Midnight Club 3 Dub Edition PSP review

There’s a saying on the streets; (I should know, I was walking down them past Morrisons earlier) if you want to settle a score, prove your worth or show someone up, you have to do it on the streets. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure that the person in question that said it was talking about Midnight Club 3, but either way, I think it fits quite well.

For those who don’t know the series, Midnight Club is about taking a car, tuning it up, racing around the streets of a city, and winning more cars to tune up ad infinitum. Well, not quite infinitum, but the sheer amount of races that you can take part in may be as close as you are going to get. My first experience of the series was on behalf of Boomtown when I competed in a press only tournament on the second of the series, having merely played it the night before to try and get used to its controls. Naturally I won. My appreciation for Midnight Club 3 however doesn’t stem from that, but from the sheer arcade playability that skids around the corner and smashes right into your console.

PSP – Particularly Slow Portable

If you own another version of the game, I can’t see much of a reason to buy the PSP edition, unless portability is a serious benefit for you. The game is much the same (if not identical, ignoring subtle graphical losses) to the console versions, which is a very impressive feat in itself, but the main problem lies in the loading times. It seems like at least a minute elapses between choosing a race and it starting, and while (thankfully) restarting it doesn’t require a full reload, the initial wait can get frustrating.

Frame rate is the only other aspect to suffer from portability, taking you a little by surprise if you begin in Career mode, since the free-cruise style of finding a race remains remarkably fast with a fantastic frame rate. The FPS of races is diminished, probably due to the extra AI that is required, as well as having to keep track of where each racer is at all moments. Even so, the game still feels fast, with enough responsiveness to be able to deal with any race, and feels like the best use of the analogue stick I have yet to experience on the PSP.

The game itself

Career mode is where you will be spending most of your time, progressing through the story, racing through the streets, unlocking new cars, special moves (more on that later) and all three cities to tear around. The cars vary rather well, all being rendered beautifully (perhaps explaining the long load times and therefore diminished battery life), and even though the cities are large, you will end up recognising areas within races and get to learn them all over the course of a long play-through.

The aforementioned special moves can be unlocked by beating certain racing troupes and winning certain vehicles. The first that I came across (if you exclude the cliché yet well executed Turbo) was Zone. Throughout a race your Zone meter is gradually rising, and every time it reaches the top, it adds one to your zone capability, which allows you to slow down time substantially, so that you can manoeuvre around oncoming traffic or narrow turns with ease.

While turbo is achieved by pressing the square button, and a special slipstream turbo can be charged by, unsurprisingly, remaining in an opponents slipstream, circle will activate whichever other special ability is relevant in the vehicle that you are driving.

Motorcycles for example have their own, called Roar, which charges as you drift around corners; the concept being that on activation, your engine roars so loudly that not even the most hardcore of drummers can help themselves from trying to get out of the way. These extra little features add another element to each race to help push the game away from just a plain street-racer.

A Street-Racer

The races available aren’t just your standard checkpoint fares (despite a large amount of the races being like that). Others come in the predictable circuit type, but my favourite are the first to the post style, where everyone starts from the same place and has to get to another point in the city. The fastest to the single checkpoint wins. The expansiveness and detail of the cities really comes out in this rare gems, but the satisfaction of finding a back alley leading to a jump that allows you to leap over your opponents meters from the finish has to be played to be appreciated.

Arcade modes increases the playing field even further with Tag mode, Capture the Flag, and a whole load of others available to test your motor, and the wireless multiplayer capability of the PSP gives an edge to the durability and sheer fun available from your shiny (?) UMD.

Portability

While the easy multiplayer element can draw a few straddlers to the PSP version, the main pull is, of course, portability. The ability to jump into a quick race for 5 minutes and turn off again is marred only slightly by the loading times, but still retains the ability to pick up and play for a quick blast. Trying to keep track on the fast moving DUB-road while on a real life bus (fortunately I wasn’t driving) was a little more of a challenge because of the constant shaking, but in a smoother ride, or just waiting at the bus station, Midnight Club 3 is a more than fantastic experience.

The difficulty remains challenging and rewarding to skilled players, yet the AI is beautifully tweaked to make mistakes. Many times cars will career out of control into walls in sharp turns, or into each other, giving an illusion of human fallibility rarely seen in AI outside George Bush’s speeches, which affects the player by always giving you a chance to win. A good stretch behind the closest vehicle is never cause for an early restart because it just takes one to make a mistake and then with some clever driving you can slipstream-turbo-leapfrog up to pole position, leaving them to smash into the layman cars that are stealing your road.

Terrorising the public

Playing Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition on your PSP in public could be cause for concern because of the fantastic soundtrack available. What must be over 100 songs populates the tiny disc, and I’m constantly hearing new ones. Various tastes are catered for from a range of Hip-Hop to some heavy Rock, all of which sound great through PSP headphones, but perfectly adequate emanating from your console’s inbuilt speaker, and that goes for pretty much all of the sound effects.

Playing through the game, I was thinking about my review of it for a long time. Part of me wanted to focus on how much fun it is (and it really does reek quality gameplay), but the rest of me realised that it was the fact that it was the portable version of an already established game that was the main feature. MC3 works surprisingly well on a PSP, despite the grand setting and detail put into the original. Rockstar Games has again proved itself, and now all that I can hope for is that Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories is as much of a success in my eyes as Midnight Club 3.