Pretty sad, unlockables have always added an enjoyable and challanging dynamic to games in my opinion; I quite like them. I'm sorry to see them being replaced by having to shell out more effing money that I don't have.
Nevermind challange.. heck having unlocks in most games is what gives a game its lifespan.
In single player terms this is also the case with NFSC as apparently the cars are better balanced now - a fully tuned VW Golf now
cannot go head to head with a Gallardo and hope to win because the Gallardo is simply a faster car. So if people are buying the fastest can in the game at the very start, they're going to rocket through the earlier stages with no contest whatsoever...
...which to me is tantamount to cheating.
On the subject of cheating I had a nasty experience with it and Oblivion a few days back. I wanted to buy a house but didn't want to save up the cash to do so - so I cheated just for that and got the cash and bought the house. Now unfortunately I've seen I could cheat and get any item in the game... level my player up instantly etc... and the knowledge that I
could is making actually doing it the hard way slightly less fun than it was. Don't get me wrong, I love playing the game. But knowing that instead of spending 8 hours levelling up, I could just type in a command - it sort of dillutes the experience.
So it is with buying unlocks for games instead of earning them. If I know that for $10 I can buy the DB9 instead of unlocking it after 15 hours of gameplay - that's unfortunately quite a tempting thing to do. I'll just have to hope I can resist doing it and get the full enjoyment out of the game. But it's a shame I'm even being tempted by the
publishers to do this. They might as well sell a fully completed save of the game so you can skip to anything you want without having to earn it.