Benz CL55 are located on the bottom end of Hot Pursuit 2's spectrum. On the high end of the scale, you'll find such rare exotics as the Porsche 911 Turbo, the Ferrari 550 Barchetta, and the world's fastest production car, the McLaren F1 LM. More intriguing than the collection of all of these coveted licenses within a single game is the fact that you can bang up these cars beyond recognition. It has always been assumed that licensing real-world cars was a difficult endeavor because so many of the manufacturers didn't want their cars displayed in anything other than a pristine manner. And while at the start of every race, the cars in the game all look like they rolled out of a showroom floor somewhere, by the end of a particularly long and brutal event, you'll notice gouges in the paint job, dents in the hood, cracked windshields, missing sideview mirrors, wobbly wheels, and even engines that belch thick, black smoke. No matter how damaged one of your cars might look, however, damage in Hot Pursuit 2 doesn't affect performance whatsoever--it's strictly an aesthetic bonus.
In addition to its stock selection of cars, Hot Pursuit 2 also has unique Need for Speed versions of all the vehicles that you can unlock as you progress through the game. These NFS variants look like their original counterparts but have a distinctive paint job and usually hide a few more horses under the hood. The NFS cars effectively double the total number of vehicles that you'll have access to in Hot Pursuit 2, though you'll come to find that they're among the toughest cars to unlock in the game
Thanks to Gamespot for this information
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