A fantastic racing game! It has a "sim" mode, so I will use that as justification to include it on this site, although as a sim mode it does not have much in terms of realism. What it does have is loads of supercar racing FUN, and in my opinion more fun than its successor on PC, NFS3. My definite favorite racing title ever is Need For Speed III on PlayStation, but due to different development teams handling the two ports, the game is just not the same on PC in terms of look and feel. I actually think NFS3 on PlayStation has a lot more in common with NFSII:SE PC than anything else. This became even more obvious to me when playing converted NFS3 tracks on NFSII:SE (thanks to the fantastic work of www.nfsaddons.com user NESCAFE). Playing these tracks with NFS2:SE's arcade but precise and solid handling is a dream come true.

So what could be better? Well one thing NFSII:SE never had was a proper heli chase camera. Sure it had a great first person dashboard view (in software mode only), a bumper cam and a decent close chase cam, but that heli chase cam is by default so far away from the car when it gets up to speed that it is a bit ridiculous. I am quite perplexed that EA did not include some slider option ingame for how far you would like the camera to be, honestly it would have been very easy. So what I did to fix this was to look in hex and find the value for the closeness of that heli camera and make a patcher for the game. Mind that I borrowed the framework for it from a good friend! The patcher sets a value that I think is quite close to the viewpoint from NFS3 when using that heli chase cam.

Now if you want to set your own value, load up the game EXE you use in a hex editor and look for the byte sequence "89 F2 01 C2 B9 14". It is unique and only 1 instance exists in all NFS2:SE executables. the last byte "14" is the value controlling the closeness of the camera, 01 being furthest away from the car and FF (integer 255) being the closest/tightest. Setting a value in the middle (my patcher sets a value of 64 = integer 100) will make the car pull just a *little bit away from the viewer, but remain close enough for a great view of the car and give you good vision ahead. I hope that you will find this mod to give new life to NFS2:SE, personally I cannot stop playing now! Have fun.

Need For Speed II: SE - Camera Patch

I even drew an ASCII Ferrari 355 F1 for you guys. AsciiWings? Meh, maybe in the future. Btw, the archive might yield a virus warning, it is a false positive I assure you.