by: Dameon White

October 25, 2008

Rockstar’s most successful venture against racing heavyweights Ridge Racer, Gran Turismo, Need For Speed and the now incredibly popular Burnout series first debuted back in 2000 on Sony’s PlayStation 2 platform where it successfully etched a new name on the wall in the long line of racing games.

Midnight Club: Street Racing brought underground, illegal city racing to the masses hot of the heels of the box office megahit The Fast & The Furious; a movie that brought the world of customized tuner cars and highly illegal street racing to the masses. Needless to say – and by that I mean the thousands of viewers that were immediately arrested following the film for attempting to do burnouts in their moms’ 1992 VW Scirroco in the parking lot - both the film and Angel Studios’ (now Rockstar San Diego) racer were widely successful. So successful, in fact, that it was picked up on radar by the house that EA built and spawned a series of lackluster Need For Speed titles that also tried to capitalize on the buzz that was illegal street racing. It seemed, as though, this particularly new style of videogame racing was to be dominated by Midnight Club. Indeed, it has.

Jumping forward to today and past the several successful sequels on PS2 and Xbox we have this generations’ first taste of illegal street racing and it’s brought to you in all of its illegally tasteful, high-definition glory. Midnight Club: Los Angeles features very tight handling cars, fast spaced and competitive racing action and an incredibly live and very accurately recreated Los Angeles. Albeit there are a few differences here and there to the city interpretations for the better enjoyment of the game (more curved roads, more shortcuts, etc.), but you can expect to see all of the major highlights abound. Reminiscent of LA though, it’s not without its bumps and bruises and some of these ultimately keep the title from taking top dog honors of city street racing.

Much like many of the arcade racing games of today, Midnight Club is set in an open world environment. Managed by your T-Mobile Sidekick you will receive new race challenges (which can be done in any order that you like) that vary in difficultly, can view currently available objectives and other races that you can enter and listen to messages sent to you from Booke (your boss of sorts that gets you “jobs” around town to earn Rep to unlock new races and challenges). That’s right, Midnight Club features a story. It’s not the greatest story ever told by any means, but it’s a nice addition to what otherwise could just be another standard racing game. My first impression of the main characters is that they all remind me of the main characters from 2 Fast 2 Furious in almost every way. From the southern lead character to the ghetto-fabulous-but-not-too-ghetto sidekick that handles off of your business it’s a pretty straight forward affair much like that of the C-rated movies. Mostly, the story just advises you of challenges that are available and introduces you to more characters in the game in the form of cutscenes and SideKick messages, some of which are actually pretty amusing. As with past games in the genre, flashing your lights at marked cars driving around the city initiates the race.