So really, the music is as good as you want it to be, which is something I always like in games. And let me tell you, speeding down the highway against heavy traffic in bad night-time weather while desperately avoiding the cops becomes even more intense if you've got Mother Earth playing in the background. Truly and unequivocally terrible.īut (yes, there is always a but) thankfully the game provides you with the oppurtunity to use songs stored on your Xbox's hard-drive instead, bypassing the entire problem. Quite literally all the music that comes with this game is a steaming pile of techno-spunk that sounds like what you'd get if someone dragged a synthesizer behind their car for 3 miles. I don't have a lot of complaints about MM3, but the music is one of them. There's also been a surprising amount of attention paid to the design of the little details: the first time I noticed a pedestrian carrying an Xbox, I was literally struck dumb for a second or two which, in retrospect, was pretty poor timing because it sent my car flying through a guard rail and straight into the river. Despite previous-generation graphics at work, it still manages to look very realistic, if not entirely photo-realistic. Both cities are also very well-done, with lots of detail and polish to them. There are no closed circuits, no invisible walls, no lakitu's holding up stop-signs: you can really go from a dirt-road in a park to a four-lane highway to a tiny alley littered with dumpsters whenever you want (more on this later). But Midtown Madness is excused from this, because in literally every possible mode of play, you have the entire city at your disposal. Normally I deduct points for using existing locations in games, because it means that the designers can just put their feet up and let Google Maps do all the work. Note: Flying police cars smashing into your vehicle at high velocity is not a typical occurence (yes it is). For a racing-game to provide something besides racing is commendable, and I definetly approve of this part of the game. What I'm trying to get at is the fact that even if it's not perfect, MM3 does have a story, and not a bad one at that. Now of course, it still isn't actually high drama: Lord knows better stories have been spilled from pens. By racing-standards, this is already more story than you'll normally get, and the fact that there's likeable and believable characters with actual faces rather than numberplates makes MM3 pretty damn unique. You start off in either city undercover in some measly job (pizza!) and gradually work your way up until you're dealing directly with the people you're supposed to be keeping an eye on, with several recurring characters as well as actual plot-twists. In the first case you're a secret agent trying to stop the kidnappers of a world-famous racer, and in the second case you're a private eye who's investigating shady dealings around the film-set of the upcoming blockbuster The Quick And The Slippery. The game takes place in one of two cities: Paris or Washington DC. So imagine my surprise when I found out there was an actual story here! Usually my biggest complaint about racing-games is the fact that they never have much of story beyond "Be the best racer of them all!!!1!" and I originally went into MM3 expecting exactly that. Now of course, for all it's apparent omnipotence "universal" isn't a very solid word: there's always bound to be at least one exception to the rule, and in this case that exception is Midtown Madness 3. One genre that we universally despise, however, is racing-games.
My older brother is the only one of us who really likes RTS and if you ever have the poor luck of fighting my oldest brother in Phantom Crash then I guarantee he will royally kick your ass eight ways from Saturday. The gamers in my family are all different in small ways. Prepare to have your mind blown: I actually liked this game.
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