The Rest -
Luckily, the story is not as overbearing and annoying as it has been in other racing games. But it might have been pushed a bit too far into the background. Computer opponents are never personified nearly as much as before and are reduced to voices making comments over walkie-talkie cellphones. Starting off in career mode introduces you to a local chop shop owner in San Diego with $20,000 burning a hole in your pocket and you’re off buying cars and looking for races. It’s not Shakespeare but it works in this setting. As you move through the game the cities of Atlanta and Detroit become unlocked along with a bunch of new races, cars and customization options.

Midnight Club 3 is about three things: speed, pretty cars and upgrades. The controls are easy enough to pick up and get even easier once you tune your cars up for better performance. Going through the career mode you’ll find that you need to use all of the different car classes and eventually you’ll find the one that works best for you. There are tuners, SUV’s, muscle cars, luxury sedans, choppers and trucks and more than 60 licensed vehicles like Mitsubishi Lancers, Chevys, Impalas, the ‘78 Monte Carlo, Dodge Neon SRT4 and many others. Each car feels different once you bring it out for a test drive and each car class has a set of special moves that are unlocked once you finish a set of races. These moves include the tuners ability to slow down time so you can weave through heavy traffic at high speeds or the very useful “roar” ability of muscle cars to send all traffic to the edges of the road. They are easy enough to perform but using them effectively takes some time. Along with these special moves, there are many ways to use strategy to change the outcome of a race. Sitting in another car’s slip stream for a few seconds can give you a boost and upgrading your nitrous oxide tanks makes you go faster more often.

Unlike the Burnout series, Midnight Club 3 doesn’t focus much on crashing. As a matter of fact, vehicles don’t take nearly as much damage as they should considering the pounding they take. But this is all in the interest of arcade racer action. Realism is checked at the beginning of each race so you can focus more on the exaggerated speeds and narrow misses and less on repairing your car on the side of the road. DUB Edition has to be the fasted racing game ever with speed distortion and big jumps that send you sailing across the cityscapes. This illogical speed is amped up even more by nitrous oxide boosts and car upgrades that hike your top speed and car performance. The difficulty of the game has also been smartly reduced since wrecking your car in the middle of the race doesn’t count you out. In one player career mode computer opponents make mistakes and it’s a bit easier to win a match although still very challenging.

Much like in the last two games, DUB Edition throws large urban areas at you and challenges you to find your way around during ridiculously fast race challenges without totaling your car. Unless you are a diehard fan who doesn’t mind memorizing the lay out of each city before racing, you’ll be using quick reflexes and sharp eyes to find your way around because the roads are treacherous. Most of the races are checkpoint oriented but there are point-to-point races and the typical time trials mixed in with random tournaments and car specific race series’.

Narrow alleyways, gas station pumps, lamp posts, bridges and traffic all get in your way and since there is no set path for each race, only checkpoints, there is no one way to finish. So unless you’re accustomed to finding your way around using the circular map in the bottom left corner at high speeds ala GTA, the game play might take a bit of getting used to. The worst case scenario is that you take a wrong turn and find yourself too far off the track to get back into the race. Even veterans of the series will find this happens often although not nearly as often as in the last game.

This brings us to the customization mode which is kept quite simple for those of us who haven’t spent years of our life in a garage. From the performance upgrades (top speed, acceleration and handling, etc.) and nitrous tanks to the garish decals, paint jobs, rims, spoilers and endless useless but pretty upgrades that you can slap onto your car. It can become quite obsessive but fortunately you have to stop once your money runs low.

While Midnight Club 3 is perfectly fun in single and two-player mode, bringing it online ups the ante considerably on both systems. The club system is a nice addition and the systems performance works well on both the PS2 and the Xbox although the Xbox is noticeably smoother.

Midnight Club 3's visual presentation is superb. Compared to the last installment the environments are much smoother and more colorful although there is always a limited color palette since the entire game takes place at night. Still, the blur of the air around the speeding vehicles and the glowing neon lights of the city sailing by are done well. The car models are pretty impressive when you consider the amount of customization each car can go through without seeming pasted together.

As one would expect from a Rockstar game, the soundtrack is large and varied with a lot of current popular music. Tracks from Lady Saw, T.I., Marilyn Manson, Fat Joe, Jimmy Eat World, Twista, Fabolous, Queens of the Stone Age, Nine Inch Nails, The Game, Calyx and Suburban Knight pump while you race through the streets of the three cities. My only complaints with Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition are pretty superficial. It would have been nice if you could cycle through the tunes and select before the race began. Also, the customization and car purchasing mode menus are a bit clunky and annoying to navigate. And, as much as I like a good challenge, it took a bit too long to move from the first city, San Diego, to the second city, Atlanta, and I started to feel like I was racing the same race over and over.

Otherwise, Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition is a great racing experience with almost endless replay ability. Online play kicks up the game play and replay value a few notches and it’s accessible enough that even non-racing fans might want to give it a try.

Posted: May 25, 2005