I have to admit to looking forward to this title; having been tempted often to buy one of the next gen consoles merely to play driving games. During two of my stints in the studio in my band, we "wound down" with plenty of beer and a few hours of various driving games on the Xbox. Need for Speed coming to the Mac was rather cool, and it was probably the most interesting of the first raft of EA releases for Intel Macs.

The excuse for you to careen around the city is the fact that you are earning money and prestige to pay back the guy who paid off your bounty. The storyline is not that deep; but there is at least enough of it to make things interesting. There is a nice share of backstabbing, intrigue and duplicity, which makes things more fun. The cutscenes, while cheesy, are no worse than anything in a similar driving-themed movie series one could think of. Thankfully, cutscenes are brief and don't intrude too much.

You have three possible paths in the game, which you can change in your later car choices; you can start with a tuner, an exotic or muscle car. For a first-time player, I would take the advice of the various FAQs about and go for tuner. Your starter car gets good quick with alterations and stays competitive far longer than the other two. Don't, like muggins here, try and play the first time with a muscle car.

Let's just say the game designers have the European/Japanese attitude towards American cars and going around corners. The handling on almost all of the muscle cars, except with heavy modification, is barge like. Fun, yes, but not useful if you are trying to advance through the game.

There are lots of tracks to choose from as you move through the game and take over territory. A couple of great aspects are the fact you don't have to win every race to take a patch. This is incredibly useful if, like me, you cannot "drift" to save your life. You get rewards for each race won, each territory taken and boss races won. These take place on the canyon, which features heavily as you advance in the game. The great thing about the canyon is the lack of police.

Alas, advance brings problems as well. I am not talking in-game design but game stability. Certain tracks in the "challenge" part of the game have the habit of crashing the game — even at the lowest graphic settings on a machine well in the recommend requirements for the game. Most frustrating is that these crashes tend to happen toward the end of the race, usually when you are ahead, and can be quite frustrating. I was really impressed that NFS: Carbon managed to hard crash OSX. It is rare for OSX to crash so that you have to shut down the machine — very rare indeed. Needless to say, an update that addresses this issue would be welcomed post haste.

You can continue your fun online racing against people all over the world. I was lucky enough to hook up with someone from an NFS fan site who helped guide me through the vagaries of online play. There are ranking and bonuses that can help your offline play as well. You are not able to play a tier of car until your offline character has unlocked, however. This is not a problem and gives you an incentive to advance.

Overall, this is a great game that will provide you hours of fun tempered with frustration. NFS fans tell me it is not the best of the series. I could care less; great racing games are rarity on the Mac, and NFS is welcome addition to platform.