Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition

Review - Rob considers "pimping" his Fiesta...

I drive a 1.1 Fiesta Quartz Classic. And it's not just any old Fiesta, it's a really old Fiesta. So old in fact that it has been inadvertently souped up by a hole in the exhaust that makes my car sound like the muffler's been removed and a couple of turbos added. I've floored my accelerator on occasion at lights, beckoning the Toyota Yaris opposite to race me. Then reality kicks in, the lights go green and my engine stalls. I really should take it into the garage.

And that's about as far as my pimping goes. No furry dice, no go-faster stripes, not even a CD player (player-player-player). My car moves (occasionally) and that's about it. And since I only passed my test last Christmas I still err on the side of caution when it comes to driving. So it won't surprise you to hear that when I approached Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition for the first time I wanted to hate it. All this urban street culture, minimum ground clearance, drum and bass, rap and gangstaz and 2-Fast-2 Furious-look-at-the-size-of-my-engine business, it all reminds me of that depressing sector of society, the Chav.

I'm stereotyping wildly here of course, but when you're completely ignorant of something that's what you tend to do. Need for Speed: Underground and previous Midnight Clubs have all silently slipped by my gaming radar; it's about time I educated myself in this new high-octane-plenty-of-crashes-likely genre. And the surprising thing is MC3 actually does a good job of teaching me the ropes.

The premise of MC3, dominated by its career mode, is relatively straightforward. With whatever delightful little speedster you choose, of which there are many authentic vehicles (including VW Polo, Lancer Evolution, chopper bikes and a whole host of year specific cars such as the '64 Chevy Impala), you can cruise around one of three American cities in search of races and tournaments. Once you accept a challenge you're whisked briskly into street racing antics of the checkpoint variety - meaning that you don't have to follow a specific route so you can duck down side streets and crash through shopping malls. It's a tried and tested formula patented by the Midtown Madness series but it continues to feel fresh and lively even today.

With each racing success you're awarded money and, more importantly, progress through the game - illustrated by a percentage indicator on your save game screen, a feature I'm always very fond of as it gives you a target to aim for. The more you do the access you have to new cars and equipment, while rival racing firms will challenge you to more races. With the dosh you collect you can visit the now a-typical RockStar Games Hispanic character who inevitably calls you 'homes' a lot (why do I suddenly feel like a famous detective from Baker Street?). He'll happily accommodate your vehicle with improvements as well as offering other cars to purchase, some of which you'll need for vehicle-specific tournaments.

It's an efficient game that gets you straight into the action with little or no learning curve. There are no convoluted storylines or endless menus to crash through in order to upgrade your car; you race until you need a new vehicle or improvements and then spend no more than three minutes doing it - unless you want to really customise your car with alloys and paint in which case it's your choice. Clearly MC3 respects its target audience and should be applauded for that.

The main crux of the game, that being the racing part, is pretty tight too, just as long as you abandon all hope of realism and subtly. MC3 is all about speed, the occasional bend, the tricky task of avoiding race-ending collisions and special tricks. And it's the special tricks that give MC3 a unique sense of identity in this increasingly flooded genre. Depending on what type of car you've got tricks range from aggressive attacks, such as blasting traffic out of the way, to increased driving abilities, such as slowing down time (Matrix style) in order to negotiate particularly tricky sections of a race. Add to that nitros and slipstream boosts and there's plenty of ways to work your way up the field.

MC 3 is not without its racing flaws however. Unless you know the cities inside out, a lot of the races begin with a series of trial and error attempts in order to work out where to go. While a mini-map with the checkpoints is provided it's so hopelessly under-detailed that even if you do have time to glance at the map, which you rarely do considering how fast everything goes, you can't really gage any useful information from it other than you need to head in a generally southeast direction. The alternative is to shadow the racing pack until the final moments and then use your special abilities to nudge in front but this feels like a coward's way out.

The second navigation problem is related to technology. In MC3 there seems to be a mighty battle going on between what the developers wanted to do with game and what the PlayStation 2 can provide (it might be wise for Xbox owners to skip the next couple of paragraphs). At best the graphics are muddy but once things begin to move at a hectic pace things quickly become a smudge. Now I have no doubt that a blurring effect was in fact intended on the part of the developers in order to emphasise the feeling of speed, but structures are so dark (remember it's midnight racing) and mixed together that you barely notice them before you come into fatal contact with them - and to make it even worse rain seems to introduce a fog of war element. All this isn't aided one bit by the loss of frame-rate when the screen gets busy either. Thankfully this is countered somewhat by the immediate restart race option that will quickly reset things for a fresh attempt, but in tournament races where points need to be accumulated, restarts aren't really an option.

It's sad really because you don't like having to criticise a game for having ambitions beyond the platform it has to work with, but technical faults such as difficultly seeing where you're going and suspect frame-rates are serious issues when it comes to games of such speed requiring cat like reflexes.

But let's not end on a disappointing note such as this. Weaving in and out of traffic at breakneck speed, customizing your car and slowly but gradually taking over the streets of the city with your expanding repertoire of skills has never been so much fun and that's exactly what MC3 is, fun. It never promises to be an exhaustive Grand Turismo affair but it gives you more than your average arcade racer. As an introduction to the genre, MC3 does an admirable job, but at the same time it doesn't do anywhere near enough to dethrone the current king, Burnout 3.

While we always welcome multiplayer options, especially those that venture into online territory, MC3's main strength is it's single player career mode. The graphics and framerate suffer an even worse fate in split-screen games and while there are some gimmicky modes such as capture the flag, you soon admit that you'd rather be a social retard and carry on with the career mode. But the multiplayer option's there if you want it and that's better than nothing at all.

To go all cliché for a moment, if you're a fan of the genre then there's no reason why you shouldn't give this nippy little mover a try. But if, like me, you like to dip in and out of each genre as and when then there are, albeit only one or two, better alternatives.

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