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Applelinks has posted a new review of Need For Speed: Carbon, an action packed racing title from Electronic Arts, made available for Intel Macs courtesy of Cider emulation. Applelinks gave the game a score of 4 out of 5.

From the review:

The racing itself starts out fairly easy, but that doesn't last. By adapting more of an arcade style approach and forgoing realism, the developer made sure they built up your confidence before tearing it down later on. The keyboard controls don't help. They're fine enough in the early levels, but as the difficulty increases, I found them terribly frustrating. Thankfully, the game worked just fine with my Logitech RumblePad 2. Setting it up was kind of annoying, if only because the set-up interface is cumbersome. Beyond that, though, having a good game pad will make a world of difference. In fact, I'm tempted to rent the Wii version of Need for Speed: Carbon just to see how much easier it is to play when doing so with controls conducive to racing.

This is important, because considering the wide variety of racing styles and the difficulty of them all, you'll nee a more seamless control system than the keyboard can provide. The drifting races, especially, is much, much easier to handle with a c-stick or actual steering wheel (I didn't test the game with a steering wheel, so I can't comment on compatibility). Same with the boss battles, which find you first staying as close to the opposing driver as possible, and then trying to stay as far ahead as possible. These are quite fun, but they're just not natural and are therefore extremely frustrating on the keyboard.

Applelinks: Need For Speed Carbon

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