Pimp My Ride
Unlike NFS:U2, Juiced is very much ‘screen driven’ in that unless you’re racing you spend most of your time looking at static screens with various options on them. In NFS:U2 you’d drive around to buy a new car or mod what you’ve got, you’d drive to a venue for a certain type of race or you could just cruise around, perhaps even challenge other racers you encounter to quick ‘follow the leader’ type races… Juiced doesn’t have any truck with any of that though, you just pick your way through the options screens and choose what you want to do. Ok, so loads of other racers do the same thing, but that’s what makes NFS:U2 a special game to play and that’s what Juiced is up against.
Ok, so once you’ve chosen a car from the small selection you get to start off with, you trundle your bog standard motor off to the workshop to start modding it up. Initially there’s not a whole load of gear to bolt on and in the true tradition of racers everywhere you unlock more stuff as you race. You initially start off with roughly $40,000 (depends if you beat TK in that first race!) and you use this money pool to upgrade your car.
Upgrading cars has been the stock in trade of racers since year dot, and Juiced is no exception in giving you a wide variety of parts to bolt on from real-life manufacturers. Readers of Max Power will be right at home though you’ll not find any scantily clad babes to drape over your bonnet here. To be honest, having a chick to dump on your bonnet might have been a good idea as we’ve seen all of this modding and upgrading stuff before in the NFS: Underground games. To its credit, Juiced does feature slight differences in performance for different makers of the same suspension or intake kits where the NFS games didn’t, but other than that its very much a case of seen it, done it, bought the upgrade and paid the speeding fine.
