Need For Speed Underground 2 is just such a game, and I'll tell you why.

It combines a very large, attractive free-roaming area full of performance shops, detail shops, rival racers and more wherein you can cruise to your heart's content; this is the city of Bayview. available in Explore Mode. It's easy to navigate this zone as you have a mini-map in the corner of the screen that is either fixed or rotates with you as you turn. You can aimlessly drive for fun, or you can take race challenges. Some of the challenges are found in locations indicated on your map and will wait for you to complete them. Others will appear after you have made a certain amount of progress through the game and will give you unique opportunities to gain points and reputation. You can also discover hidden races that don't appear on your map. You find these by SMS and voice messages, as well as just looking out for unusually colored street lamps. You can also flag down rivals and have quick and fun Outrun races (although you'll probably never lose these, as they are quite easy).

By unlocking events or passing over "i" (for information) icons, you'll get SMS text messages on your mobile phone (sponsored by Cingular). You can quickly view these in a sub-menu, and even archive and delete them if you like. They contain basic gameplay information, hints and clues to the locations of secret races and hidden shops.

There are several different types of races that you can enter.

The tracks are primarily created by sectioning off areas of the street map. This not only allows for a very large number of street courses, but also gives you the opportunity to practice routes and lines while in Explore Mode. Also advantageous is that you can discover shortcuts out on the streets and sometimes bring that knowledge to bear when you need to make a quick jump to first place. Varying road conditions add extra variety, with the Draft races being played out on glass-smooth courses for extra banking, to the dry surface of drag races. Some races even have variable weather patterns during the race, so that what starts out as a fairly simple exercise in power-sliding soon becomes a rain-soaked nightmare as you lose control in the tight corners.

It is not very challenging, especially at the early stages. Outrun races in particular are an easy way to build up money and reputation. Get enough of those, and you can purchase the upgrades necessary to win races at higher difficulty levels. Finding hidden shops also opens up a wider range of parts for your car. One part that is indispensable to this game is the Nitro Boost.

While your first car does not have a Nitro system, you will want to get one as soon as it is available. It is the very heart of the game. Once you have Nitro, then the Race-breaker feature is made available to you. When you pull off a stylish maneuver, such as burning out, power-sliding or gaining place ranking in a race, you get points. If you use Nitro, then these points will replenish your Nitro. Sufficiently stylish driving can refill a whole tank from nothing. You are also rewarded in the same manner for driving clean, so the temptation to just slam around the track is much lessened. In a large 4-lap circuit race, pulling off a few clean sections can give you the boost you need to take the lead. It is nice that the game has an actual mechanical reward system for taking risks and performing exceptionally well.

It's fun boosting up your car, and even adding "bling-bling" (as the kids say) has a game mechanic advantage, improving your reputation and granting you bonus cash for "magazine cover" races. However, this isn't entirely necessary, and if you feel that the cosmetic extras ruin the look of your car, then you can just buy another car or two and switch off depending on what you need at the moment. Similarly, if you want to tune up your car for drag races, but don't want to ruin it for street courses, you can make a preset tuning for each race type (other than Outrun), which allows you to do just that. You can even tune your car while driving in a special mode available from the garage. All in all, your cars are super-configurable, but it never really gets difficult. Buying more parts for your car usually translates almost directly into better acceleration, handling or top speed, and you can see the improvement before you buy by checking the bar graphs that represent these attributes. And if you decided to uninstall a part, then you can do that quickly in the garage and save the part for another car.

Controls are configurable to four presets. Audio is configurable. The game is just ridiculously configurable, so whatever your favorite set-up/car/control is, you will probably be able to have it. If the game has hot-rodded racing SUVs, then it probably has just about everything else... and it does have hot-rodded racing SUVs, and my, are they tacky.

The graphics are quite a mixed bag. They cityscape is very lovely, and the objects in the background look very good, but curved streets are actually polygonal segments (eg, curved paint stripes are actually angled). When the streets are dry, the textures are flat enough that oncoming traffic can be difficult to spot because of their headlights. When it's raining, though, it really looks like wet pavement. The car models are attractive. They are not very beautiful, but they are functional, and when you're going fast enough, you really won't notice. The same is true for buildings and signs. When you are really racing, you simply don't notice things being a bit angular or flat textured. The speed and Nitro boost effects sufficiently warp and blur everything enough that it begins to look very realistic. There are no pedestrians in this game, however, and it's for very good reason. The human models, only appearing in cut-scenes between races, are terrible. They are completely unnecessary, though, and neither contribute to nor detract from the gameplay. Also, while the opening movie sequence is nice and crisp, interstitial movies between "chapters" of career mode gameplay suffer from a disgusting amount of compression artifacts. Game Cube discs are very small, and space is much more limited than on a PS2 or Xbox disc, so I can understand the need for compression. However, if they knew it would look this bad, they should have just left it out. An example of what they did to compensate in other areas was to use a comic-book storyboard format for interstitial scenes. A comic book page is flashed onscreen, then the camera zooms and pans in on the current frames, while the voice actors play out the scene. The artwork was very nice, and it is a novel and interesting concept, but these sequences progressed just too slowly for me, so I skipped them. Fortunately, you can easily skip all cut scenes and movies by pressing the big, green A button.

The sound was also a mixed bag. The soundtrack is an unremarkable mix of techno, nu-metal, industrial and hip-hop. It is inoffensive, though, and there are a few good tracks in a fairly large soundtrack, but all of the acts onboard are no-names, has-beens or might-be’s that probably have cheap licensing rates in common. The voice acting is generally bad, with too much "hip & edgy" jive talk. I mean, no one says "dawg" anymore, do they? The racing sound effects are good and functional, though, and the sound options will let you turn off the rest of that garbage. Unfortunately, you may miss some clues to hidden races and shops if you don't listen to your voice-mail, but you might find them on your own, anyway.

From a functional standpoint, the game really shines. Despite frequent loads between sub-menus, races and garage interfaces, I found it to be quite swift and agile. With other systems which shall remain nameless, I can load a save game, go off and make a sandwich, and have it half-eaten by the time my game is loaded. Then, I shall probably die because of a bad camera angle, reload, make another sandwich, etc, et al, ad infinitum. NFSUG2 has very excellent loading times, especially for restarting races, and even on the very large map in Explore Mode, I never noticed any slowdown as it loaded in streets, graphics and events. Whatever engine beats within this beast is quite mighty, indeed.

This is not a difficult game, but it is very well balanced and engrossing. Its highly configurable interface gives you the power to shape it even further into a game that is great for the all-night campaign or the quick pick-up game when you have a spare five minutes. NFSUG2 has many different race types all well executed within a no-frills engine that gets to the core of the racing genre.