Need for Speed/YMMV

• And the Fandom Rejoiced: Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. Developed by Criterion Games. Focus back onto the exotics. And a Bugatti Veyron cop car.
• Broken Base: specifically, the pre-Underground fans versus the Underground fans. The massive amounts of Fan Dumb over Shift is astounding. Here's proof.
  • For another example, see the comments here, some of which are rated at around +10. Maybe deservedly so, Your Mileage May Vary.
  • Not even Criterion is immune from this; immediate reactions after the confirmation that the next game in the series would be a reboot of Most Wanted developed by them ranged from excitement that the developers of the Burnout series and Hot Pursuit 2010 is returning for another reboot of a fan-favorite Need for Speed title to disappointment that they're not returning to Burnout just yet with expressions being made that Criterion's first NFS title wasn't as good as they hoped it would be. In other words, the Need for Speed fanbase is still very much fragmented to this day, and we don't know much anything about Most Wanted 2012 yet!
    • People probably weren't expecting Most Wanted 2012 to be so different to the original. It's likely that most people were slightly disappointed, but the fun-looking gameplay made up for it.
• Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch: Nitro received much flak for having a drastically different art style from the rest of the series, as well as for replacing Shift on the Wii.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Some of you gamers may wonder why Forza Motorsport 4 and Gran Turismo 5 didn't feature any Porsche. This is the reason. (Forza 4 did get a Porsche DLC expansion recently.)
• Character Tiers: The series as a whole tends to divide cars into "Classes," putting similar cars into different classes (for example, putting high-performance sports cars like the Lamborghini Diablo VT and the Ferrari 512TR in their own Class).
• Crazy Awesome Car: Nitro allows the player to (visually) mod vehicles such as a Volkswagen Type 2 or a Tesla Roadster, among other things.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: Has its own page.
• Dork Age: The series fell into one starting around Carbon (although some will claim everything post-Underground as Canon Discontinuity), and left it with Shift and Hot Pursuit 2010.
• Even Better Sequel: Shift 2: Unleashed to Shift 1, specially after the 1.02 patch which corrected the jerky handling for pad users.
• Excuse Plot: Seriously, EMPs? Satchels? Police stings? Bleh. Just drive and laugh.
• Fanon Discontinuity: see Broken Base. "I wish NFS was still around."
• Fandom Rivalry: With Test Drive during The Nineties.
  • With Gran Turismo 5 in 2010, even though it makes little sense as they take completely opposite approaches to the racing genre.
    • Gran Turismo 5 and Shift 2: Unleashed would make more sense.
• Fridge Logic: after a few Races in Hot Pursuit 2010 as the cop you'll probably get this... The game gives you some of the fastest cars in the world complete with some seriously awesome looking police paint jobs and sirens (in fact you can even select what kinda sound you want your sirens to make)) that would probably still be heard amidst the noise of the engine. But the Civilians on the roads don't seem to mind at all, which can be particularly frustrating when you're driving say a Konigsegg CCX down the freeway at max speed while truck drivers or cars are moving at a gentle pace down the same freeway.
  • What's worse is hitting said vehicles get's a huge +3 time penalty (hitting the sides of the road costs 2) and can make some challenges nearly impossible.
• "Grand Theft Auto" Effect: To be expected when you have an EA soundtrack in your game. Snoop Dogg? Spiderbait? The Buzzhorn? Bush? Hot Action Cop? Disturbed? Bitchin.
• In Name Only: The series between Underground and Undercover is this to the previous games. Also, the V-Rally installments.
  • The Broken Base starts at Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks: What some say about Carbon.
• Memetic Mutation: One of Razor's lines about betting "five grand -- FIVE GRAND!" against the player character in one of the opening cutscenes to Most Wanted is an inside joke at Giant Bomb that comes up whenever a NFS game is in the news.
• Porting Disaster: While not exactly a port as such, the PlayStation 2 and Wii versions of Undercover are considered by reviewers as nothing more than just cash-ins for fans who don't have a more premium system, and therfore, the superior version. The visuals are worse than Carbon's, despite being two years younger, the framerate is (amazingly) worse than the 360/PS3 versions, and the game's landscapes aren't actually new; they're actually just various roads and highways from both Most Wanted and Carbon clobbered together. On top of that, it still suffers various problems that griped the superior versions i.e. the glaring, shiny street effect.
  • Even worse with the Wii version of Hot Pursuit 2k10. Bear in mind how the game was praised for dragging the series out of the stale tuner street racing theme and returning to its roots. The Wii version is effectively Nitro, but with out a cartoony style and several new courses and cars from the more mainstream versions. Everything else however? Nearly identical. You can still modify the look of your car, which, given the car selection, is tragically hilarious.
  • The Game Cube, Xbox, and PC versions of Hot Pursuit 2 all look worse than the PlayStation 2 version, despite all of them being more powerful. They also had less content and worse gameplay.
• That One Boss: Earl in Most Wanted served as this for a lot of people, usually due to the aforementioned Rubber Band AI, because at that stage of the game the cars available are not as maneuverable as they should be for his final course, so although the player will usually outpace Earl for the vast majority of it, when the player gets to the last 15% or so of the course the rubber-banding would kick in and Earl would accelerate enormously, and if the player made even the tiniest mistake in turning the ridiculously sharp corners--which would almost always happen--Earl would be going so fast that the player would find it impossible to catch up in time.
  • Racing a fully tuned Mitsubishi Eclipse, using every shortcut, nitro whenever possible, and speedbreaker when appropriate, and having Earl total his ride, he still wins, making this tighter than a gnat's chuff or a nun's ass. Of course it doesn't help that he completely recovered from said prang and was at top speed in less than a second.
• That One Level: The Miami circuits in Shift 2: Unleashed are bloody awful. The kerbs on gentle curves can spin your car out with ease and even with the skill to avoid spinning you'll be fishtailing for quite a while.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks: What some say about Carbon.
• Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny: The series does this for supercars.