YMMV / Need for Speed: High Stakes

• Even Better Sequel: High Stakes to III: Hot Pursuit. Despite being a Mission-Pack Sequel to the latter, High Stakes improves a lot in III's mechanics and graphics, adds new gameplay modes and mechanics (like visual customization and tuning, although the former was limited due to hardware restrictions) and polishes those that already existed, and adds new tracks while (in the PC version) retaining its predecessor's tracks.
• Goddamned Bats: The aggressive traffic found in the PlayStation version. And as mentioned below, it can aggravate the player to a big degree if they're unfocused.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The game had a Take That! towards Rice Burners in its opening cinematic, in which a riced-out Honda Civic Expy joins a race against a bunch of Porsche 911s, Corvettes, Diablos, and all other sorts of cool cars. When the race starts, all the powerful exotics take off at high speeds while the Civic expy barely moves an inch before its engine explodes. Considering that EA would experience its best NFS sales when they moved the franchise towards tuning culture with Underground, just 4 years after High Stakes, it's hard not to see this with some irony. Adding some extra irony is that many non-AAA-class cars in High Stakes have bodykits to be equipped with when upgraded, meaning that in one way, Underground took High Stakes's upgrade systems to full force. Driving this point home, the Japanese release of the game features the Nissan Skyline GT-R R34, which would become the cover car of Underground and one of the iconic cars in the franchise onwards.
  • Speaking of the Skyline, in the Japanese PlayStation release, the car could be upgraded to resemble what would become Brian O'Conner's Skyline◊ in 2 Fast 2 Furious four years later.
  • One of the names used by the racer or perp AI drivers was "Razor", but only in the PlayStation version. Several years later, Razor was the alias of the main antagonist in Need for Speed: Most Wanted (2005).
• Sequel Displacement: To the point some people tend to confuse High Stakes with III: Hot Pursuit, as while it is essentially a Mission-Pack Sequel to the latter, High Stakes improves a lot in III's mechanics and graphics.
• That One Level: In the PlayStation version, some Tournaments and Special Events can be qualified as such, and one event in the latter has traffic that can screw the player over if they're not careful.