Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition

So after all the hype, should you care or not? Our verdict on Rockstar's latest Midnight Club, along with complete video collection.

	Version Xbox, PS2 (PSP soon)	Developer Rockstar San Diego	Publisher Rockstar	Genre Racing

By Keza MacDonald

Street racing games are fast carving an entirely new genre out of the car-racing template, with such titles as Need for Speed Underground proving ridiculously successful despite somewhat lacklustre quality. Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition promises to epitomise this new sub-genre, combining arcade racers' high speeds with more 'authentic' racing games' plethora of available cars and adding a truly vast amount of tinkering options and a unique soundtrack.

What we've ended up with is a game with a very distinctive style which improves hugely on Midnight Club 2 - but is this the best street racer we can expect for the considerable future, or will another sequel quickly supersede it?

There are three things I like in my racers: variety, customisation and ridiculous speed. It was fairly certain from the start, then, that Midnight Club 3 was going to push my buttons. Here, we have more cars than anyone could possibly own, each one customisable right down to the tiniest detail, from the letters on the number plate to the design of the paint job to the tiny manufacturer's symbols on the sides - you can even change the colours of the in-game speed dials.

And oh, do we have speed. Perhaps only in Burnout 3 will you ever see videogame vehicles going this fast and looking this good whilst doing it. What's more, you aren't confined to racetracks - you're racing through lively, brightly lit cities, weaving through dense traffic and dodging down sidestreets at over a hundred miles per hour. It feels very fast and very dangerous - no self-respecting speedfreak could resist this game's charms.

You'll start out in a San Diego garage with just enough money to buy yourself a car and, hopefully, customise it a little to suit your tastes. As you go on, you'll earn enough to upgrade and, to use the game's gangsta phraseology (by which, as a bit of a toff, I must admit I am somewhat perplexed), 'trick it out' to your heart's content, hopefully winning some new ones along the way as well. By entering city races you can get a name for yourself, unlock new customisation options and earn a bit of cash, which you can build upon by challenging other racers, entering big-money tournaments and entering car club races designed for specific classes of vehicle. There is certainly enough variety in all these different sorts of races to keep the player sufficiently challenged and interested.

Talking of variety, Midnight Club 3 doesn't limit itself just to different cars, though it has plenty of those - various motorcycles are also available and, unsurprisingly enough, provide a quite different driving experience to the cars. Shifting the rider's weight around is an art that must be mastered in order to get round corners without flinging your hapless driver twenty metres on the air.

Unless you're extremely good at MC3, though, the bike races get very, very annoying, as it isn't easy to keep your eye on every surrounding car's position and manoeuvre the bike sufficiently accurately to get it around tricky corners without crashing into anything. In fact, this annoyance pervades the whole game - when a perfect race is completely ruined by a massive truck suddenly appearing in your path without any warning, it's often tempting to throw one's controller across the room.

That said, the thrill when you do get it exactly right and manage to navigate your way through a highway-full of dense traffic at nauseating speed is intense. Each car has a proper feel to it when racing through the cities, so each poses a different challenge. Having struggled through a couple of races with an un-upgraded car, the difference in the handling is satisfyingly obvious when you can finally afford to boost its performance a bit. The game's classes of car - Tuner, Luxury Saloon and Muscle,to name a few- all drive slightly differently, which means you'll need to approach the class-specific races in different ways.

Each class also has a devastatingly unfair and immensely gratifying special move, which can alleviate the inevitable frustration of crashing into other traffic and ruining your race. Muscle cars and chopper bikes can clear the road ahead of them and drive the traffic into vehicles ahead with ROAR, luxury and exotic cars can use AGRO to power their way through traffic, and tuners can enter the ZONE to put the road into bullet-time and manoeuvre with pinpoint accuracy.

These moves, like additional custom designs and cash, are earned by beating other racers in streetracing clubs. The game guides you through different new developments with cutscenes, which mean you'll never be at a total loss for what to do next. Some frightfully 'street' garage-owning Americans will upgrade and drool over your cars and, ah, 'hook you up with their homeboys in the zone' (ie, arrange races for you) in each of the cities, and are kind enough to congratulate and slag you off in near-incomprehensible vernacular depending on how you do. The cutscenes fit the style of the game and work well in guiding the player through.

The music, too, fits the game like a glove. Midnight Club 3 boasts a fantastic soundtrack, comprised of artists as diverse as Ash, Beenie Man and Sean Paul. Players of the Xbox version can even comprise their own soundtrack from the Xbox hard drive if the game's huge selection of tracks begins to wear thin, but it's unlikely that it will. The graphics, too, focus on speed and style - MC3 looks fantastic and only very rarely slows down, even when it has a ten-car pile-up to deal with.

Midnight Club 3 places a great deal of emphasis on how your car looks as well as how it performs, and anyone searching for endless customisation options will be in seventh heaven. Everything - absolutely everything - can be altered, painted, decorated and upgraded with an enormous multitude of different vinyl designs, car manufacturer logos, decals and colours.

What with all the different cars and bikes and all the different ways of tinkering with them, anybody will be create to find their perfect ride and pimp it out to their heart's content. The sheer wealth of personalisation opportunity open to the player is worthy of immense commendation - in no other arcade racer is it possible to create a car that so exactly suits your tastes.

The only truly bad thing that could be said about Midnight Club 3 is that its loading times are somewhat on the lengthy side. It often takes upwards of twenty seconds to load races, which gets extremely tiresome, especially when multiple replays are required (and they usually are, as MC3's race layouts are challenging and unpredictable).

You'll need a lot of skill and dedication if you want to pursue the game to completion, too, as racing at such enormously high speeds is an art that's hard to master. Walls that seem quite far away - or that you can't see at all - often suddenly appear in front of your vehicle, and the handling of the chunkier cars and especially the bikes takes a while to get the hang of.

Persevere, however, and you will be rewarded with a racing game that's hugely varied, great fun and really gets the adrenaline going. Midnight Club 3 is a brilliant street-racing game, realistic enough to be authentic without being so realistic as to take all the fun out of it, in the manner of PGR2.

It's got style, substance and ludicrous, eye-melting speed, it's accessible enough for anyone to pick it up and play and at the same time detailed enough to keep petrolheads happy. Adrenaline-seekers - this is the racing game to keep you entertained for months to come.