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June 11, 2004 - One of the best selling launch titles for the PlayStation
2 was the first Midnight Club. Shipping day and date with the system on October 26, 2000, then developer Angel Studios (now
Rockstar San Diego) brought over its Midtown Madness gameplay from the PC and mixed it with the growing street racing culture
to create a game that had a little bit of everything. With open street design, non-linear gameplay, dozens of side streets
and secret sections, and a solid sense of speed, the game took off quickly, becoming one of the first best-selling games on
the system.
Rockstar once again had concrete success with the 2002 sequel,
Midnight Club 2, a blazingly fast arcade-style racer that reached new levels of opponent AI, course design, and console online
playability. Oh, and hell-bent motorcycle racing, too. In 2004, the company that scorched its name across the globe with the
wild success off Grand Theft Auto III is, however, aiming to differentiate itself from the growing crowd of Street Racing
games with new features, an evolved technology, and a new partnership.
Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition digs deeper into stylistic and performance
customization by offering hundreds of after-market parts to tweak and personalize vehicles, and it gives gamers more than
50 fully licensed vehicles with which to drive, race and crash into smoldering piles of flaming metal. Yeah, that's right.
You can customize your licensed vehicle, paint it, color shift it, switch out rims (these happen to be real polygonal rims),
and all sorts of engine parts, and then take your perfectly stylized vehicle and bash the crap out of it. Naturally, you won't
want to do that. But apparently, Rockstar is looking to take licensed car deformation to new limits, giving players the ability
to crunch them into indistinguishable pieces of scrap metal, far beyond what other game companies have done in the past. Rockstar
has also partnered with the car/celebrity magazine, DUB, which focuses on modifiable vehicles, parts, rims (actually, it seems
it focuses mainly on rims), and the celebrities, racers, and athletes who drive them.
Following the second super-fast mofo of a racer
(MC2), Rockstar San Diego plans to vastly improve Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition in each of the areas that Midnight Club 2 excelled.
So, first, there are more cars and motorcycles, 50 of them -- all licensed. Rockstar has revealed only a smidgeon of vehicles
that will be available, but you can count on playable Cadillacs, Mercedes, Ducatis, and GMs (Hummers) among other cars, and
loads of new motorcycles including the introduction of choppers. The class of vehicles has grown too. There will be import
tuners, trucks, sedans, muscle cars, and various other kinds.
Rockstar San Diego has also overhauled the graphics engine, adding
new levels of realtime reflections, more realistic car models, and longer draw distances. There are tons of new side roads,
shortcuts, insanely placed jump sections, all placed in three highly detailed cities (Atlanta, Georgia; Detroit, Michigan;
and San Diego, California), each with its own distinct neighborhoods, downtown sections, and suburbs. Just like in MC2, the
cities are filled with moving traffic, civilians, and AI opponents that are even more intelligent and crafty than before.
Remember how you couldn't follow any single racer from one point to the next to gain first place in MC2? Having brought "Railbranching"
into MC2, Rockstar San Diego has plans to up the AI levels, while also building the cities out with more streets, jumps, secret
alleys, and side-streets from which to choose.
Online, Rockstar is currently being very quiet. Midnight Club
3: Dub Edition offers Xbox and PlayStation 2 gamers the chance to drive against seven others simultaneously, and after you
have stylized your ride you can then bring that online to race against anyone else. We suspect many of the previous modes
of play, such as Race, Detonate, or Capture the Flag, might be available in this new version, but again, Rockstar hasn't revealed
everything just yet. The Race Editor will be back too, but with a more dynamic role.
For the first time in the series, customization will now play a major
role. Players can alter the outward look of their vehicle via the use of paint, adding layers and styles of color. Players
can color shift their vehicles, i.e. tuning the base color and adding five custom highlighted colors on top of the base color.
You can then tweak the body of your vehicle, switching out fenders, bumpers, fins, lights, grills, hoods, rims, wheels, and
more. After you're done finding the right combination of style and class to reflect your personal, eh-hem, "lifestyle" (watch
the gold, baby), you can then get to the nitty-gritty, performance mods. Change out the suspension, air intakes, and exhaust
parts, or add superchargers to give your car an extra boost. There is actually a lot more on this area to talk about, but
Rockstar is still implementing many new sections of the game and it's also holding its hand close to its chest, so as not
to give away too many secrets right away.
The fact is, while Rockstar's Midnight Club
series was indeed the first racing game to tap the street racing culture in the videogame arena, other companies have caught
on fast. EA (Need for Speed), Acclaim (Juiced), Namco (Street Racing Syndicate), Capcom (Auto Modellista) you name it, many
others are right there making street racing culture a part of videogame culture. The thing is, Rockstar's game is already
quite different, with its wide open cities, intense sense of speed, and sense of style.
By infusing high levels of customization to the exterior and the
performance of the vehicles, and by bringing in more than 50 licensed vehicles, all with the ability to take heavy damage,
Rockstar San Diego looks to give MC3 an edge over its competition. The fine details behind Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition still
remain to be seen, and we'll be here to provide you with all of them in good time, so stick around gearheads.
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