What NFS ProStreet and the first Crysis have in common is that they were both released prior to 2008, under the old ea account system, one of the links for this was account.ea.com. The old account system allowed players to register their game by the install key, and if a player lost a key, he could sign into his account and all of the registered games and their keys would appear on one of the old account system web pages.
In 2008 ea switched to a new account system, which no longer registered games or kept track of install keys. The new account system kept track of player personas used in games and also a new EA ID, which ended up being used as the players persona for some of the later games like Shift 2 Unleashed. The old forums site (forum.ea.com) would display all the personas and EA ID, allowing a player to select which on to use on the forum site. There was a migration of sorts of the new (2008+) account system to Origin account system. This is also the time that some games could be purchased either on DVD or as digital downloads.
Prior to Windows 10, a player could buy a used DVD version of an old game. Since the servers for all of the old games except NFS Carbon are shut down. there's no need to have an EA account for these games since they are now offline only games. However Windows 10 prevents the old games from installing drivers used to validate the media for the old game so that's not an option for those that only have Windows 10. Over time the digital download versions of the older games are having more and more problems, and more recently, with the shutdown of the digital licensing servers (securom), the games that used those licensing servers aren't working, although EA has a workaround for some of them.
What is puzzling in all of this is that the online server for NFS Carbon, released in 2006, is still running, so there is some remnant of the old game account system still running. There is speculation that the Carbon server may get shutdown in 2019.
In the case of NFS Undercover, the original EA DVD version of the game has a patch 1.0.1.18 that adds a Challenge Series to the game, but the Origin version doesn't have this feature and the patch can't be used for the Origin (or Steam) version. Also I don't know if the EA DVD version can run on Windows 10. Unlike prior NFS games, the EA DVD is only needed during install (this is also true for Shift 2 Unleashed, the DVD version only needs the DVD during install).
In the case of Shift 2 Unleashed, any extra content like the Limited Edition which included more cars and events, or promotional cars like the Dr Pepper Camaro, can no longer be enabled if a player doesn't have a save with the extra content already enabled, since there was a change made to the account server in that it no longer sends out unlock messages when a player signs into the players account when running Shift 2 Unleashed. Instead of fixing the problem, Origin just stopped selling the Limited Edition, although the EA DVD limited edition is/was available for sale at online retailers, but with no way to enable the extra content. Tech support stated they were looking into this, but that was over 6 months ago and nothing has been fixed.
In general, the situation with the older EA games has been getting worse over time, either loss of extra content, or games that can't run at all due to license server shutdown. EA is supposedly working on this, but it's been several months. For some of the affected games, EA has a workaround to remove the need for a license server, but I don't know which games or how this is done. It would be nice if EA created a thread here with a list of the games that do have workarounds and how to do the workarounds.
