PC users with multi-core CPUs, largely quad and six core flavors, reported crashes and general buggery that made the game unplayable upon unboxing.
Aside from EA's lukewarm response that Criterion, being the developer, is the go-to guy for fixing issues, exacerbated by players' already jaded views of just how much EA cares about its PC audience, Criterion did issue a patch to address several of the issues. [How many times did I say 'issues?' Geez.]
One of the awesome things about next-gen games and multi-cored processors is, well, that extra processing power. All that beefy goodness that you splurged on to toss under the hood and vibrate your panties. Criterion's elegant solution to the NFS:HP multi-core crash? Hamstring user's PCs so that only a single core is utilized for gameplay.
Bring up ye olde Task Manager, and check out the affinity that NFS11.exe is set to: CPU 0.
This strikes me as...odd. Lame, even. In fact, the kind of fuckery that gamers, justly or otherwise, tend to hate developers for when they rely heavily on the more business-friendly model of porting console versions rather than parallel development.
Your milage may vary depending on how many cores you're rockin', but I posit this:
Criterion. Seriously. For those of us with V-Sixes, yer gonna make us only use a single cylinder because our shit-hot blocks won't fit in your and EA's lemon?
