Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition

If you can fit four elephants into a mini, and two fat ladies into a bike and sidecar, why can't you fit a PS2 game onto a UMD? Street racing skids out of the living room.

	Version PSP	Developer Rockstar	Publisher Rockstar	Genre Racing

By Stephen Rowley

Cor, this is good. No need for some fancy introduction to this review. Not even really much need for the review seeing how this is pretty much exactly the same as the PS2/Xbox version we reviewed a couple of months back. Just on the dinky little PSP. We gave that version of the game a fairly sweet score of 9.2. Now scroll down this page to the bottom and check the score for this version. Go on, we'll wait for you...

...checked it? Not the same is it; fairly close for sure but lower nonetheless, a whole 1.7 points lower in fact. Right well that was sort of fancy as opening paragraphs go, sorry about that, but it does highlight that although the PSP version is the same as the home console game, for certain reasons it's just not quite as good, and that there is actually a need for this review and a point to reading it, to find out just why that is. The best way would be to break it down and see how individual elements match up.

On the visual front the PSP version goes a long way to show that the machine is, as many have described it, a portable PlayStation 2 (ish). Obviously it isn't quite as lovely to look at as on the TV, but comparative to other PSP games, and considering it's a first generation PSP title, it still looks cracking. Framerate is decent enough, if not perfect, but strangely the menus can feel sluggish at times, though they're responsive enough when it comes to navigating them that it doesn't become an issue.

The soundtrack here is as with the PS2 version, including all the same licensed tracks. It's a shame that the selection is quite narrow and as such its appeal will not be so broad, but the same can be said for the game as whole. The only slight concern obviously, is that music tracks stream off the UMD and no doubt affect battery life. You can always turn them off of course. If you keep them on though, you'll still get some fairly decent sessions before needing to recharge your PSP; battery life with the PSP hasn't turned out to be a huge problem as many touted before the machines' release.

Now we're getting down to the nitty gritty; how good does it play? The handling on the cars is very arcade-like, crashing doing nothing more than slowing you down and having no other negative effect. The courses have plenty of chances for driving up ramps and through and over other obstacles like trams and police blockades that can help to give a feeling of variety in what amounts to an enormous game. It is slightly annoying that after selecting who next to race you still have to drive to where they are, flash your headlights, then drive to the start of the race. A nice little 'start race now' option would have been helpful when you just want to get your teeth into the game. Something like this would have better tailored the game for the shorter gaming sessions you'd associate with a handheld.

The police can still be a bit on the annoying side, sometimes they can be more persistent than a T1000 to the extent of completely ignoring the other racers and hounding you so much they mess up your race. This is even if you're driving perfectly and boosting far ahead of the other racers. Still, it doesn't happen too often and it's easy and fast to restart a race once it has loaded. Those are the only gameplay issues though, but as a nice little counterpoint, take into consideration that the PSP version has a nice wireless 6-player mode squeezed in too which pees over other PSP games' multiplayer modes, at least in terms of numbers.

In terms of content too, this PSP version is as jam-packed with jam-jars (and mods) as the home ones are. All three cities are here, with no compromises on size or scope. All the same cars (and bikes) and mod parts too, which in itself is an incredibly impressive achievement for a handheld game. It used to be that the handheld version of a home console release had to either be significantly trimmed down or became some entirely different.

So we've established that aside from a few minor differences and some platform specific considerations the home and portable versions are very much the same. Unfortunately this also extends to the flaws as much as it does to anything else. The single biggest problem with MC3 is without a doubt the loading times. Now this isn't just a concern with the PSP itself as the home console versions had some very noticeable loading issues. It's just that here the problem has been increased almost tenfold, to a point where the loading times are the single largest problem with this release.

This in itself wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that there is absolutely no indication of how long you will be kept waiting. It's a simple feature that far too many games don't include and should, as the difference people feel between having to wait for an unspecified amount of time, or knowing how long you have to wait, is phenomenal. If a game requires a fair amount of time to load, make it more palatable for the player, give them some useful feedback not just a repeating animation that makes you think the game has hung or crashed.

These loading times alone are mostly what drag the final score down. As although the game is as feature packed and expansive as the home console versions, you'll end up waiting to play about half as long as you actually do play, and for a portable console this is far from the ideal. You want to be able to just pick up the game, have a few races, then hop off your bus/train and feel like you've made some progress. They also affect the multiplayer games as all the setting up and waiting for a game will become old, fast (or indeed, slow).

We have schizophrenic feelings when it comes to PSP Midnight Club 3. On the one hand we're slightly disappointed that it is just an almost carbon copy of the PS2/Xbox game we've already played, yet on the other it's still a damn fine game, and now you can play it on the move if you're so inclined. Though the one thing that impresses the most is just how big a game it is and how well it translates to the PSP, aside from those loading times of course, and as a by-product gives us warm glowing feelings about the potential of the upcoming GTA: Liberty City Stories. Hopefully the guys at Rockstar have learnt plenty enough from this port to lessen loading times in any other PSP games they develop, whilst still keeping this sort of free-roaming environment.