Need For Speed: Carbon

Bless you, EA, for digitizing Emmanuelle Vaugier and putting her in a mini-skirt and jackboots and a push-up bra. Bless you again for bringing the cops back for yet another Need for Speed encore. And bless you a third time for polishing those Xbox 360 graphics to a high shine. With all these things going for it, Carbon should be as addictive as boobs dipped in beer. Then why doesn't the game have that just-one-more-race quality that the best installments of NFS usually have? Maybe it's because the whole street-racing culture is starting to feel stale. Or maybe it's because tweaking our cars has become an exhausting endeavor. (If we have to pick out one more Level 2 Hood, we'll smash our HDTVs. OK, maybe that's a little rash.) Is it just us, or has this game done one long, dramatic slow motion, nitrous-boosted jump over the shark?