Criterion Games: maker of Burnout, dean of sparks, champion of the once-unfashionable arcade racer. Not, it must be said, a studio to use one cult movie reference when another 50 will do. Case in point: the 2010 remake of Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, a racer which is literally signposted with nods to John Carpenter’s The Fog (Barbeau Lighthouse), actors Eli Wallach (who gets a Wild West ghost town) and Mickey Rourke (can’t remember what he gets – a tree or something), and even John Milius, writer of Apocalypse Now.

I first cottoned on to this habit during Black, the studio’s firecracker of an FPS, wherein lies a reference to one of my absolute favourite movies, Sneakers. (‘Too Many Secrets’, I think it read.) I decided at this point that Criterion must, by association, be one of the coolest game developers in the world, and it hasn’t let me down since. That countless people violently disagree makes me like them even more.

But Hot Pursuit isn’t just full of movie references, it is movie references. They are its atoms. They are the gravitational forces that turn a sideswipe into a barrel roll which is then sucked towards the camera; the aggressive reds and blues; the lens flare which threatens to become a recurring bloody theme around here. Set in the American South, mystical home to Vanishing Point, Smokey And The Bandit and Natural Born Killers, it’s home to cops and robbers who are both beyond the law.

Criterion has been implicated in worsening Need For Speed’s identity crisis with this game, but in truth it’s the fault of EA and its truly schizophrenic racer, Shift. ‘Need For Speed: Shift, you mean?’ I don’t know, you tell me. To look at Shift 2: Unleashed, a game which carries the Need For Speed logo like it found it a dead man’s trousers, you’d wonder if EA’s brand managers can agree on each other’s names. Hot Pursuit doesn’t just wear the badge with pride, it remembers when it actually meant something. That it means much the same as Burnout is just one of those happy coincidences.

The Shift scenario is a symptom of EA’s paradoxical approach to making and selling modern games. It’s a sim-but-not-a-sim and an old/new IP, built to fill a hole that isn’t quite its shape. But that’s another matter. Here instead is the assured and compelling face of the real Need For Speed, which like the best of America’s modern cars is a glossy update of an iconic model.

It was a frickin’ nightmare, too. It wasn’t until Nvidia donated one of its latest graphics cards – and I’ve covered this ground already so the plugging can take of itself – that I could force antialiasing on the cars /and/ scenery, a peculiarity of a game which at one point didn’t have any antialiasing at all. Given how fantastic the game looks on PC, it’s ironic how poorly that version’s been treated. I could go on all day about the egregious lack of PC DLC, the performance bugs, the bizarre workarounds and what these say about modern publishing, but that too speaks for itself.