My $300 gamble paid off because...

"Need for Speed Underground: Rivals" was the first game I bought for my Playstation Portable, and I've been a fan of the Need for Speed franchise for quite a while, and I was exceptionally fond of "Underground" despite the fact that it seems like everyone wants to be a tuner these days.

NFSU: Rivals is quite a decent game, it's definitely not bad as far as release games go. It remains somewhat true to the franchise, at least as far as "Underground" goes, though it does lack any form of transition between the levels - it takes more of the much touted PSP "mini-game" approach.

The controls are faithful to the console versions, and the game physics are pretty much the same as well. It's not quite the driving simulator that Gran Turismo is, but it's not bad at all. It manages to keep the realism and the fun for non-racing types alike.

Graphically, the game is quite nice. The dark nature of the display is not easy to view in bright daylight, despite the bright yellow/red borders the developers used to make things more visible. But the track and cars look spectacular either at standstill or 120mph - you really couldn't ask for a nicer release game to showoff the capabilities of the system.

The sound's not terrible, but it's not amazing. The soundtrack is pumping as always, but it's also not comprised of a huge number of original tracks - many of them are simply re-issued from the two console "Underground" releases. One of the things I did notice was that at times you manage to "lose" your engine noise - it simply drops out and doesn't come back until maybe 15 seconds later.

Multiplayer is very fun, despite the lack of infrastructure support. It keeps track of the player names that you've beaten and been defeated by. Unfortunately it's only "head to head" - you seem to lack the ability to race against more than one person at a time.

"Party Play" is quite a fun mode - at least for a little while - which basically puts a band-aid on the problem of wanting to play multiplayer but having your friends being too poor to afford a PSP of their own. You each take turns on either a timed or points scoring race of short length, and then pass it on to the next player, and the game tells you who's won at the end.

If you were a fan of drifting in the original two console "Underground" versions, chances are you might be horribly disappointed. Gone is the "freeform drifting" of those releases - you're forced into driving over lit up pads, in order, you must be drifting when you touch them, and drift all the way over the end of them to score points. It's frustratingly difficult, then trivial, then seemingly almost impossible - and this player might have even prefered having drift mode dropped from the game completely instead.

Aside from my gripes with the sound and, multiplayer (which should be called "two-player") the one other downside is the slowdown. Yeah, unfortunately at times (blasting out a couple of closed shed doors with an opponent in front of you comes to mind) the game slows down terribly - it simply mutes the entire impressiveness of the game, and for fifty bucks you kinda are left with the feeling that these things shouldn't happen. It's really a game that could benefeit from the full power of the PSP, rather than the crippled release version.

On the whole, the game is the next best thing to having "NFSU: Underground" in the palm of your hand. If you're not a fan of the console franchise, you probably won't enjoy this - especially with the steep price tag and other problems. It all comes down to whether you enjoyed the console version or not. Let that be the deciding factor when deciding on this game.