I’ve been revisiting Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2010 recently, and mostly setting better times on various racer events. And there’s some minor details I’ve noticed between Burnout Paradise, NFS Hot Pursuit 2010, and a couple other recent games by the Criterion Games staff, such as NFS Rivals, which was made by Ghost Games.

The obvious thing I enjoy in HP2010 is the thoroughly detailed voice-over for each and every car. The female voice will overview the car’s engine specs, history, and heritage - it’s all a call-back to the male voice-over seen in NFS: Hot Pursuit 2, back in 2002. I can sort of get that it may be too expensive to consistently have this, especially when you can just have a few written paragraphs of flavor text, like in Gran Turismo 5 and 6. It’s still nice, and really drives home the feel like you’re at an auto show, and the car is being showcased. In each car’s description, they even include the price tag.

The next thing is how each car has its respective font/logo. In other words, when you select a car, it doesn’t use a generic font, but rather the same specifically stylized font as the manufacturer would have on a display for that respective model. So for example, the Aston Martin One-77 or the Lamborghini Reventon each have a different font used to spell out their names, which really helps build the “character” of each car. I believe something identical is seen in Gran Turismo 4, but unfortunately, I don’t recall it being in Gran Turismo 5.

But one of my favorite things in HP2010 is how each car also has the selection of paint colors as provided by the automaker. Unlike Most Wanted 2012, it’s not just “red,” or “glossy yellow.” Cars like the Nissan GT-R Spec V have that trim’s exclusive Opal Black color, while the Lamborghinis and Maseratis have their colors in Italian, with colors like the light-green “Ithaca Verde.” It’s quite immersive. I also recall this also being seen in every Gran Turismo game that I know of, so good on them for the attention to detail.

Something interesting about HP2010, compared to NFS Rivals, is that in the former, virtually every car has a police car version. In the latter, the police cars have exclusive models - for example, the Nissan GT-R can only be driven as a cop car in NFS Rivals, and the McLaren P1 can only be driven as a racer. But that’s besides the point. My point here is that in HP2010, some of the cop cars have neat differences in paint schemes, such as the Lamborgini Gallardo, which I believe has a paintjob modelled after a real-life Gallardo police car. This is versus NFS Rivals, where every police car looks identical aside from the car model being used. Personally, my favorite set of police car paintjobs was in an earlier Criterion Games’ work, Burnout Paradise - the faux-TVR car, the Montgomery Hawker, had a cop car version very similar to those in England, while a car that bears resemblance to the Nissan Skyline GT-R R34, the Nakamura Ikusa, has a cop car that really looks like a Japanese police car. I can understand why the police paintjobs would be more homogenized in HP2010 and especially in Rivals, both of which are set in a specified county - Seacrest and Redview - but it was still nice to see a variety of police cars.

Either way, I just think it’s good to take it all in, and admire the little things - they add up, you know.