The Bottom Line: Don't bother going to the store and waisting your money on something you aren't going to play. This game is just horrible with bad graphics, sound, and almost everything else.
zlatan2k's Full Review: Midtown Madness 2 for Windows
General/Summary:
If there was no Midtown Madness 1, I would perhaps be a little more generous to its crappy sequel. But, considering the fact that Midtown Madness 1 exists, and it's an excellent game, I will show no mercy on Midtown Madness 2. It is the worst racing game I've played in 2001, it's physics are absolutely awful, missions are boring and unimaginative, AI makes me want to puke, vehicles are ugly and low-detailed, sound makes my ears bleed, graphics is disgusting, so I see absolutely no reason why anyone would want to play this game. Way to go, Microsoft, you successfully made a sequel that is ten times worse than the original! I'm going to be generous and give this game a 2, but it actually deserves 1.5!
Gameplay:
I remember Midtown Madness as an extremely fun arcade racing sim, very fast, with decent Driver-like physics, cool gameplay modes and rather small number of nice cars. Sure, AI controlled cars behaved like they had mentally handicapped snails at the wheel, while traffic vehicles were as intelligent as stone blocks. But I didn't care much, because rest of the game was perfect, plus I was sure some of the failures would be fixed in the sequel. God, I was so wrong! Not only nothing's been improved, but everything is so much worse - especially physics! Have you ever seen a racing sim where your car can make a 180°turn while going over 100 Mph? AI is even worse in Midtown Madness 2 than in the original. Not only that other cars drive like retarded pigs, but also don't appear to notice you while you are on the road - they just try to drive right through you! Unbelievable, even in Grand Theft Auto other cars were more intelligent. Suprisingly, new cities are pretty well designed, but cruising them is a nightmare, because of awful physics and dumb AI drivers! Gameplay is HORRIBLE!!!
Graphics:
The original Midtown Madness had decent graphics. Considering the size of levels, it was almost perfect. Midtown Madness 2, released almost year and a half later, has the same graphics as the original. But, in those year and a half much has changed in the gaming world. The designers of Midtown Madness 2 obviously aren't familiar with terms and expressions like Geforce, environmental bump-mapping, transformation & lightning, increased bandwith, faster CPUs, DDR memory, texture compression and other modern technologies. That's why the graphics of Midtown Madness 2 now looks sloppy, low detailed and below mediocre. Another aspect of the game that's been screwed up!
Sound: Music in MM2 is unbearable, while sound effects would be above average if there was EAX and Aureal3D support. I don't know why the programmers keep leaving it out, but I know that it will lower the ratings significantly!
Race against up to 8 others via LAN or the Internet Sequel to the popular street racing game Explore and race through accurate, 3-D representations of...More at Amazon Marketplace
BRAND NEW FACTORY SEALED!"MIDTOWN MADNESS 2 "A GREAT GAME IN DVD STYLE BOX Two New Cities to Race and Explore! Midtown Madness 2 features two all new ...More at eBay
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.