Need For Speed: Most Wanted is an excellent launch title for the 360 - it's one of those games that really shows off the 360's graphics capabilities. The car models in Most Wanted look absolutely beautiful, with highly detailed models, excellent reflection effects, a nice selection of modifications to upgrade your car with and nice damage effects, to boot! You could actually scuff your car up pretty good, even thought these are car manufacturers and models that exist in the real world. Most games either give you realistic cars or allow the cars to take damage. Need For Speed brings you both, although I've never seen one of the cars be completely destroyed - it's mainly cosmetic changes that seem to be allowed.

Being an EA game, the old familiar EA Trax feature is back again, providing a lot of songs by currently popular urban artists. These songs provide a good aural backdrop over which to present the story of a struggling street racer clawing his way to the top.

I love the Need for Speed series. I always have. There have been a few that were less stellar than others, but in general, they've always been fairly strong titles. Need for Speed: Most Wanted seems to me to be the game that got everything to fall into place. For quite some time, the NFS series has tried in various ways to involve police chase elements into the games. This has been done to varying levels of success in the various titles. NFS: Most Wanted has nicely done police chases and backs them up with a perfectly good storyline-supporting reason behind it; you're part of the hotly pursued underground street racing scene. The police are trying to shut street racing down once and for all, and the people you're hanging around with base their respect for you on how badly the police want to get hold of you - and how well you can keep them from actually getting you.

Another thing that was done right is the garage feature. When you're working on fixing up your car, you can select and add more items to your car than you can actually afford and you can see how your car would be with these modifications. All of these items go into a shopping cart system, and are reflected on your car while you're in the garage. When you go to check out, you can only buy those items that you can afford, but you can select which items you want to actually buy at that time. The advantage of this is that you can see if the paint job you want will look good with the vinyl you have your eyes on, and which hood looks best with the bumper you want to get without having to build your car up as you can afford the pieces, only to find that you don't like the combination you wind up with. The shopping cart system allows you to build up a car "on the drawing board", if you will, and then work towards purchasing and installing all of the parts that you want on it.

You get a variety of race types in Most Wanted - Circuits, Sprints, Toll Booth races, Speed Trap races - all of which share a lot of similarity, but with their own special "twist". There's another type of racing that you will have to engage in at some point, and that's drag racing. Drag racing controls very different from the other types - the gameplay is focused on shifting at the correct time, avoiding traffic and other obstacles and getting as much speed as possible in a very short distance. I don't like drag racing. This is not only true of Need For Speed: Most Wanted, but generally true of other games I've played that feature this type of racing. I'm not sorry to see it made available, mind you, but I do kinda wish I didn't have to do it to progress. Unfortunately, there are racers on the Black List that challenge you to Drag races as part of their challenge. Still, I was able to make it past these challenges with a little bit of practice - just mentioning this as a personal issue, not a downfall of the game.

The difficulty in Need For Speed: Most Wanted depends on several factors: your particular driving style, your choice of vehicles, and how wisely you spend your money on upgrading your ride.

If you're used to pure arcade or cart racing or pure simulation racing, you might have to adapt a bit for Most Wanted. I would say that NFS: Most Wanted provides a nice blend of these two styles, ending up somewhere in between realistic and just plain fun arcade racing. For example, your nitrous refills over time and you can take damage, but it only has aesthetic effects (and even that is repaired immediately after the race is over).

The vehicles each have their own characteristics, stats and unique feel. The Mazda RX-8, for example, has some serious traction issues in Most Wanted, but has so much acceleration on tap that it doesn't matter so much; I found I could mess up in a corner, get back on the road and overtake the competition with relative ease. Each car has its good points and bad points, but the Cobalt is a pretty good car overall; I suggest starting with that one and when you win against a rival, choose performance parts and use them on this car - at least until you get a good feel for the game and win (or purchase) another car you would prefer to upgrade instead.

Upgrading is a major element in Most Wanted. You'll need to upgrade your cars' performance to keep winning races. It will also come in handy when you need to shake the cops. Some of the other upgrades purely affect the look of your ride. However, these can be useful at times as well; changing the look of your car can take some of the police's attention off of you - until they learn what your car now looks like. Another way to avoid the cops is to switch between your cars. When one of your cars becomes well known to the police, switch to a different car for a few races. The new car will catch their attention, and they'll slowly lose interest in your other car.

One final note on difficulty - as the game states, "Experience may differ during online play." Boy is that ever true. You'll be dealing with real people, and if they get upset, you may hear some cursing - or at least some colorful dialogue between the players. The surprising thing to me was just how badly I was beaten. I had played through about half of the game when I tried my luck online, but I used my highly upgraded Cobalt (which had better stats than the Porsche I had won, to give you an idea of how good this car is) and watched as the other players simply tore off and left me in the dust. Repeatedly. It wasn't a fluke and was above and beyond the possibility of them simply getting a better start than I was getting. So, you've been warned. Enjoy the single player game until you're really good, then get online and make fun of chumps like me. Or something like that.

I have to say that Need For Speed: Most Wanted is the best Need For Speed game I've played to date. Everything seems to be well done, from the Police A.I. to the upgrade system. I can't think of a single thing that I noticed while playing and said, "Aw, man - Why'd they do that?!" It simply works.

There is some very obvious in-game advertising in here; you would think that Cingular had footed the entire development bill, based on the heavy use of Cingular phones as the way that you communicate with other in-game characters, and the Cingular billboards. Additionally, you can see a couple of Burger King locations as you drive around the city. I thought that was a nice touch. (How come I couldn't drive through and get a burger?!)

One of the cool (and very rare) features of this game is that the cars are actual production vehicles, but they can take damage. It appears the this damage is only skin deep and is immediately fixed after a race is completed (without costing you anything or affecting the car's performance), but typically a game will have either models of real cars or cars that take damage - not both. This aesthetic damage only seems to be an interesting compromise that may become the latest thing we see in racing games.

I could probably go on in fine detail about a whole lot of things, pointing out how they work well together, how they simply fit together to make this game a fun, high-quality game, but I think it would probably be a waste of my time and yours. If you like racing games and you have an Xbox 360, you should go out and pick up a copy of this game. It's an excellent showcase game, a strong launch title, a shining gem in the Need For Speed series and loads of fun to play. So stop reading and go play it already. No, seriously. Now. Whatever - keep reading, but I'm going to go play it some more.

...Or at least sit in front of my broken 360 and pretend I'm playing it...