Need for Speed Carbon review

However, it should be said that the PS3 online experience isn't purely plug-and-play. We hope it was just our experience, but we were requiredto open TCP traffic on ports 18230, 18235, and 13505, and UDP traffic on ports 20000-23000 and 3658 - which is a complicated paineven if youactuallyknow what all those numbers mean. And having a firewall - which you really should have - can mess things up some more.

That's not the only difference between the PS3 and 360 versions, either. While the two versions appear to be identical at first glance, there are actually several noticable shortcomings in the PS3 Carbon.

For example, the Race Wars event features a field of 12 cars, down from 20 on the 360. And Photo Mode is totally missing. The Sixaxis steering isn't all that and you have to read the manual to find out all that it can do in the first place - for the record, we'd much rather have the rumble back for this game. And the auto-saving isn't auto at all - it asks you every single time if it's okay to overwrite the old save. Thank goodness you can just save manually as well.

Finally, the graphics aren't quite the mirror-image of the 360 version they appear to be at first glance. It runs more smoothly, but it'sabit morejagged and special effects like the tracers behind speeding vehicles have a peculiar, almost cel-shaded look that makes them stand out from the game world as if they're not really part of it.