The seventh NFS part, Need for Speed: Underground, is very strongly influenced by the movie The Fast and the Furious. There is a variety of vehicles available, which you can upgrade to your liking during the game. This includes not only optical tuning, but also technical gimmicks like turbochargers or nitrous oxide injection. The game offers different race modes, so you can not only drive lap or track races, but also acceleration and drift races. All tracks are located in the fictitious city of Kindiak City, which cannot be freely driven on, despite a well-developed road network.

There is not much to say about the installation. CD 1 is needed to start the installation, CD 2 to finish and play. During the installation it asks for the CD-Key, you note it somewhere and enter it manually, because Copy'n'paste doesn't work here. Then install the patch afterwards and if you want to play without a CD, the crack. That's it concerning the installation. It's not enough to just use a backup installation for this game, if the game has never been used on the Windows installation before. The game must also be started with admin rights, otherwise the screen will remain black. In this case you can only end it with ALT+F4. RunAs Spc is useful here.

There are a lot of things that are useful for the basic game:

• Music iporter: With this you can replace the music files in the game by your own. There is also a readme with it, where you can read more about it.
• Replacement videos: A little thing that is always annoying are the promotional videos at the beginning of the game, which you can't click away. You can easily replace them with empty ones (no one really needs them anyway). The only thing that remains is the stupid public message.
• Cheats: Might be self-explanatory.
• Saved game editor: You can use it to pimp your cars till you collapse. With cheats it works even better. With the editor, it's possible that Sophos and a handful of other AV scanners will strike. But there's no need to worry.

NFSU1 offers a multiplayer for up to four players at the same time, but without bots. Originally there was no LAN game, but only the internet game. But after the necessary EA servers have been shut down in 2007, nothing works anymore. Therefore the lobby server for LAN was made.

For the LAN game you need the LAN server. The following port shares on a firewall are sufficient for this: 10800, 10900, 10901, 10980 (TCP), 10800 (UDP). Since the server can only be reached in the local network anyway, no port shares are necessary on a router.

For the LAN server under Linux the package libstdc++5:i386 (x86) or libstdc++5 (x64) is required.

For the client you need Admin rights, or at least writing permissions to the file %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. (Not everyone should be able to mess with this; this is security relevant. Not that www.google.de is redirected to some Russian IPs suddenly…) Here the address of the EA-Internet server is apparently redirected to the LAN IP. It is recommended here, if you don't feel like entering the password every time, to use Runas Spc. This way the program behaves as if you start it with user rights, although it is actually started with admin rights.

While the client is running, you can play LAN games in the same way that you play on the Internet, except that you end up on the private server. As an Internet server it is not suitable. At least it doesn't allow connections from other subnets. More details can be found in the manual provided. Other versions can be found here.

• Need for Speed

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