Juiced

Introduction

After years of countless delays and holdups, Juiced has finally arrived. Juiced began development right around the time of the first Need For Speed Underground title and has since been delayed a number of times due to publisher issues. Developer Juice Games originally signed a contract to publish their new racing title with Acclaim Entertainment. Unfortunately for Acclaim they went out of business last year, and Juiced was left alone without a publisher. THQ eventually scooped up the rights to publish the title so that development could be completed. Well, it's finally done, and we are disappointed to say that it was not worth the wait. Granted Juiced does have its finer points, and there are a few nice ideas put into this street racing game that you probably won't find in any other title. However, its poor presentation, weak graphics and undesirable driving physics don't exactly make it top dog in this genre.



While Juiced doesn't necessarily offer up any type of story that we see so often in street racing titles, it does have a very lengthy career mode that takes quite a while to complete. Career mode is obviously the main area of gameplay in Juiced, where you can race for big bucks and unlock plenty of different performance and visual modifications for your vehicles. Right away you're given a hefty $40,000 and setup in a race against T.K, who serves as your primary contact throughout your career. Maybe he sees potential in your racing style, or maybe he's just after your pink slips. Either way he's your first contact in the game, and you can call him at anytime to setup a new race or to take on new challenges.

The characters that you'll meet throughout the game are shown in small cinematic videos where they talk rubbish about your ride and how much they can beat you. Each character does have their own distinct personality and desired amount of money that they wish to bet. Once you're done racing T.K. using one of his cars, you have to take a quick trip to the garage to spend your new $40,000 on your own ride. There are only a small amount of cars that are first available for purchase, but there is a large number of cars that are unlocked in the dealership later on. Normally when a new car is unlocked you'll receive a call on the cell phone letting you know what new vehicles have just been made available for purchase. Just a few of the listed cars include a Toyota Corolla, Mazda MX-5, Volkswagen Beetle GLS, Honda CR-X, Ford Focus, Mitsubishi Eclipse GSX and more. The car list does get much better later on, and most cars also have different models to choose.



Whether or not your newly-bought car has some power behind it, it is still not a very good idea to take a stock car out onto the fierce street racing tracks. This is where Juiced 's customization capabilities come into play. This is really one of nicer features in Juiced . The customizations that you can do to your cars feels a little more in-depth than that of the Need For Speed Underground series. In other words, there seems to be more ways that you can customize your car. For example, Need For Speed Underground works from a simple upgrade system. When you simply want to install a better turbo system all you have to do is just upgrade to level 1 or level 2 if it's available at that time. It really didn't matter what manufacturing company you chose for that part that you're installing, because the company names were more for show, or authenticity, than anything else.