Need for Speed: ProStreet, the latest racer from EA Games, represents a change of direction for the Need for Speed franchise. Instead of racing in a wide open city, you race on closed tracks. Instead of earning the ire of the law, you now race in sanctioned pro-am events. And instead of cinematic cut scenes which tell some hilariously retarded story about your illegal street racing career, you'll be stuck listening to an idiot announcer while boring, rendered in engine scenes take place.

While the race mechanics and car rendering have improved a bit, keeping up with current generation expectations, the game itself is a step back. EA Games has somehow managed to toss out everything that gave the NFS series its unique character, replacing it with dullness. Plus, they've added the annoying announcer guy.

As racers go, the NFS series has been arcadey since at least NFS Underground. Some of the previous versions, High Stakes and Porsche Unleashed come to mind, were much closer to being sim racers. While NFS:PS is still arcadey, it definitely represents a turn back towards simulation style racers. That said, it's breaking into the turn, not accelerating out of it, so to speak.

The overall handling is definitely more realistic than in recent offerings, particularly when you take the new damage modeling into consideration. In some of the previous games you could actually use the lack of damage modeling to your advantage such that, sometimes, bouncing off the walls at full throttle was the quicker method of rounding certain corners. In ProStreet, not so. The first wall you hit at full speed will total your car.

While it does represent a turn towards realism, the damage modeling is pretty simplistic. It's most useful feature is that it allows you to get extra points for a clean race. Damage comes in the form of light damage or heavy damage. Light damage is largely cosmetic and will have little (if any) effect on your ability to finish a race. Even so, it can be expensive to fix. Heavy damage will adversely affect your overall performance; the more you get, the slower you go. Simplistic as it is, it gets the job done in that it encourages clean, precise racing. A clean race gets you extra points, and a dirty race hurts your performance, score and bottom line.

The story of this new NFS, such as it is, is the story of one Ryan Cooper, a pro-am underdog that used to be an illegal street racer. There are a number of skill tiers, each containing a number of "race days". There's a central race day in which all racers drive the exact same car, presumably provided by the race sponsors, as a sort of qualifier for the rest of the events. After beating the central race day, you can move on to the other race days in the same tier. After beating most of those, you can then move on to the "pro challenge" which is basically just another race day.

And really, it's about as exciting as I make it sound, which is to say: not at all. What really drags the whole experience down is, in fact, the presentation of the "story". It's told via in-engine scenes that take place during your race day. In one, there's this guy, Ryo who's some sort of racing bad ass, and despite your winning a particular race, he complains that you're just a poser because you don't race with style. In another splendid scene you'll be forced to observe the presentation of some stylin rides accompanied by a race-queen. And I do mean forced: you can't skip these stupid things.

And all of it's accompanied by a running commentary by generic announcer guy. I want to stab generic announcer guy in the face. Repeatedly. Seriously, I hate him. First, he has this awful, braying voice, and second, every single word that comes from his mouth is laced with deadly levels of stupid. In an effort to make his chatter all "street" like and such, he has to end every other sentence with "you know what I'm sayin". I found that I actually enjoyed the game more when I muted the entire thing.

And the stupid street talk doesn't end there. As each race loads, there's a quick "heads up" describing the overall rules of the type of race coming up. They're almost uniformly badly written. The most retarded of which starts by informing you that "Grip Races are basically a straight up race." Seriously, who approved this copy? Like everything else in the game that isn't actual racing, it's stupid.

The biggest head scratcher, for me, is the car customization. It's almost like they went out of their way to make it suck. You'd think a company with more than 10 years of designing car customization screens could build one that doesn't fight the user. Painting your car is a pain. Applying decals to your car is mind bogglingly difficult. And upgrading your car's parts has gone from intuitive to utterly perplexing. They use this new "blueprint" system which, rather than simplifying the management of car setup and performance tuning, makes it a chore.

Need for Speed ProStreet is a giant step backwards in just about every way that matters. Instead of being a stylish racer with a crazy story and great customization options, it's turned into just another racing game. There's simply no meaningful difference between NFS ProStreet and the pile of other generic racers available. Except one: the other racers don't have annoying announcer guy.

I am thoroughly disappointed.

A final note: Having played it on both the PS3 and 360, I have to say: if you have choice and you ignore the rest of this review, get the 360 version. The throttle controls on the PS3 are just not analog enough, and that hurts you in the drag races. Beyond that, I've noticed no meaningful differences in the single player modes of this game. I can't speak to the online capabilities of this game: I don't like it enough to feel like adding the annoyance factor of other people in the mix.