What Need for Speed should have evolved into.
I've caught myself wanting to buy a car not because it's an upgrade in terms of handling or speed, but simply because I want to own it for the sake of it appealing to me. Which is kind of weird really. Think that's what Polyphony has been trying to do for all these years, but at least to me, this is the first game to have gotten it right. It's about the experience, and Eden Studios has done a pretty good job at emulating it. But the one thing I do wish they would've done a better job with is the engine noises, the cars generally don't sound as impressive as they ought to.
One type of mission that deserves to be mentioned though, is the "Car Transport". Some bloke wants to have his ridiculously expensive and fast car driven to a certain location and you get payed for doing so. There's no time limit, so what's the catch? Scratch it and the supposed repair costs are deducted from your check. The trip is long and you are in a really fast sportscar, so you just kind of eventually end up going faster than perhaps you should, and so you risk crashing the car. It's rather ingenious.
If you're connected to Xbox Live the game is constantly online....and offline. There's no distinction really. Once you're online the world is automatically populated by nearby players. So you're free to proceed with whatever event you feel like, multi or single. Or no event at all. Every now and then you'll come across another player and you can have sort of an improvised race or something, just driving along the ridiculously large game world. Or you can set up a point-to-point race. One time when trying out my Lotus Esprit's top speed I was nearly clipped in an intersection by another guy who was doing the same to his car. Just woooshAMAGAD, is coo.
Test Drive Unlimited is coo.