I think ProStreet is very underrated, and I’d say that’s my favorite. The car handling is a nice balance between realistic and arcadey, and the game is just a really entertaining take on track racing. Most of the game feels tight with its controls and challenges, and there are clear ways to express skill and achieve goals. My biggest problem with it is that dominating events (setting track records) is a little too easy, which probably works well for kids, but as someone who knows how to play racing games it’s often a matter of not crashing and having a reasonable car. There’s probably a mod to change that though? The soundtrack is also a bit mid compared to other NFS titles from this time but it does grow on you a bit.

Most Wanted is probably my second place, but I think it’s not untouchable. The rubberbanding almost singlehandedly kills any sort of difficulty. In MW you’re there to race neat cars and look cool doing it. There’s no real challenge, and if there is, it’s not a fair one. It could be a little less menu-driven too. Sometimes it feels very linear in how you progress through the game, just picking event after event from the menu, and even starting police chases from it.

Carbon is probably third place? It’s more interesting than MW in a lot of ways but it’s also just more mediocre in most respects. I consider MW and Carbon to be two sides of the same coin, but if it comes down to it I think you can easily put Carbon below MW. I think most people consider Carbon to be complete trash, but I don’t think it’s fair to say there’s nothing good about it.

Underground 1 just sucks, and Underground 2 doesn’t have a lot to offer in retrospect. Both Undergrounds were amazing at the time, but now that we have newer alternatives I don’t think there’s a lot of reason to return to U2, and I think U1 has aged like milk in just about every respect. I could definitely be convinced to play U2 again, but it’s not something I feel a strong pull to return to.

Other Need for Speeds have a lot of hits and a lot of misses, and it’s hard to want to put them in any sort of ranking system. They can all be fun in certain ways, but like most people I consider Black Box NFS to be the real NFS.