Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition (PS2)

Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition (PS2)

Aalaap Ghag, Apr 30, 2005 1212 hrs IST

Rice imports, luxury liners, big boys and crotch rockets

Wide open cities, great sensation of speed, excellent selection of cars, bikes and aftermarket parts

Performance tuning is not too detailed, not too many character voices and cutscenes, looks good but not too good

Expert Rating :

Expert Review

The illegal street racing fad spawned by movies like Fast and the Furious and Gone in 60 Seconds is no longer a fad - its a full-blown genre, and a robust money making model in auto business. Nowadays everyone wants the hottest body upgrades and the coolest performance parts (literally) for their rides. In gaming, it has opened a whole new world of customizable and upgradeable, lawless car racing, and with new and improved titles coming out every few months, the scene is not going out anytime soon.

I really liked the first Need for Speed: Underground, simply because it was the first of its kind. The first NFS to feature branded performance accessories, detailed cosmetic configurations and my beloved Mitsubishi Lancer. Though they had the Evo VII and not my singular favourite Evo VI (in Colin McRae Rally 2.0), it was still a Lancer. Everyone loved the game, and they couldn't wait to see what the next announced Underground 2 had to offer. Spinners! Audio! Dyno! Free roaming city a-la GTA! It was going to be a long, long drive through the night!

But I was disappointed when I played it. There was another game around much before U2 - Street Racing Syndicate by Namco - which already had almost all the elements: the free roaming city, detailed tuning, races that could happen anywhere, and it even had cops. U2 had no cops. An illegal street racing game with no cops? I had too many issues with U2, really. I hated the fact that you HAD to drive 30 miles just to get to a race, even though that was more real than SRS, in which you could simply choose to teleport to that place if you're not in a mood to drive. Its fun driving, but after a while it gets a little boring and you just want to get on with the career progress. I hated U2 because the race locations had no sign of any activity around except for a glowing colored circle. Is that how it happens in the streets of LA? Here's an idea, EA: how about having a bunch of people gathered around a few cars with loud hip hop coming out from the trunks? Doesn't that describe the racing scene a little better? Didn't you see the Fast and the Furious carefully? I hated the ultra-narrow lanes in most parts of the Underground 2 city, and I hated the fact that there was no damage whatsoever. Come on.

SRS had damage. The real type of damage - one that would stay on and you'd have to go to the garage and pay to fix it. This would make you drive a little more carefully, but then I contested by saying that there's no fun in illegal racing if you drive carefully. But I wanted the best of both the worlds. I wanted damage, but I didn't want it to stay on beyond the current race. And that is Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition.