How do you take the joy out of illegal street racing? Easy. Make it legal. The Need for Speed series has made a name for itself by delivering serviceable tuner-world racing for the past million or so years. With the latest version of the series, Need for Speed ProStreet, though, the action has been taken off the nighttime highways and thrown into legit racing circuits. The result is an ultra-generic racer made for a console that's already busting at the seams with ultra-generic racers. Need for Speed? Hey, what about a need for fun?

Not sure exactly what the folks at EA and Black Box were thinking when they decided to yank the undercarriage neons and hot, yet dangerous chicks from the venerable NFS series. Yes, it does make it a little more distinct from EA's Burnout games, but that's about it. In ProStreet you're unleashed on a dozen-plus real circuits (and their numerous variations) to play a bunch of permutations of get-there-first racing. Forget about a vast and open-ended romp through a dark and gritty underground driving culture -- and if you're looking to be chased by the police, your only real option is to try to swipe the game from your local GameStop.

Just like last time around, the PSP version of things is a completely different animal when compared with the big console take. Unfortunately, whereas the handheld version of NFS: Carbon bested its big brothers in a lot of ways -- a better storyline, better use of your wingman teammates -- here things are decidedly less impressive on the handheld. Unlike the big-screen ProStreets, which throw you into a semi-story-driven game that revolves around multi-event "race days," here you plod your way very linearly through race after race, unlocking and winning new cars and upgrading your ever-growing stable of wheels along the way.

To its credit, ProStreet does try to introduce a new element on the track. The wrinkle in this latest NFS is Driver Intuition. It's basically the ability to see the optimal turning line. The better a driver you become, the more you'll be able to use this feature that can be toggled on with the circle button. Following the line during a race gives you a slight speed boost. It's an interesting enough premise; it just doesn't pan out all that well.

While the game does a good job at purporting to focus on -- and reward -- finesse driving, in a lot of ways it's a facade. Yes, there's the aforementioned ability to check out the optimal driving line in real-time while racing. There's also a post-race screen that lets you check out -- lap by lap -- how you did when it came to actually hitting the right line. Unfortunately, during the actual racing, you can get away with all sorts of BS driving tactics. Can't find the right line? Who cares? You can always bumper-car your way around tight chicanes or take a shortcut and scoot across the infield.

On the plus side, you'll get to do all this questionable driving in a mess of different rides. The game lets you roll in dozens of muscle cars, sports cars and tuners. If you're looking for more than just graphical variety with your car choice, you may be let down. Unlike the bigger consoles, which let you get down and dirty with your performance tuning, here you're left with just a few options, and since the game isn't all that stingy with the money that it tosses you for winning, it doesn't take too long to max out the performance upgrades. The result is that just about any car -- front-wheel drive, rear-wheel drive -- can be tweaked to handle like a four-wheel drive dream. It takes a lot of the challenge out of things. You rarely get the rush of trying to wrestle a car that might just be a little too powerful for you to control.

In some ways, the look of things is an improvement over Carbon, but in other ways it takes a backseat to its predecessor. Visually, the game is a lot cleaner. A lot of this is due to the fact that, unlike Carbon, which had you zipping around at night, here you race in bright sunlight. It's a lot easier to see what the heck is going on during the day. It's also a lot easier to see what's ahead when you're not distracted by buildings, street signs, strangely configured highway exits, etc. Racing on real circuits lets you get a better feel for the road. On the negative side, despite its title, the game has a tougher time than ever in delivering any real sense of speed. There's a gimmicky blur effect that doesn't really work, and there'll be times when your speedometer will say 150 and it'll still feel like you're driving under the limit in a school zone.

When you're not banging away at the career mode, you can opt for a quick fix of racing in a single event. While the events are theoretically broken into two styles of racing -- speed and grip -- the action is just about the same no matter which you choose. The speed events claim to put more emphasis on airing it out and the grip events are allegedly more about how well you can control your wheels. On the track, though, you have to be able to go fast and have decent handling skills if you plan to do well, regardless of the race style. On the plus side, having to choose between speed or grip adds another menu screen to the disk, making the game seem deeper than it really is. Last fall's Juiced 2 scored points with me for adding drifting into the mix. The juxtaposition of the game's two very different types of racing -- speed versus drift -- forced you to master two distinct racing styles. The game wasn't all that great, but at least it served up a nice variety of mediocrity.

Online, ProStreet lets you go against a live foe in either ad hoc or infrastructure mode. The game is still new on the shelves, so there aren't that many folks out there to go up against, but when you do get to take on up to three other drivers, the action is solid with no noticeable frame rate differences from the single-player game.

With no story through which to plow and the been-there-done-that feel of the closed-circuit racing, fans of high-speed thrills may want to grab the recently released and futuristic WipEout Pulse. For those who dig street action, for my money, you still can't beat the fun-as-hell Burnout Legends. But as its fourth NFS release for the PSP, EA has clearly hit a speed bump with ProStreet. The game delivers by-the-book racing without a whole lot of flair.

This review was based on a retail copy of Need for Speed ProStreet that the writer bought with earnings from illegal street races he won in his Mitsubishi Eclipse.