Tuesday, January 18, 2011  The weapons of Hot Pursuit  Above:
Roadblocked.  Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit shares a little of its
DNA in common with games like Mario Kart and Wipeout. It's less
fantastic than those games, but at heart it's a combat racing
game, just as they are. Playing through career mode requires you
to unlock all of the weapons available to you, so at first you
may think that Hot Pursuit, like Burnout before it, is more
about trading paint and using your car as a battering ram than
about blasting your foes with high-powered armaments.  This
turns out to be only partly true.  There are two essential
things to understand about the weapons of Hot Pursuit:   1. They
take skill to use.   2. They can't be replenished. Those two
facts make all the difference. Unlike Mario Kart, Hot Pursuit
doesn't provide an on-ramp for unskilled racers by gifting them
devastating weapons the further behind they fall. Unlike
Wipeout, there are no uber-powerful weapons against which there
is no defense. And unlike bo