Midnight Club II (Xbox)

Racing in the middle of the pack at the start of the race.

Racing games have been a strong point for the Xbox with Project Gotham and Rallisport challenge as launch titles. Rockstar games is taking the racing underground and into the world of illegal street racing as in the Fast and the Furious films, and Midnight Club 2 needs to be both fast and furious to raise itself above the stiff Xbox competition. Taking place in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Paris where the streets are full of traffic, the action in Rockstar's street racer is certainly furious.

The Long and Winding Road

Burning Rubber.

The focus of the single player game is the career mode. This sees you enter the ranks of the Midnight Club underground street racing crew. You must work your way up the ranks by defeating other members and winning their cars to enable you to beat the better racers. Other modes are available such as circuit races where you compete doing laps of a certain course which includes a course designer so you can keep going at this mode for some time.

There are also two capture the flag modes – traditional and detonate. Capture the flag sees you drive to a flag to take possession and you must return it to a randomly determined point to score. The flag can be taken off you by being hit. In detonate the flag is a bomb and too many hits will cause it, and you, to explode. All of these modes are available in multiplayer which includes system link, split screen and Xbox Live.

If she had a set of wings, man, I know she could fly

Some races will put you in a bike racing cars or vice-versa.

Before each race in career mode you get a little spoken intro from your mentor or your competitor. In the early races it is used to instruct you in the race type (checkpoints in order, checkpoints in any order, timed checkpoints etc) and later racers use it to trash talk you. The trouble is that the races are so difficult to win that you’ll probably race most of them many times and the intro talk can’t be skipped. This becomes very annoying very quickly.

Between races you are presented with your opponent who does a bit of trash talking to try and progress the career mode story a bit. I’d like to say that it’s redundant because it isn’t very well scripted but it does present a face to race against and without it the game would probably be a bit dull.

There’s one more thing, I’ve got the pink slip daddy

Powersliding in a newly acquired ride.

The point of career mode is pink slip races. When you have won a series of races involving the racer that you are challenging you move on to a pink slip race. This can be a one-on-one race or a group race but when you eventually win you’ll get the opponents car and then continue in career mode with that car. You’ll also get the chance to race on bikes intermittently but the emphasis is on the cars. There is no licensing in the game so the cars only look like real models, they have different names and characteristics. They are all well modeled and look the part whether tearing along the highway, flying off a ramp or spinning wildly out of control.

When you take control of your opponents’ car you realize just how much better than yours it was and how amazing it is that you actually won. This effect is short lived as the next person you challenge always has a significantly better car. It’s a shame that at no point are you ever on an even footing with the competition in the single player mode.

You give me Road Rage

Pulling a wheelie increases your speed

I found the AI in Midnight Club 2 to be a bit of a mixture. The computer-controlled cars certainly drive very well, although they aren’t infallible. I got the feeling that the computer plays catch-up a bit with the pack. Catch-up AI is popular on arcade racing titles and is where the cars ahead of the player move slower to keep the pack tight. This is quite noticeable because the computer cars are always significantly faster and yet if you crash you can invariably catch them back up. This makes the races feel a bit unrealistic although it is a forgiving way to play, as you aren’t heavily penalized for your mistakes.

The routes taken through the courses are free as long as you hit all of the checkpoints in the correct order. There are often shortcuts that can be taken and alternative routes to hit all of the checkpoints and the computer-controlled cars have sufficient intelligence that they don’t all take the same route and don’t necessarily take the same route every time you play the same course. The best way to find the quickest route is to look out for where some cars break away from the pack to discover shortcuts. The only computer-controlled cars which are lacking in intelligence are the non-racing cars which fill the roads up. The non-racing cars generally pootle along on their way but do have a tendency to swerve to avoid you and end up going from not being in danger of hitting you to sliding sideways right in front of you.

Baby you can drive my Car

Lining up for a side swipe on an opponent

The three cities on offer in MC2 are suburbs based on the real cities. One of the available game modes is cruise, and in this mode you don’t race against anyone you just get to drive around the city freely unencumbered by the police but with the other traffic still in place. It can be useful, once you have learnt a course within the city, to go and explore it in cruise mode, looking for extra shortcuts. This mode is only really useful in game terms for this task but is also good for getting the hang of the car as well as admiring the quality of the graphics. The graphics shine through in this game, they suffer no slowdown and don’t half move. There is a tremendous sense of speed as you tear along the highway past all of the normal traffic.

The car models are well detailed although the damage model is very generic. After you’ve smashed you car up a bit it starts to look dented, smoke starts to appear, then flames and finally it explodes. None of this has any effect on the performance of the car, though. When the car explodes, which also happens if you crash into petrol pumps, it is almost immediately reset where it blew up allowing you to continue with the race. The cars damage is also reset between races regardless of how badly damaged it was.

Highway to Hell

Racing through the night until sunrise

The sound effects are a weak part of the package. The cars all sound the same and are fairly generic vroom-vroom sounds – there’s no detail or clarity. Even with the surround sound switched on there’s no definition or muscle there and the surround mix doesn’t contain much directional information – you couldn’t place an opponent’s car by its sound positioning. The music is pretty dull and there’s no option to use your own soundtrack. This feature should really be mandatory for racing games as everyone has their own favorite driving music and we don’t all want to have to listen to poor quality dance or metal.

Scream if you want to go faster

The courses take in all aspects of city driving.

The speed of the game and the density of the traffic in places demands an intuitive control system as well as lighting fast reflexes. MC2 tries to provide one but the other is up to you! The control system is not immediately intuitive and will take a little bit of getting used to. For a start the left analogue stick controls direction whilst the d-pad controls the map and stereo. Personally, I like being able to choose between the two and tend to use the d-pad for steering. The left trigger is used to shift your weight whilst in the air and on the ground whilst the right trigger is the hand brake – it can be a bit tricky if you get the two confused.

I also found that I kept hitting the nitro instead of the brake although must of the turns were either gentle enough to not need the brake or so sharp that they needed the handbrake so that became less of an issue. The controls aren’t difficult to get used to and are usefully laid out once you do get the hang of them.

Bat out of Hell

Its not just about the cars - bikes have a role to play too.

The multiplayer game here was rather difficult to gauge. You take the cars that you have acquired in the single player mode into the multiplayer mode. This can make it difficult to find a fair match. The few games I played online were so heavily weighted against me as to be ridiculous. The trouble is that unless you have the best cars there really isn’t any point going online, because the only people you’ll find there will have the best cars and there’s such a performance gap between the best car and the next best car that it’s not worth the bother. There were also surprisingly few games available online. The times I tried I was limited to a choice between two or three each time even with all of the game filters switched off. This might improve with time and it will certainly give you a chance to unlock the decent cars before you get your butt kicked online.