There are two ends of the driving game spectrum, the simulation racer and the arcade racer. Simulations attempt to provide realistic physics, and arcade racers go for the fun. Most games fall somewhere in between. Need for Speed falls heavily towards the arcade side of things perhaps too far, and unfortunately, EA forgot to make it fun.

Need For Speed: High Stakes has several different modes of play. There is a career mode where you purchase a car for racing. With your winnings, you can upgrade and repair your car as well as purchase a new one. Periodically there are High Stakes races where you go up against another car with the vehicles as wager. If you lose the race, you lose your car, hence the name of the game. Then there is the arcade mode that has variations on normal play. The only interesting variation is called Hot Pursuit (a la Need For Speed III), where you are being chased by the police and have to achieve a certain distance without being caught. All of these modes of play would be interesting if it were not for the state of High Stakes' control.

There are several problems with control in Need For Speed: High Stakes. The first fault is made obvious when you take a corner at high speed. All the cars, from the BMW Z3 to the Porsche 911 Turbo, handle with severe understeer. It takes divine intervention to break your tail loose at any speed. You can slam the steering wheel all the way to the side at a hundred miles an hour in an overpowered rear wheel drive car, and all you get is a severe case of understeer. For those who don't know, understeer is when you turn the wheel and the handling of the car is such that you don't turn as sharply as you want to. Too much understeer can leave you slamming into the outside wall of a turn. Oversteer is just the opposite, where you end up turning sharper than you intended, and possibly spinning out. This is not only incredibly unrealistic, it limits how you can drive the car and ends up making the game not fun at all.

This ties into the second fault with High Stakes' control, all the cars handle almost identically. Sure, some have better acceleration and higher top speeds than others, but that is about it. You can compare this to Gran Turismo where different cars actually perform differently.

The third fault we experienced was excessively slow response. Your car would begin to turn a noticeable amount of time after you turned the wheel. It was somewhere in the realm of a tenth of a second, but at one hundred miles per hour, a tenth of a second can mean hitting the wall. We tried increasing the steering wheel sensitivity but it made no real difference. On their web site, EA actually recommends you use a joystick to play High Stakes over a steering wheel because of the fast response time. We find this recommendation slightly disturbing. Why would a joystick be better for racing? Need For Speed: High Stakes has major control problems that really ruin the fun.