Along with flagship franchise Madden, the Need for Speed series of racing games is one of Electronic Arts' longest running properties and heaviest hitters. It also happens to be one of the publisher's few yearly titles that isn't suffixed with a two-digit year abbreviation. The tenth main entry in the Need for Speed series, subtitled Carbon, was recently announced, and it still makes heavy use of the street racing sensibilities brought into the franchise with Underground. For its recent Summer Showcase event, EA brought along the Xbox 360 version of the extremely multiplatform racer.

This year, the game's big central feature is canyon racing: high speed, high stakes nighttime vehicular faceoffs through windy mountain roads. In Carbon, conflict resolution between the player protagonist and rival racers frequently takes the form of these canyon duels. Producer Larry LaPierre explained that this tradition is drawn from the current real world street racing scene in places like California, the East Coast of the US, Europe, and Japan. Rather than a straight race, canyon racing is a points-based affair in which each of the two participants goes one round following the other, racking up points by tailing the opponent as closely as possible. A points meter will constantly rise, and the closer you can stay when it's your turn to follow, the faster the points will go up. This is made a little more difficult by way of the flimsy guard rails that offer little protection against your car flying off the road and over a precipice should you take a turn too tight. There are some instant win and loss conditions as well; managing to edge ahead of the competion and stay there for nine seconds when you're supposed to be following will give you an instant win, while dropping behind too far for nine seconds will result in an instant loss. Barring either of those, it's just a matter of who racks up the most points during their chase round.

While recent Need for Speed games have been oriented more towards import tuner cars, Carbon's single-player story mode gives the player a choice to align himself with one of three general classes, each of which has its own particular strengths. Cars in the tuner class, most associated with the street racing scene around which the game is set, have the best handling; muscle cars, not traditionally a big part of the Need for Speed series until now, accelerate the quickest; and exotics, the Need for Speed series' former mainstay, reach the highest top speed. Having chosen an alignment, the player starts building up a crew by challenging rivals in other territories of the city and, hopefully, taking over their turf. This is accomplished by beating other racers, working up to the high level territory bosses who can be challenged to a canyon duel. The more of these races you win, the more former rivals will want to join your crew. As in Need for Speed Most Wanted, the game is set in an open-world, free roaming city environment.

Though you may have many would-be crew members at your disposal, only a certain number may be chosen to actually join up, so it's important to look for the ones with the most useful abilities. Bosses only want crew members who have great skills. These come in the form of out of race abilities or in race abilities. Crew members with out of race abilities come in three varities: fabricators, mechanics, and influencers.

Hiring a fabricator gives you access to Carbon's new Autosculpt feature, a comprehensive tool allowing you to shape many physical aspects of your vehicles. It's quite similar to Oblivion's slider-based character customization tool. A huge number of body attributes including rims, tires, hood, side panels, intakes, spoilers, grills, and many others, can be tweaked by way of realtime slider controls. Spoilers can be enlarged, intakes can be widened, wheels can be deepened, the front grill can be shrunk down a bit; there are a huge amount of changes that can be made to each vehicle. However, the changes are purely cosmetic and do not affect gameplay in any way.

EA is not yet sharing much information on the specific abilities of mechanics and influences. In general, mechanics allow your cars to be tuned for performance, and keeping multiple mechanics in your crew will allow for better performance potential. Influencers will have some kind of positive effect on your crew's relationship with the police.

Similarly, EA is keeping a fairly tight lid on the game's in race abilities, but LaPierre did mention three of them--blockers, drafters, and scouts--as well as demonstrate the usefulness of a blocker crew member. When challenging a rival crew in a street race, a blocker is used to clear the road of a particularly troublesome opponent. Based on the proximity of your car and your blocker's car to a nearby opponent, the game will automatically assign an opponent as a "target," and when your blocker gets into an opportune position, you can order your wingman to sideswipe or cut off that car so you can edge ahead and take the lead. It's sort of like having AI perform a Burnout takedown for you, but with fewer explosions.

That's pretty much all EA is sharing about Need for Speed Carbon at this point. LaPierra declined to comment on any potential multiplayer features, though it is assumed the game will be online enabled. EA has also noted that the Wii version of the game will feature mechanics specific to the console's unique controller, though again no concrete details have been revealed. Other existing features, such as the bullet time-esque Speedbreaker function, have been retained, but for more details on the new crew member abilities and class affiliations, we'll have to wait until closer to the game's fall 2006 release period.

Need for Speed Carbon is in development by EA Black Box for PC, PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii, Nintendo DS, PSP, and Game Boy Advance.