Black Box-era Need for Speed – series research

A research post documenting findings about the Black Box-era Need for Speed games (Underground, Most Wanted, Carbon, ProStreet, Undercover). It covers loyalty career bonuses — cash or item rewards granted when saves from previous games are detected — including bugs in the PS2 versions where wrong serials caused the feature to fail. NFS Carbon has a bug where Most Wanted Black Edition saves aren't properly recognized in NTSC-U and PAL builds; a patch was submitted to the PCSX2 patch database. ProStreet fixed some but not all of these issues. NFS Undercover on PS2 carries over Carbon's code but never uses the loyalty bonus feature. Additionally, a bug in NFS Underground's Magazine 22 drift score unlock conditions was discovered and fixed via a SilentPatch for PC and PS2.