It's been interesting to watch EA's ongoing approach with the Need For Speed series over the past few years, and it now seems to be getting rather more complex. The past couple of generations of the series (it's up to around a dozen games now) had each game delivered with a new "angle", beyond simply being the next generation in the franchise, with ideas such as career structures, silly plots, realistic damage modeling, or open-world play. The last NFS game I played, Need For Speed Undercover, didn't really seem to deliver any of these notions convincingly, so it'll be interesting to see if the two-pronged reboot of Need For Speed: Shift and free racing MMO, Need For Speed: World Online, create something worth paying attention to, and breath new fumes into the series. Continued below...

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