What's good internet? It is Austin here and I am about to do another article

read of the sort that we've done a couple of times now. Just dropping this right

into our podcast week because I know a lot of you don't have the time to swing

over to the site and give longer articles or read. If you do you should feel free

to, that's waypoint.vice.com, and the name of the article which I've hidden from

myself is it's a window I've closed is the new Need for Speed sees a future

where e-boxes are in control. Alright so here it goes. In the late hours of the night as I drift

down mountain highways and shift into high gear on Need for Speed payback straight

away. The controller disappears from my hand. The car and the road and the checkpoints and the other

racers do too. This isn't unique to payback. This is what happens whenever I play the most

average of racing games. Instead of worrying about how tight to solemn down one of payback's

serpentine freeways I'm thinking about how the turns of this world feel mundane when

compared to the cartoonish curves of burnout paradise. Instead of working out whether I should save

my nitrous for fourth or fifth gear I'm comparing the signage of paybacks fake subway sandwich shop

to the ones I remember from the crew. Instead of trying to win I'm trying to parse.

What is this specific race car fantasy? On its face that's an easy to answer question.

Need for Speed payback wants you to feel like you're running your own version of the fast and

the furious familiar. Set in a fictionalized Las Vegas and its desert and mountain surroundings

you play as a team of roadway criminals determined to set out to take down the house

slightly more organized collection of criminals that run the city's casinos.

Unlike fast and the furious the bulk of payback isn't focused on surprisingly warm characterization

or spectacular set pieces and unlike the ballad of Dom and Brian paybacks pacing is terrible.

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