chrisell's Full Review: Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition for PlayStation 2
I'm a huge racing game fan - especially of the Gran Turismo series for the Playstation. I've been spoiled by those games - nothing else really comes close. But I was intrigued by the latest version of Midnight Club. The first two sucked. Really sucked. This new one has been sponsored by Dub magazine and its main selling point over the previous versions is the sheer amount of customisation you can do to the vehicles.
MC3 is a street-racing game, pure and simple. It's in the same genre as Need For Speed:Underground. All the races are at night on fully populated street circuits. Because they're at night, you'll need a darkened room to truly appreciate the graphics in MC3.
There's three basic modes of play. Arcade mode which is, naturally, a jump-right-in and play mode. Multiplayer mode which is exactly what its name implies, and career mode. Career mode is the bread and butter of the game, where you start off as a wannabe racer and work your way up through the ranks to earn money, respect and great finishing times.
You start off with $22,000 burning a hole in your pocket, and a choice of 6 vehicles to start with. Once you start racing and winning, you earn money. With money, you can go to the garages and tune up your vehicle, or add body mods, wheels, wings, and cosmetic items like decals and vinyls.
There's a few types of race in each city, available to you via the city map. Regular races are just for fun - they don't advance your career at all. Club and trophy races win you money and advance your career and are themed around the cities and gangs that populate the MC3 world. The first guy you'll come across is the head of a gang of Lexus drivers. Beat them at all their races and win a Lexus - and so on and so forth.
When racing, there's a couple of different camera views. The always-present and as-always unusable "above and behind" camera is the default. Thank goodness there's also an in-car cam so you can actually race properly. (I despise the above-and-behind cam - it serves no purpose and makes racing games impossible to play.) There's a heads-up display which shows all the relevant information such as speed, available nitrous, power-ups etc.
Ah yes - power ups. Depending on the type of vehicle you're driving, you can either accumulate and use "agro", "roar" or "zone". Agro is for the SUV and truck drivers - it allows you to drive like madmen and not sustain any damage. Roar is weird - basically it makes the engine of your vehicle roar and clears the road ahead of you. (I know - weird!). Zone is the best one. When activated, everything apart from you slows down. So if you're coming to a slim gap, you can hit Zone and maneuver through it in ultra slow motion. Neat.
You can also shift the weight of the vehicle. On a motorbike this means leaning in corners and popping wheelies. In a car or truck it means altering it's stance once in the air after a jump, and either landing on the roof, or if you're clever, on the wheels again ....
The gameplay is pretty much get-up-and-go. It's worth skimming the manual once before picking the game up but you probably won't need to refer back to it afterwards. One thing which is a little annoying is the extremely binary steering. With the PS2 analogue controller or a steering wheel plugged in, it's almost like you only have 5 steering positions. Straight, 30 degrees left and right, and full lock. I tried it on a mate's PS2 as well, and it did the same, so it's not my controllers. Apart from that, you've got accelerate, brake, handbrake, boost (nitrous) and rear view. Pretty basic controls. Every vehicle will slow down radically if you take your foot off the accelerator - almost like they're dragging the brakes. This means a lot of corners can be taken with no brakes - just pop the accelerator up for a moment and lose speed. Probably for the sake of gameplay, the driving model in MC3 is lousy. Every car has terrible oversteer - ie. you steer very precisely into every corner. If you come from Gran Turismo straight to MC3, you'll hit the inside of every corner guaranteed. It takes a couple of races to adjust to this odd driving style. Once you get used to it, it works well for the game though, allowing you to maintain insane speeds through all but the tightest corners.
The game is fun and frantic to play. The post-race replays are good to watch but don't look too closely. There's some bad collision detection in MC3 and you'll frequently see the wheels of the cars coming up through the bodywork, or the car itself submarining underground after landing from a jump.
During the race, you can collide with other vehicles, trees, lamp posts, fences, glass windows etc. Most things that aren't a complete building are destructible in MC3 which is cool for shortcuts. Also scattered around the various cities are silver rotating RockStar logos - collect 10 per city and you get a bonus, but they're mostly hidden. You'll have to find them in cruise mode rather than in a race.
Your opponents in MC3 all suffer elastic AI whereby a vehicle that cannot match your top speed will suddenly come from w-a-y behind and slingshot past you like you're standing still. It's an old gaming technique to try to keep the action all centred around where you are. Some people like it. I don't. Still - it's not as bad as in some games. At least in MC3 you can maintain a reasonable lead if you try.
In some of the races, you'll find yourself harassed by police road blocks, and some of the most hopped-up Ford Crown Victorias ever. I was doing 130-something mph in one chase and the police shot past me in a Crown Vic like I was stopped at the traffic lights. With some judicous use of the "Zone" powerup, you can weave into tight little gaps when being pursued, safe in the knowledge that the police will never make it through, and thus leave you free to carry on racing.
One thing which is nice about MC3 is the freeform race - it doesn't matter how you get to the finish line or next checkpoint, just as long as you do. This makes a lot of the races almost infinitely different. The other vehicles don't always take the same route so you'll likely never have two city races which are the same.
There's a lot of graphics popup in MC3 because of the speed you're travelling. What I found a real disappointment (being a computer graphics artist) was the opening menu. You zoom through town really quickly, then stop looking up at a building with the main menu on it. About 3 seconds later, the texture pager catches up and the building texture rezzes-in. This is a long-time problem with all PS2s and putting it front-and-centre at the beginning of the game is a questionable move if you ask me. Nevertheless, once playing, you'll be concentrating so hard on racing, you'll likely never notice it again.
The sound in MC3 is great. There's a massive soundtrack to choose from. In fact the last 3 pages of the manual are all the credits for the music used. You can switch tracks in-game too, which is nice. The engine and driving sound effects are good too. In my review of Gran Turismo 4, I noted that despite Polyphony's claims, there seemed only to be 4 or 5 distinct engine noises. In MC3, there's a lot more, and they sound a lot better too. You get great turbo dump-valve sounds, supercharger whines, engine roars and grumbling road noises. Sweet.
As I said up top, the big selling point for MC3 is the customisation of the vehicles. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of custom options, all from name-brand aftermarket suppliers. It's theoretically possible to duplicate right down to the rims, any car in the real world but inside MC3. One of the games magazines actually did this with a Caddy C300. They looked at the options that were on a tuner car at a trade show, took a photo, and went back into MC3 to replicate the vehicle. Same named parts, same items, same colours. Very trick. Just remember that one man's uber-car is another man's P.O.S. Just because you think it's the most buff set of wheels doesn't mean anyone else does. If you've not modified the engine and drivetrain, suspension and brakes, no amount of vinyl, wings and decals is going to make you go faster and win races :-)
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