It strips away the pretension of the PS2’s heavy marketing and the Xbox’s brute force. It is simply a great arcade racer on a quirky purple box. If you own a GameCube, this game is essential. It sits comfortably on the shelf next to F-Zero GX and Mario Kart: Double Dash!! as proof that Nintendo’s little console could hang with the big dogs when it came to third-party realism.

To understand the significance of Underground , one must look at what came before. The Need for Speed series was previously known for high-end exotics—Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Porsches cruising along idyllic coastal highways. NFS: Underground scrapped that entirely.

The bread and butter of the game. These were standard races, but the track design was revolutionary for its time. The developers utilized a "sandbox" approach to track creation, cutting off sections of the open-world map to create tight, technical courses. The traffic density was high, and the sensation of speed—especially when using nitrous—was visceral.