What Keith's Not Playing: Need for Speed (2015)

I'll be honest, I probably played this game for five minutes. Maybe ten. I was a big fan of Need for Speed: Most Wanted. I also liked the little bit I played of Need for Speed: Rivals. But this newest Need for Speed is crap. There's a plot to it now. And I can't say how much the plot is like the Fast and Furious franchise, but it sure seems headed in that direction.

From the little bit that I played, it appears that there are no in-game cutscenes. The scenes that carry out the story are videos acted out by mediocre actors. It's all shot first person and the actors are trying to rope me into some underground culture. Sounds a lot like Fast and Furious to me.

Basically, the game starts off with a random street race and we run from the cops. We meet up under a bridge and a kid that seems like an SNL character Pete Davidson would play gives me a card about some hard to find club. I then have to drive to the hard to find club. The club isn't hard to find. This is the only driving I did while playing the game. Then there's a pretty long scene where I walk through the club and a lot of kids are having some kind of Matrix-type rave. Presumably before they all go street racing and wrap their cars around telephone poles, trees and the like.

I meet up with KMart Paul Walker and he introduces me to some chick he knows. She says something about how excited he is that he met me and my awesome skills. He says something about drifting. You know, because drifting is the only way to establish driving skills. Then he takes me back into a garage where a supposedly hot girl is also a mechanic flicks us off. He declares his love for her.

Then I get introduced to a guy that reminds me a lot of Vincent D'Onofrio in Adventures in Babysitting. To establish this guy's cred, we see him working a punching bag. Heavy stuff. It's at this exact moment where I thought: "I can't fucking do this anymore." I stopped the game and turned it off.

I like racing games. I like driving games. I like them when they focus solely on driving. I don't need a story. I just want to drive. If I wanted a story mixed in with my driving, I'd play Grand Theft Auto. But I just want to drive. I want to race. Fuck it. I even want to occasionally do a little Tokyo Drifting. What I don't want are a bunch of wannabe movie stars trying to connect all the races I'm in. Sorry, Need for Speed, you lost me completely on this one.