I race down a canyon with my speed being at least 70 mph, trying to stay on the road. My opponent crashes into me purposely, making me swerve. I hit him accidentally, driving off the road and into the canyon. My heart pounding, I step away from my keyboard, and get myself a Coke. Luckily for the civilized world and mankind, I’m not really old enough for a driver’s license, and I had only been playing EA’s new racing game for the Mac, Need for Speed: Carbon.

In Carbon, you play as an anonymous driver coming to Palmont City. A very pretty girl named Nikki shows you around and offers advice as you start your own driving gang and try to take over territory (and eventually, the city) from other gangs.

You can choose from three car classes: Exotic, with high top speed with the most balance between attributes; Tuner, with great handling, decent acceleration, and slow top speed; and my fave, Muscle, with great acceleration, decent top speed, but poor handling. Oh, by the way, there are high-speed chases with the boys in blue.

To get in a chase, you have to run over or crash into some things, and wait for the police to find you. Then the fun begins. But, as always, there are some cons. The boss battles get a little annoying after a while, and the cops become very hard to beat when you get to a certain level

And you need 6 GB of memory! But these won’t slow you down. To play, you need a Mac running OS X 10.4.9, with a 1.83 GHz or faster Intel chipset (sorry folks, no PowerPCs), 1 GB of RAM, 6 GB of hard-disk space (what’d I tell ya?), a decent graphics card, and a DVD-ROM drive. Vroom, vroom!

Thomas Fogel, Posted 12/20/2007

For more information on Need for Speed: Carbon visit: www.ea.com