By Jim Drewes - May 20, 2005

Midnight Club 3 Overview

With the soaring popularity of MTV’s “Pimp My Ride,” and the faithful following of the “The Fast and the Furious” movies, its no wonder that game manufacturers are still gripping to the arcade racing genre, focusing on car customization.  Rockstar’s latest foray into the genre comes in the form of Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition, a new addition to the Midnight Club franchise.  Midnight Club 3 goes over the top sometimes and uses too many arcade elements and too much pop-culture lingo and attitude.  However, for any faults that Midnight Club 3 has, there are plenty of assets to keep the game interesting and to make it worth your purchase or rental dollar.

Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition employs the same premise used in just about every other arcade racer out there.  The basic idea being, you start out with next to nothing and you gradually race your way to supremacy by upgrading your car or purchasing new cars with the money you earn from races and the cars you either sell or trade in.  Rather than force a purely linear storyline, Rockstar opted to allow the player to “cruise” a city to look for races to enter.  Although this isn’t an entirely original way to navigate through a game, it is an effective one that is increasingly becoming the modus operandi for Rockstar’s games (as is evidenced in the Grand Theft Auto series.)

There are several different race modes in Midnight Club 3, allowing you to challenge other AI drivers, race for acceptance into car clubs, or to just generally race city circuits.  Most of the actual races however, are checkpoint races.  Checkpoint races tend to be fairly linear, although Midnight Club 3 takes a “find your own way” approach which allows for several alternate paths to any given checkpoint.  A more extreme example of finding your own way comes in the form of simple start-finish races where there is only one checkpoint, which is the finish line.  This method of racing causes players to scatter down various paths through the city to try to be the first to reach the finish point.  Complex city grids can be frustrating at times when finding your own way, or even just following the pack.  A wrong turn or a bump from cross-street traffic may send you down a path you won’t be able to recover from.  Once you grow tired of career mode, you can continue your Midnight Club 3 experience through multiplayer or the game’s route creator.  Multiplayer has many of the race modes we have come to expect in arcade racing games, such as capture the flag and tag.  However, with online play capabilities, multiplayer will still keep your interest even after tag becomes trivial against your less talented friends.  Midnight Club 3’s route creator is pretty much what it sounds like.  It allows you to take an existing city map and place your own checkpoints to form a new route to race through.  This feature is perfect for players who have found some interesting paths in cruise mode and would like to try them out in an actual race.

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1: Midnight Club 3 Overview 2: Gameplay and Graphics 3: Sound and Summary