Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights First Look
We go for a ride with an early version of Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights
It was hard to fault the original Juiced for feeling a bit dated when it finally found its way onto store shelves after a long and tumultuous development cycle. Still, the game showed promise and sold 2 million copies. With sales like that it shouldn't come as a surprise that a sequel, Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights, is in the works for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable, Nintendo DS, and PC. THQ recently showed Juiced 2 for the first time and provided details on some of its many new features.
For starters, THQ is working with the "lifestyle" custom car show tour Hot Import Nights to help capture the modding and customization culture. As it's told in the game, the tour is so big and popular, entire city blocks in locations such as Rome, London, Sydney, Paris, and San Francisco will be closed off for racing, and thousands of people will line the track to cheer on their favorite drivers. Before the races start, drivers stand in front of their rides as DJs play music, girls dance, and lights flash all around. While this happens you can place bets on the race and check out the other drivers' profiles.
You start your career by creating a male or female driver and then find yourself some wheels. There are 90 different licensed vehicles from top European, American, and Japanese manufacturers such as BMW, Dodge, Toyota, and Honda in the game. Your driver will be ranked as a rookie and then presented with a series of goals to reach--such as winning specific races--to be promoted to the next rank. There are two different types of races: circuit and drift. In a drift race you're the only car on the track and you're given a specific score to beat. You'll need to drift and slide your way around the smallish, winding tracks designed especially for drifting. The longer and steeper your drift, the higher your score will be, and you'll earn score multipliers if you're able to continuously drift without hitting walls. Circuit races will have you race multiple laps against up to 10 opponents, and your goal is to finish first and win cash. To win races you'll need to make good use of your nitrous, which recharges as you powerslide around corners, similar to the latest Ridge Racer game. If you can't get around opponents with speed you can try to intimidate them by racing close and getting in their heads. Each car has a small meter overhead that decreases as you rattle the driver, and you can see the driver's reaction to your efforts in small windows that pop up onscreen.
Racing is just one part of how you'll spend your time in Juiced 2. Modding and customizing your car plays a huge role in the game, and it seems possible to spend hours at a time making your cars look and drive just how you'd like them to. Should you want to tune your ride, change the paint, add decals, or equip visual mods, there are more than 300 hundred different licensed parts to pick from. You'll need money to improve your ride, and you'll also need to win challenges, since doing so unlocks new parts. When you tune your ride you do so via a neat-looking screen that shows your car as a rotating wire frame model. Here you can change power-related items like the exhaust, transmission, turbo, and nitrous. You can improve your car's handling by purchasing new suspensions, brakes, and tires.
There's no shortage of ways to change your ride's looks, either. You can choose from multiple types of hoods, lights, mirrors, spoilers, exhausts, front and rear bumpers, wheels, and rims, and you can even change wheel size. But wait, there's more. You can swap out doors and steering wheels, tint your windows, and change your seats. The ability to customize your license plate is a nice touch, too. You can choose from a variety of paint jobs such as metallic, gloss, flake and more. What's more, you're able to layer some of these paint types so that they'll look different depending on the lighting. And then there are the game's vinyls, which make the rest of the car customization options seem almost basic. There are upward of 2,000 different decals and vinyls to choose from, and you can place up to 50 on your car at a time. Chances are pretty good that you'll find something you like, but if you need to do some tweaking you can place them almost anywhere, rotate and scale them, change colors, and layer them on top of one another. The whole process may sound complicated, but it's possible to make a really cool and unique ride in just a couple of minutes, and you can reap the fruits of your labor by selling your car online, as well.
Online play is another aspect of the game that's receiving a lot of attention. Up to 10 players at a time will be able to race, and there are online goals to achieve, which will help ensure there are always plenty of people to challenge. Online leaderboards aren't anything new, but because the game tracks your offline driving habits with "driver DNA," you'll actually be able to download the DNA profile of the leaders and race against their "ghosts," which will use the tendencies of the real-life driver they're based on. Even if you're not in the same league as other drivers, the game has a handicapping feature that will compare drivers' abilities and then give the lesser-skilled driver a head start. If the stakes aren't high enough for you in a normal race, you and your opponent will be able to put your cars' pink slips on the line. Once you lose your car, it's gone for good, so you might want to think twice before risking your best ride.
Even though it's early in its development cycle, Juiced 2's visuals are coming along nicely. The track we saw took place at night, and there were plenty of bright lights to show off the details on the track as well as on the vehicles. In the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game, each car is composed of more than 10 times the number of polygons as a car from the original game. Not only do the cars look nice, but they come apart nicely, too. If you're good enough you might make it through a race with some scratches, but if you hit a few walls you'll start to see dents in your hood, rims, and doors, or you might even lose your mirrors and bumpers completely.
While only the Xbox 360 version of the game was shown, the developer indicated that for the most part, each version of the game will have the same feature set. However the game will play to each system's strength, so the Nintendo DS version of the game will have unique dual-screen features, the Xbox 360 will have achievements, and the PlayStation 3 will have as-of-yet-undecided tilt functionality. We'll have more details on individual versions of Juiced 2 as its fall release date draws nearer.
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- GameSpot Score5.5mediocre
Check Prices: $9.99 – 26.7
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- Release: Sep 17, 2007 »
- ESRB: Teen
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