MIDNIGHT CLUB 3 CAR LIST FULL
Without going into full Burnout-style abstraction. The result is a game based on unstoppable speed and crushing momentum. Then you add nitro speed-ups into the mix, and the mechanic where you can gain such a boost after following a competitor for a short distance. Races are well set up such that shortcuts are findable but not always obvious, and you can add smashing through glass walls to the list. Everyone else on the road is pretty much an irrelevance. Sometimes the police take after you too, and can be taken similarly lightly. Likewise, you just obliterate any trees that get in your way. But it poses much less of a hindrance even before you get the power-ups that let you sonic-boom all the cars out your way, you can shrug off most impacts short of tram size. The game does a great job of maintaining a dark and midnight atmosphere while almost always remaining easily legible, which is impressive and important.Īs with Need for Speed: Underground, you race your way through traffic. Do it right, and turning is barely necessary, never mind braking. All to try to find the straightest possible line to the next point. In practice this means trying to control the car, look at the big guidance arrow pointing to the typical route, and read the map in the corner of the screen at the same time. (Without having played previous Midnight Club games, it was still broadly familiar from the races in Rockstar’s own Grand Theft Auto III). Its races are on courses made up of fixed checkpoints, marked by big glowing flares, that you have to go between, picking whatever route you like. After a short adjustment period, it became clear that was very much the point. My early impressions were of thinking that the brakes on the car were remarkably ineffective. Midnight Club 3 also keeps the racing absolutely central, and absolutely fantastical. Your customisation options include changing the colour of the HUD you see on screen - speedometer, arrows pointing which way to go and all - because those are very visible to the player, and so they matter at least as much as some tweaks to the car. Yet for all the plays for authenticity, one of the biggest strengths of Midnight Club 3 is that they stay secondary to better parts of the experience. The DUB Edition of the title comes not from music, as I assumed, but from linking up with custom car culture magazine DUB. Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition responded by bringing in customisation and real licensed cars and customisation, and variety moved further towards being something within each game instead of between them.Īs well as the real Chryslers and Mitsubishis and all, Midnight Club 3 takes place in representations of real cities (San Diego, Atlanta and Detroit) and the real world links go further.
And then its sequel added an open-world element too, and Midnight Club’s niche was gone as well. Need for Speed: Underground, with all the resources of EA, combined ideas from several of those titles in one game to massive success. Other racing games had their own niches, be they style or customisation.
MIDNIGHT CLUB 3 CAR LIST PS2
Rockstar’s original Midnight Club was a PS2 launch title based on open-world street racing. The racing games of the PS2 era make for a great illustration of convergence at work, even if 2005 was relatively early days in game genre homogenisation. Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition (Rockstar, PlayStation 2, 2005)