Need for Speed: Underground: Let's race

Need for Speed Underground, or NFSU for short, is a game in the Need for Speed series. This game is pretty much the same as others in this series with one major difference: all races occur at night. Night racing for me is ok but I wasn't too crazy about it being the whole premise of the game (NFS: Carbon takes place at night as well). You start out with a very basic car and you must win races in order to be recognized. By winning races, you unlocked new cars and new modification parts such as new hoods, paint jobs etc. You must mix and match the different parts as you progress to increase your rating among your underground peers. The higher your rating, the more noticeable you will be and you will begin to show up on top notch magazines. Races are divided between easy, medium, and hard difficulties. Hard races are hard to complete (you only earn stuff if you finish a race in 1st place) but you earn more than if you completed the race on easy or medium so it's your choice. There are races where you must powerslide your car and try to achieve a certain number of points. These races are my favorite. They take place on a circular track and you are given a certain number of laps to achieve these points. If you are good enough, you can beat these races on hard. On to gameplay. There are only a couple of tracks, but these tracks are modified various times to have different races (changing a turn here or there). Still a little more tracks would have been nice. Also it is very easy to crash while racing. If you do crash (and it's hard not to), it will be very hard to catch up and win because it seems like the computer never crashes. There is nitro used in the game. It is supposed to help your car speed up when the button is pressed. However I feel that this was a waste of time because the nitro doesn't help much. I am also not a car aficionado. Therefore I didn't like customizing my car just to advance in rank. Future NFS games remedy this, so that's a good thing. Music, for the most part, is ok. There are some memorable songs. But I think that this soundtrack fails in comparison to others in this series. If you like car customization along with racing, you will like this game. For me, this game was ok, but there are better racing games for me to play.