Ah, April Fools’ Day: Google is now Topeka, the excellent webcomic xkcd goes terminal, and my college announced that next year the campus will be dry (this was especially well-played because alcohol policy was in the process of being changed only yesterday). Among all these April 1st shenanigans, the 2010 New York International Auto Show pressed on, with its usual stock of interesting reveals (which I shall definitely be covering in the coming week). Toyota, however, decided that it would be the perfect day to launch two new video ad campaigns in order to increase attention for new models in its subsidiary brands. Oh, they got my attention alright…

BMW Lexus Films

Does anyone remember when BMW released that phenomenal set of eight short films in a series called The Hire from 2001 to 2002? If not, a brief synopsis is in order: Clive Owen played a wheelman known as “The Driver,” who takes on various risky driving-related missions. As well as being highly entertaining, these videos showcased BMW’s strong lineup at the time, including its M-model lineup. The series was an enormous viral success and helped boost BMW sales numbers that year. Today, nearly nine years later, Lexus announced a series of their own videos centered around the upcoming CT200h hatchback. And thus the first red flag was raised.

The CT200h?, I thought, That’s a luxo-economy car, isn’t it? It is. Powered by a 1.8L inline-4, the CT200h is expected to produce less than 200 horsepower. It’s also front wheel drive and has an eCVT transmission. What’s that you say? This powertrain configuration cannot possibly be fun? I agree, that’s what it sounds like to me, too. However, Lexus doesn’t think so. Watch this teaser to see what I mean:

Lexus’ new series, which apparently is set to launch on May 13th, 2010, is called Dark Ride. The name stinks of low-grade sci-fi, does it not? Anyway, this is what I’ve gathered from watching this: Lexus has made a BMW Films clone using a car that will be plagued by tremendous understeer and a 0-60 time that will be lucky if it sees the low 9-second range. As my friend accurately pointed out while watching this video, you never actually see the thing accelerate from a dig. I’m guessing that’s because no filmmaker could shoulder the impossible task of making Prius-like acceleration footage look action-packed. I don’t blame them.

Reinvent The Whiff

Swing and a massive miss, Toyota. In order to attempt to raise the hype of its new models, Scion’s advertising department has begun airing a series of episodes called Reinvent The Wheels on YouTube. A bastardly hybrid of MTV’s Pimp My Ride and the generic “contestant presents to a panel of judges” reality show model, Reinvent The Wheels pits a group of “design professionals” (the likes of which are pastry chefs, DJs, and special effect artists for independent films) against each other in a competition to see who can each best customize one car from Scion’s new, desperate line of vehicles. Of course, as you probably expected, the designs concepts shown in the first episode (all I needed to watch to get the point) are hilariously atrocious. Video literally speaks louder than text, though, so watch this:

It cannot possibly be anything but a lose-lose situation: either it’s acting so bad that it’s actually NOT funny, or these are real people. For the entire world’s sake, I’d really hope for the former.

The Real Joke

APRIL FOOLS! …I wish. But it’s no joke. There are no intentional lulz to be had here: Toyota’s marketing department is really, actually determined to use these campaigns to help their sales. In the case of the Lexus series, Dark Ride, it seems the goal is to capture a younger, more “sporty” demographic using some weird footage of a gilded economy car. With the Reinvent The Wheels campaign, Scion is trying to flout its apparent customizability to even more tasteless youths than before.

You know what the real joke is here? It’s probably going to work.

Yeah, yeah, I know this game came out in November of 2008, and that it’s almost a whole year later, AND that Need For Speed: Shift is coming out in slightly over a month, but I still feel the need to give a commentary on this game. Until I saw the light of games like DiRT, Test Drive Unlimited, and Forza Motorsport 2, I was a big Need For Speed fan.

Need For Speed: Most Wanted was (and still is) one of the greatest “arcadey” racing games ever made (those police chases almost become zombie-horror-survival-esque with their one-versus-infinite feel), so it was natural for EA: Blackbox to try to replicate that feel after two games that didn’t do so well (Carbon and ProStreet). Did they succeed? Read on to find out.

A Failed Attempt?

Indeed. Most Wanted‘s concept worked wonders the first time. Carbon was an undeniable flop of a game. ProStreet was a completely different breed of game (a faux-sim, if you will), so it doesn’t count, although EA’s CEO John Riccitiello thinks it’s comparable:

I thought it [Pro Street] was an okay game, in terms of gameplay. It’s not good… …Undercover will be a much better game.

Wrong you are, John, because Undercover is pretty damn poor. I know I enjoyed ProStreet, which I traded in to get Undercover, a lot more. It’s a better game overall, because it’s not trying to be Most Wanted; it’s original. Enough about comparisons between the Need For Speed games… time to talk about Undercover by itself.

The Good

I’m starting with the good so you can see that I just don’t blindly hate this game, and because there is actually a surprising amount of good in this game (just not right stuff, unfortunately). The map, Tri-City, is colossal. It’s got 109 miles of roadway, which only loses to Test Drive Unlimited out of the games I’ve played. The map has more than enough polygons, as to not have the jarring “ride” of TDU, and they manage to make the visuals of a moderately boring desert-combined-with-coastal-town (yeah, I was confused too) quite beautiful with the lighting and shaders the game’s graphics engine employs. Speaking of the graphics, the cars look absolutely amazing as well. The paint shades look excellent and you can definitely and easily distinguish between the finishes available for the paints (see my matte black Veyron as an example, although excuse the poor quality of the image). The attention to detail is also excellent, except when the cars get damaged, in which case the damage looks rather generic and it’s not exact (for instance, swipe the left front quarter panel only and the whole front bumper appears scratched).

Then comes the car list, which I personally think is the best they’ve had in a Need For Speed yet. You’ve got everything from the old Corvette Stingray to the Bugatti Veyron, including a little personal favorite of mine, the Volkswagen R32 (again, see my image below). Europe, Asia, and America are all represented, although the representation from Asia could be a little bit stronger. At least they have the R35 GT-R.

The last good thing about the game I’d like to touch on briefly is the soundtrack. Every Need For Speed has had at least a few good songs on its soundtrack (well, except Carbon maybe), but this one definitely takes the cake. As well as representing very well-known names such as Justice, Nine Inch Nails, and The Whip, Undercover features some interesting and fun tracks from slightly less mainstream bands and artists such as Ladytron, Ojos De Brujo, The Pinker Tones, Mindless Self Indulgence, and The Fashion. I have not yet switched to my own music streaming from my iTunes Library while playing this game, which is something I usually find myself doing fairly quickly with Need For Speed titles. Hell, it’s actually an iPod-worthy soundtrack.

The Bad… Uh-Oh

Oh boy. Here it comes. I actually don’t even know where to start. Factual inaccuracies? Good idea.

And yes, as a disclaimer to possible fanboys, I know this game isn’t a sim, but damn, these errors are truly unforgiveable. Here are a few, NOT ALL, by any means, but a few:

• Possibly a deliberate error, the pricing of cars in this game is ridiculous. A Nissan GT-R is $225k while the Veyron is $325k, and an Audi S5 is $115k.
• It is commonly known fact that the Lamborgini Gallardo LP560-4 and the Audi R8 are very, very closely related and that the Gallardo is the better performing of the two by a considerable margin. Why, then, is the Gallardo less expensive and in a lower performance tier than the R8 in Undercover?
• The Veyron is a tank, weighing in at over 4000 lbs. How can a police-equipped Porsche 911 Turbo (with a very heavily rear-biased weight of 3500 lbs) perform a PIT maneuver on a car with a mid-mounted W16?
• The A.I. in this game can handle a car on the highway at 200 MPH like doing a slalom on foot. No human will ever have such reflex. They also can spin you out with great ease, like the police, but if you try to do the same to them, it’s like hitting a brick wall.

As you can see, this Undercover has absolutely zero regard for physics, and this becomes even more apparent as you progress through the game, unlocking cars that handle better and upgrade parts to increase handling even further. I was at Lime Rock a few weeks ago (yes, I know, I know, a post about that is STILL in order), and I watched as the Acura LMP1 car tore through corners at over 80 miles per hour with complete control. This morning in Undercover, I took a hairpin turn in the Veyron (which, if I may point out, is not a stellar car for insane handling) at 160 miles per hour, flat out, no brakes, nothing, and did it cleanly, too. Seriously, what were they thinking?

It’s clear that they tried to mimic Most Wanted, but they honestly could not have made the game look more like it AND be less like it. The same feeling of “Oh damn, I gotta escape!” is not there during cop chases, the A.I. make the races extremely annoying, and the plot is more or less the equivalent of mixing 2 Fast 2 Furious and The Transporter. No, seriously, that’s actually what they were shooting for:

Undercover, according to Riccitiello, is instead taking cues from action films. “For those of you who ever saw movies like The Transporter – it’s sort of a cult classic among people with a B-movie mentality, which fits me perfectly,” he said.

My Final Verdict

Well, Mr. Riccitiello, The Transporter may be a B-Movie and fits you well, but Undercover is really a D-Game and doesn’t fit me at all. I was hoping so much for a newer, better Most Wanted, and this is the mess I get instead? Really?

For pretending to be Most Wanted, and of course, failing, I give Need For Speed: Undercover an Ignition Unlimited Media Rating of 3/10.

Ah, The Fast And The Furious trilogy quadrilogy: the single biggest butt of jokes in the history of car movies. The first, The Fast And The Furious, was possibly the largest impetus to the rise of ricers; the second, 2 Fast 2 Furious, was a terrible, terrible movie with a dry, boring plot and horrifyingly gross cars; the third, The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift was an interesting spin on things and possibly the best of the bunch (although that’s not really saying much). When I heard there was a fourth one coming, and that it would restore the cast of the original movie, I was wondering if they were attempting to redeem the sorry series with a retry of the original. Despite this, I wasn’t expecting much, as it is still part of the F&F series. Well, this past weekend I went to see Fast And Furious, and it was not exactly what I expected…

My Thoughts

Alright, I’ll go right out with it: I was expecting bad, but this was absolutely horrible. I don’t even know where to start, but I guess I’ll begin with the plot. It seems as if they took the plot from the second movie, nearly exactly, and swapped out some characters, cars, and objectives. Yeah, that’s right, the second movie. The worst one. Needless to say, the acting is horrible, with stellar, over-the-top performances from Vin Diesel and Paul Walker. The minor characters were acted stereotypically and in a way so easy to guess, I had the movie figured out literally twenty minutes in.

The Fast And The Furious series is about street racing, right? Well there’s ONE main race, and it’s unrealistic and packed to the brim with CG and corny drifts. It also featured what would be the coolest navigation system ever – if it existed, and furthermore, didn’t look like something out of Star Wars.

And now, the cars. Oh, this is going to be fun. Well, it’s the second movie all over again: riced imports against old muscle that border on tasteless. I had an admittedly hard time keeping myself from cracking up at a scene I know should have been 100% serious: a certain funeral (I’m giving no spoilers) sees a group of ricers’ racers cars parked along a cemetary road, sporting their oversized wings and wheels. It was almost insulting.

Paul Walker is given the choice of any import on the city’s impound lot to use in his undercover mission, and after filtering through plenty of rice but also legitimately awesome cars such as the Honda S2000 and the new Nissan GT-R, he goes with a cool yet horrifyingly outdated (and overused in this series) Nissan Skyline GT-R R34, only to tune it exactly how he does in the second movie. Boring. Vin Diesel’s got yet more old-school muscle, both a Chevelle SS and the same Charger from the first movie. Boring again. Later in the movie, Diesel and Walker steal a riced 2008 Subaru Impreza WRX STI from the impound lot. That should really please the Subaru fans who saw this.

Ok, ok, there were some good cars as well, but let me make this point: they do NOT, in any way, redeem this movie, especially because most of them are only featured for a few seconds, tops. A black Buick Regal GNX plays a fairly integral part for the first five minutes, then disappears entirely for the rest of the movie. The best part of the movie only lasts for about five seconds, though: a white, rally-tuned Ford Escort Cosworth RS shows itself, light rack and all, at the beginning of some miscellaneous drag race. At the very end of the movie, the audience is slightly rewarded (like I said, nothing redeems the rest of the movie) with seeing Jordana Brewster driving a JDM-spec Honda NSX-R. Finally, there’s some Porsche Cayman which I guess could be considered cool. Overall though, in terms of cars, I was left far short of impressed.

Conclusion

I wanted to give Fast And Furious a chance. I really did. I heard it was the best of the series, and after Tokyo Drift, I was convinced that the people responsible for this movie had what it takes to make a good movie. Sadly, no. The fourth movie in this series is a tremendous failure, bringing back the same things that ruined the second movies. I’ll give this an Ignition Unlimited Media Rating of 3 out of 10. If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t. Wait until DVD to see it, if ever.

Who would do such a thing? This is the horrifying work of A Bathing Ape (BAPE) founder Nigo, who has also destroyed created a pink Bugatti Veyron and a camouflage Rolls Royce Phantom. This time, though, he’s just taken it too far. Way too far. It’s one thing to make a mess out of a modern production car, but to destroy a rare and beautiful creation such as the Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing? Simply sickening. I mean, look at that thing… a car I would die to own, ruined by the crazy tastes of some insane clothing designer. Poor SL.

Yes, I know it’s been modernized by AMG, and I think that’s pretty cool, but they were not responsible for the horrifying exterior styling. It just looks so… degraded in that cheap camouflage scheme. More pictures in the full post.