Re:Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser
by anal_reactor on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:05AM
(#50405162)
On one hand I'm all for preservation of video games. If the publisher refuses to sell it for a reasonable price, then that's moral permission for piracy. On the other one... the magic isn't there anymore. I'm not a kid. There are very, very few games I can revisit and actually have fun.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser
by mitthrowaway2 on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:32AM
(#50405390)
But when you have a kid, you might want to share the experience with them. They'll see the magic.
Re:Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser
by NDlurker on Saturday November 07, 2026 @10:48AM
(#50405530)
My brother has our Xbox from when we were kids and his kids love all those games we grew up with.
Re:Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser
by Xirdus on Saturday November 07, 2026 @12:17PM
(#50406210)
To me, NFS Underground 2 is one of those games I can revisit time and time again. It's one of the most fun arcade racing games ever made.
Re:Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser
by hobofan on Saturday November 07, 2026 @03:37PM
(#50407818)
Yeah, same. I jumped in via the website, and after driving around for ~5 minutes the main thing in my head was "damn, this is fun". And now, half my Saturday is gone...
Re:Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser
by hypercube33 on Saturday November 07, 2026 @09:06PM
(#50409874)
I forget if it was NSFU2 or what but they had this in actual arcade games. For like $2 you could get a smart card to store your account, car, customizations, stats etc. Pop it in and load your ride up and my wife and I put in so many hours in the arcade playing this damn thing.
Re:Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser
by tmpz22 on Saturday November 07, 2026 @12:41PM
(#50406410)
While many games don't age well I'm confident a surprising number of games can be remastered into a playable state.
1) extract the art (including audio and other fixture data)
2) instrument some kind of parity-checker / validator against the base game
3) /loop to have an agent rebuild the entire game the way you want
The hard part is 2) and push comes to shove you could probably pay a part time high school intern to laboriously go through the game and make sure it is a faithful recreation.
IANAL, art assets are the IP of the creators. It would certainly be illegal to host or otherwise distribute the art assets you do not own. I see the industry coming down HARD on this form of reverse engineering if only because it is so easy.
[1]: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Oct/28/vibe-game-development/
Re:Need for Speed Underground 2 online in the browser
by monster_truck on Saturday November 07, 2026 @01:18PM
(#50406705)
Game streaming is a massive loss leader (you can see this reflected in the increasingly slim per-month usage limits multiplied by the rising subscription prices), video at scale is far from a solved problem. Even with 8-12 simultaneous encodes per GPU (or iirc about double that from the accelerators) getting the density per rack to actually support the number of concurrent players required to approach being a commercial success is still very far away. This also ignores the very real logistical constraints decently routed bandwidth.