I’ll preface this by saying that I haven’t played it in probably at least two decades, but I used to love Wacky Wheels. I believe it’s on Steam now, too.

I’m guessing you mean the original Most Wanted. That game was excellent. I think the ‘special place in my heart’ is probably reserved for NFS 3 (which I played the absolute shit out of and was the first NFS game to include cop chases) or the first one just because it introduced me to the series. Most Wanted though was the last good NFS game in my opinion. I lost interest when Underground came out, but when the demo for MW was released I played it so much I had to buy the game. The soundtrack was good as I recall; I think it was also the last NFS game where I didn’t immediately mute the music.

And yeah, the police pursuits were really good in that. Hard enough to be a challenge, but not so hard that it was punishing.

On a similar note, Full Throttle is my favourite game ever, and has been since I first played it. I love everything about that game.

The “Can it run Crysis” thing was purely about the fact that it was one of (if not the most) resource-intensive games out at the time. I remember it being a big jump in terms of both visual quality and the requirements to run it well.

I haven’t liked a Need for Speed game since the original Most Wanted (and that was the first one since Porsche Unleashed.) I’ve played a few since and some were okay, but none of them have grabbed me the way the old NFS games did. I spent more time playing any of the first five NFS games individually than I have playing all of them in total since MW.

The Last of Us is definitely about the story. If you’re not invested in that, you’re probably not going to enjoy it. There’s nothing much in the gameplay that sets it apart from similar games.

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I haven’t played Wasteland 2, but I quite enjoyed Wasteland 3. I’ve played it through a couple of times. Might be worth giving it a go?

My only issue with IV is that Niko’s constant agonising over not wanting to kill people anymore is at odds with the general gameplay of GTA; a game where you’ll probably end up killing at least one innocent person on your way to the mission, let alone the dozen or so cops/criminals you’ll kill during the mission.

The ending really got me though. On my first playthrough I drove around the city for at least an hour real-time trying to decide what to do.