Ford Street Racing

Ford Street Racing is a racing video game released for the Xbox, PlayStation 2, PlayStation Portable and Microsoft Windows in 2006. The game was sold as Ford Street Racing on the PC, while the console releases were given region specific names. Ford Bold Moves Street Racing in the US and Canada, Ford Street Racing: L.A. Duel in the European Union countries and Ford Street Racing: XR Edition in Australia and New Zealand. It was developed by Razorworks and published by Eidos Interactive in the US and Empire Interactive under the Xplosiv banner in the rest of the world for PS2, PSP and PC versions.

Gameplay
Just like the previous Ford Racing games, this game is composed only of licensed Ford vehicles, which are divided into three sectionsː Classic, Performance and High Performance. The major change respect to the other games is the implementation of the Team Racing mode, a gamemode in which the player can control two or three vehicles in a single team during a race event of the many gamemodes by changing vehicles during the race or by giving the AI drivers of the team certain orders, such as blocking or drafting.

General

 * 1) Terrible naming decisionsː It's understood that the developers wanted to give different names for the game depending on the region, however, these names don't make any kind of sense or can be misleading. "Ford Bold Moves" sounds really stupid since there isn't any element that could imply some kind of "bold move" (A term that refers to somebody or something that is not afraid to do things which involve risk or danger) and "Ford Street Racingː XR Edition" could confuse the players, since they may think that it's an updated version of the original game or some kind of special edition. On the other hand, Ford Street Racingː L.A. Duel is more acceptable and faithful to the game, but it's still an unnecesary change, since the PC versions were all distributed simply as "Ford Street Racing".
 * 2) The cover art from the console NA and AU versions are extremely ugly and uninspiredː
 * 3) *The AU version in theory tries to imitate the EU cover but using a more emblematic vehicle of that country, however, due to the poor choice of the night background and editing, the color of the letters of the logo can barely be seen and doesn't contrast in any way, making it look very ugly at a glance.
 * 4) **Another point is that the car of the image has a white lighting that basically comes from nowhere, making the cover look even more ugly, since it looks like if the car was just superimposed at the end of the process of making the cover.
 * 5) **A lot of free space is wasted since the logo and the car are placed too low and the city of the background is too small to fill that space.
 * 6) *The US version just consists of a dull shot of the front of a Ford Mustang Shelby GT500 (S-197) with a plain yellow background and nothing else, there isn't some kind of collage, any additional artwork or designs to make it look more attractive for the possible buyers.
 * 7) Something that is really discouraging of this game is that there are too few vehicles in total. While Ford Racing 2 had the amount of 30 vehicles and Ford Racing 3 had the amazing amount of 55 vehicles, this game only has 18 cars, six per vehicle class, which is very limited for a game of the saga, and it's even more insulting when you see that the PSP version of the game added a lot of new vehicles (Six for the EU version and eight for the AU version).
 * 8) Despite being named "Bold Moves" and having a "street racing" orientation of gameplay, the truth is that the game doesn't have any kind of option to tune your vehicles or to modify them to make them faster or look different, thus contradicting the proper nature of the game. The only thing that you can actually modify from your vehicles is the color, however, just like the previous games, you can't choose a custom color, instead, you have a very lackluster selection of only five colors.
 * 9) * Another point is that the game doesn't offer police chases, sprint races or an open world either, as you only have the usual default closed circuits of every single racing game, but now with a more urban aesthetic.
 * 10) Just like the other games, the resolution and graphical settings cannot be adjusted within the game options menu, instead, you have to open a program named "sysconfig" located inside of the game folder, however, in the other games at least you had the option to change the controls inside of the game, but not only that, you could even configure a steering wheel and activate the force feedback option, but in this game that's not possible anymore, it only accepts gamepads apart from the keyboard controls and you have to change the controls in the same sysconfig program that was mentioned earlier. To make things much worse, the program is terribly bugged, since the program won't register any inputs of your controller unless you press enter and another key right before entering the input.
 * 11) Every time you move the selection cursor with the keyboard keys, the characters that form the name of the option will turn into greater-than signs and make the transition to alphabet characters again, the problem is that this can be excessively annoying if you move the cursor between the options really fast, something that is not helped by the slow speed of said transition.
 * 12) Very poor graphics that are a really huge step back from the previous game. For starters, the models of the vehicles look more compact in relation to the real-life vehicles, but not only that, in general, all of the models and textures of the game are terribly muddy and look more like if they were pulled from a Nintendo 64 game. However, the worst graphical elements of the game are the shader effects, since they use an exaggerated amount of High Dynamic Range, every single texture of the game will look much worse than they should, especially during the sunny levels, to put it simply, there are even times in which you can't practically see anything because of the excessive light that will blind all of the camera angles of your vehicle.
 * 13) A damage model was finally introduced in this game, which means that your vehicle can get damaged if you crash too much, however, this damage model is very lazy and weak because it just consists of some minor scratches and aesthetical damages like broken lights and bumpers, apart from that, it's more of the same, and what's worse, despite the multiple attempts of the game to convince you to fix the damages of your car, the damage will not actually affect your vehicle in any technical way and fixing it will not do anything but fixing the aesthetical damage of the vehicle.
 * 14) The introduction of the new team racing gamemode was something innovative for the Ford Racing series and the racing games in general, even at the point of being considered one of the first games (If not the first one) to implement a cooperative racing mode in which you can also control the other vehicles of your team, nevertheless, the developers focused too much on this new gamemode and tried to make it the main attractive element of the game that they forgot to give a notorious importance to the individual races. If you complete any individual tournament, you will practically win nothing from it, even if you first on first place, no new tracks, vehicles or money will be gained from that, for winning actual money and unlocking new content, you have to forcefully complete the team tournaments in order to unlock all of the content and experience the game in its whole. In other words, it's completely useless to play the individual tournaments if you actually want to progress and complete the game, giving a really big feeling to the player that the game is actually unfinished.
 * 15) * Not to mention, when you complete any of the individual tournaments available, it won't be marked as completed in the menu and you will not unlock the next tournament despite finishing on first place, however, this can also be caused by a bug.
 * 16) Because of the obsessive desire for the developers/publishers to innovate in the racing genre, a very rushed development cycle or terrible decisions, a great amount of classic gamemodes from the previous games of the saga were deleted, leaving the players with only two gamemodes: Racing and Time Attack (Without counting Tournament), which greatly reduces the replay value of the game and makes it even more boring than usual, since the player will just do the same types of races over and over without any change during his/her playthrough.
 * 17) Not only a great amount of gamemodes from the previous games were deleted or scrapped, but also the music. The previous games had many different rock, funk and electronica songs during the races that made them more entertaining and immersive, but in this game the developers'/publishers' incompetence and lazyness got into a new level, since they didn't even compose a single music track during the races, and as you can suppose, the only thing that you can hear during the races is the sound of the engine of your car and the many different sound effects. What is even worse is that the entire game only has two music tracks exclusively for the menus, and all of them are very uninspired and even repetitive, to put it simply, the music track that plays during the tournament menus consists of a loop of only three seconds.
 * 18) All of the sound effects respect to the vehicles are completely generic and uninspired. The sound effects of the engines of the vehicles of the game are exactly the same ones, but only with some slight pitch changes to make them "different", however, the worst offenders are the impact sound effects that are way too cartoonish
 * 19) Some other small details and mechanics that gave variety to the original Ford Racing games were also removed or changed here for no apparent reason, details and mechanics that had even less reasons to be removed or changed because of how easy or simple they were from the very beginning. These elements include but are not limited to:
 * 20) * The manual transmission option that you had in the options menu to control your vehicle that had the ability of giving you a small advantage against your opponents if you mastered it well.
 * 21) * The two graphical speedometers that represented a more precise way of measuring your amount of speed in the game.
 * 22) * The nitro boost that was included in some of the gamemodes and gave you a great advantage at the beginning of every race if you started your vehicle on time.
 * 23) While the level design is not bad at all, every single level feels extremely lifeless and dull because of the lack of traffic and other minor details that gave the levels of the other games a lot of life. For instance, the previous game of the franchise: Ford Racing 3, had some elements that avoided the levels to feel empty, like ongoing traffic on some background highways, flowing rivers, weather conditions and background sound effects that could vary depending on the type of map you were racing on.

PSP Version

 * 1) Because of the capacity of the console and probably because of all of the new content, this version of the game reduced the amount of vehicles that could be on your team during a team racing from a total of three vehicles to only two.
 * 2) For some strange reason, the artificial intelligence of the other drivers got much worse than the console retail versions, but not only that, the allied AI of your teammates in the team racing gamemode was also severely affected and now it barely responds to your orders, since you can give it the same orders over and over and it will never obey you or will do after a lot of trials, forcing the player to rely more on the transitions between vehicles to win the race in order.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The Team Racing gamemode is one the best elements of the entire game. In general terms, it's probably one of the first racing games that implemented some kind of cooperative racing gamemode that didn't need an additional player to make it happen, and respect to the game, this gamemode is surprisingly very well-polished, apart from some minor technical issues, all of the proper mechanics work perfectly fine in most of the cases and the allied AI that controls the other vehicles of your team are competent enough to have a good experience, at least in the console and PC versions of the game.
 * 2) The game now has a damage model for all of the vehicles, and despite being very plain and it barely affects the gameplay, it's still something that was missing in the previous games, in which you could crash your vehicle and it would suffer absolutely no damage from it.
 * 3) The new urban and modern aesthetic designed for the game is surprisingly very well represented, but not only that, it also indirectly helps to improve some aspects of the game, especially with the HUD elements, since it features a fully moving GPS, something that is of great help in contrast to the other games in which you had a single small static illustration of the map you're currently racing on.
 * 4) Since the game now has place in Los Angeles, the level design has more continuity between levels and more attention to the details, featuring diverse areas of the aforementioned city and keeping the same aesthetic for them, which is a really good improvement and contrast to the previous games that took place in random places and completely different environments, something that broke the immersion almost immediately, however, as it was stated before, it seems that this game changed the immersion aspect for continuity.
 * 5) The PSP version fixes many of the base game failures and improves them in a much more sofisticated way:
 * 6) * The graphics, while still aren't exactly impressive, now look very adequate for a PSP racing game of its era, even the shader effects look more realistic than the obnoxious cheap attempts of shading effects from the console and PC versions.
 * 7) * As mentioned previously, it added a considerable amount of new vehicles that could vary depending on the region of the game, for example, the Australian version added a 1970 Falcon GT-HO and a 2005 Falcon GT-XR8 (One of the most famous lines of vehicles of Ford in that country).
 * 8) It was sold as a budget game during its time, having a price of $19.99 in all of the platforms available in the United States, and the Steam re-release had an even lower price of $4.99, which could be reduced to $0.49 in the same area, a price that could be even lower depending on your region, being Turkey the cheapest one, costing only $0.05.

Critical reception
Ford Street Racing received mostly mixed and negative reviews at the time it was released. Two of the versions of the game hold a "mixed or average" rating on metacritic, being the PS2 and the PSP versions the ones that hold a 50/100 and a 52/100 respectively. , while the PC and the Xbox versions recevied generally unfavorable reviews, holding scores of 48/100 and 44/100 respectively.

Dam Whitehead from Eurogamer reviewed the PlayStation 2 and the PlayStation Portable versions of the game and gave them both a score of 5 out of 10, praising the attention to the detail of the levels and the responsive handling of the vehicles, while criticizing the lackluster sound effects, the timid and basic AI and the spongy braking and accelerating controls. Shortly describing: "Ford Street Racing's biggest crime is to be an ambitionless entry in a genre already overstocked with faster, cooler titles. The low price point is certainly a bonus, but as you can pick up the still superior early entries in most rival racing franchises for the same price, it's not quite the bargain it seems. To quote another famous Ford: mostly harmless."

Brianek from GameSpot reviewed the game with a 4.1 score out of 10, talking about the good vehicle models and the great idea of implementing a team racing gamemode, but criticizing the lifeless environments of the game, the braindead AI, the underwhelming damage and collision models, the incredibly easy nature of the game, the little variety of the tracks and sense apeed and how boring the game could feel when you're not playing the team racing gammemode. He said the following in his final verdict: "The team-centric racing concept here is a good one, but it's weighed down by dumb AI, boring environments, and a generally uninteresting racing engine. Ford fans might appreciate an all-in-one place to drive their favorite cars, but there's not much else to offer virtual racers who are looking to mix things up."

Tyler Nagata from GamesRadar rated the game with two stars out of five. Saying that, despite of the amount of licensed Ford vehicles to drive and the good team racing gamemode that was included in the game, the driving experience in general was bad because of the terrible controls and the broken damage model that only affected the visual aesthetics of the vehicles, but also mentioned the boring and repetitive nature of the tracks. Shortly describing: "Even with its reasonable retail price, Ford Bold Moves Street Racing still fails to deliver any bang for your buck with clumsy controls, repetitive gameplay, and generic tracks.".

Warren Dunlop from GamingExcellence rated the game with a score of 4.0 out of 10. He stated that the game had a lot of potential because of the great concepts that were sponsored with it, like the team racing gamemode, but that the very few amount of locations, the useless solo mode, the lackluster soundtrack and the boring core gameplay ruined all of that. Shortly describing: "Fan boys will get they’re fix, and that’s about the extent of FBM’s scope, providing little to none entertainment value past the first 30 minutes.".

Jeremy Peeples from Game Over Online rated the Xbox version with a 68% out of 100%. Claiming that the addition of a team gamemode in which you could switch between the different members of your team, the great level of detail of the vehicle models and the level design were the biggest positive points of the game, but also mentioned that the unresponsive controls, the kind of misleading title of the game and the unmemorable soundtrack were the major negative points. Shortly describing: "I came into it expecting something terrible given the reputation of past Ford games, but I ended up with an above average game that didn't really screw anything up, and actually featured innovation - so I'm quite pleased with it."

Longplays
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Reviews
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Gameplays
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