Midnight Club: Los Angeles

Preview from Matt - Tuesday, 26 August 2008 @ 12:22am

I'm not very manly. Even by gamer standards I'm a wuss. I watch too much Buffy and not enough football. I like musical theatre. I own several Avril Lavigne CDs. Yes. I mean it.

But above all, I don't get cars. The whole “fast cars and fast women” thing only half appeals to me (guess which half). I don't understand the appeal of engines and chrome and custom car stuff. I don't understand the tuning. I don't know what all the bits are. There's an alternator, and a camshaft. I more or less know what those do. But that's it. I'm out. My store of car knowledge is now exhausted. Oh! There's an exhaust. So I know three things.

I understand driving games even less. The only thing I get less than cars themselves is pretending to have a car in a game. I mean... if you can't cruise the streets and pick up chicks (hey, even wusses have needs) then what's the point? Or there are racing games, where you spend hours and hours practising the same track to cut 10ths of a second off your time. Woop-de-doo. If I wanted to spend hours doing boring things for little or no reward I'd play World of Warcraft. Zing.

The only game I really enjoyed playing a lot was Burnout: Takedown. Burnout: Vengeance seemed to lose something for me, and Paradise was yawn on toast.

So it was with an air of “Yay, free trip” that I accepted Rockstar's invitation to come and play some Midnight Club: Los Angeles.

Midnight Club is a member of a specific genre that really doesn't appeal to me, a genre of driving games with customisable cars and an illegal street racing theme. I say “a member of a genre”, but it would be more fair to say that Midnight Club started the genre. The “Midnight Club” of the title is the original group of Japanese illegal street racers that began the movement. And like the original Mid Night Club, the game began a movement. While the Midnight Club series were the first games to cover the street racing and custom imports scene another game was more prominent – Need For Speed Underground.

Bikes > cars - tru fax

NFS Underground had two real advantages. One was that it was a Need For Speed game. Need For Speed is a well known title and has always been a big seller. The other was that it came out just about the same time as The Fast and the Furious, which despite being a collosal pile of doo-doo rocketed the subject in public consciousness. Also proving people are dickheads.

As I said, my interest in in Midnight Club was relatively slim. I'd heard of the series, but never really played it. Probably like most people reading this. The Midnight Club series has been one that really slipped under the radar for most gamers. It's hard to tell one driving game from another, and hard to sell the features of any one game.

So I went into Midnight Club: Los Angeles with a clear mind and relatively little interest.

First thing to say about Midnight Club: Los Angeles is that it's built on the same engine as GTAIV, the RAGE engine. The first thing you think when you hear that is that it's the driving bits from GTA IV. Logically, it's the same engine, right? And there's driving in that.

So would a game based on just the driving sections of GTA IV be fun? Basically GTA IV where you can't get out of the car, aren't any missions, and aren't any radio stations. The answer, of course, is no. It wouldn't be enough. It wouldn't be fun.

Just as well that's not in any way what it is. Midnight Club is built on the same engine as GTA4, and being on such a cutting edge engine looks spectacular. Theres something about it that's reminiscent of GTA in a kind of “shiny in the same places” way but nothing you can put your finger on. But that's where the similarity ends.

Midnight Club: Los Angeles is a driving game, fast and furious. Damn, that movie ruined everything. There are two aspects to it, one of which appeals to me greatly, and one of which I have to describe anyway out of obligation.

The obligation part is car customisation. I know so little about performance tuning of imported cars that that phrase itself sounds strange and foreign. I wouldn't know a MOMO from a DUB. All I can really tell you about the customisation is about the customisation of the appearance, rather than performance. And I think we can all agree that looks matter more than what's inside. If it counts for women it counts for cars.

The level of visual customisation is frankly excessive. From paintjobs to vinyls, rims and tintings, the look of your vehicle is impressively under your control. Not just to a single level, either. Layers of paint can be piled on top of each other, creating complex compound looks that make your vehicle truly unique, rather than just looking like they were made from some limited set of colours and a few decals. The thing that really impressed me (I don't know if it's actually impressive as I haven't played similar games) is that you can save the look of your car as a set, so you can apply that same customisation to another car without having to work at matching it from memory.

Of course, I say car, but cars aren't the only things in the game. Motorbikes are also available, though to my regret (I cried) they weren't available yet in the build we looked at.

The customisation of cars is definitely a side of the game that will be important to some people. A lot of people actually... you know... care. Rockstar told us that a lot of the servers set up for Midnight Club Dub Remix ended up dedicated to simply cruising, with guys (and presumably girls) simply getting together and showing off their cars.

Fucking wankers.

Sorry, I just had to say it. The idea of people showing off virtual products they don't even actually own... sounds stupid.

Anyway, there's absolutely no chance the same thing won't happen again, and Midnight Club: LA offers these tossers (sorry) the ability to make some highly customised and impressive looking vehicles.

The level of detail on the vehicles and surroundings is impressive

The other part of the game is the part that actually matters to me: driving the cars. Like every other game that has driving, you start with a dodgy hatchback. It worth pointing out that all of the cars are licensed and real cars. We played several different ones, which as expected drive completely differently. The cars include a range from the Cadillac Escalade to the Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, which I can tell is fantastically true to life as it matches exactly to the one I have at home. There are also bikes like the Kawasaki ZX-14R, which should be an absolute hoot through crowded city streets. The fastest car we played was an RX-8 Shinka, and it was easily fast enough for me to crash it repeatedly. I'm really looking forward to getting behind the wheel of some of these beasts.

So yes, driving. The bulk of the gameplay (when you're not customising like a mad thing) lies here. Driving games rest along a continuum from arcade to simulation, and where exactly they fall on that determines the type of experience you have. At one end is the simulator llike Gran Turismo or a lot of F1 games. They appeal to a lot of people. I don't know why. I find them boring. At the other end of the scale is the arcade type. Something like Crazy Taxi fits nicely at this end of it. In the middle there are a lot of other games. From Grid to Burnout, everything tries to find that nice balance between realism and fun. I think Midnight Club: LA has hit a good spot, though, that sweet spot that's got good enough physics for fun crashes, without being a jerk about it every time you take a corner at speed.

MC:LA doesn't have the level of crash physics that were seen in the Burnout games, which positively orgasm over every crumpled wreck, slowing down the carnage so you can see it in awesome detail. But it's certainly better than the “crash into a fence and your car just stops dead” that we often get given. That being said it still has the phenomonon whereby some poles are destructable and don't even slow your car, while others are invincible, ending your fine driving run. It can be hard to see on the fly which poles are which, and given my utter inability to go around obstacles, I found myself going “awwww” a fair bit.

zomg<3bikesohawt.... i play too much WoW. Sorry.

I'm going to compare MC:LA to Burnout just one more time, and then let it go. Most driving games just don't feel fast. I don't know why. They don't, though. They feel realistically fast, but not the crazy zany awesome hyperfast that I want. They feel slow, clumsy, stodgy. Burnout is one of the few that didn't, and I liked it so much partially because it actually finally felt like there was a sensation of speed, of the hectic. Midnight Club: Los Angeles has that same feeling, that sensation that you're barely on the edge of control, and it make it feel fast. And furious.

Dammit!

One of the things that impressed me the most about Midnight Club: Los Angeles was actually something pretty simple. The map. Maps are boring things. We need them to navigate, but beyond that they usually don't have a lot of flair. The map in Midnight Club is different, though. It's the actual city.

I know what you're thinking, all maps are of the city. Duh. No, I'm saying it's not a map of the city, it IS the city. The level itself scales down when you go to the map view, zooming the perspective way out and up in a way that's frankly awesome, keeping every aspect of it from traffic to weather correctly in place. The effect is impressive, and quite beautiful.

Speaking of weather... there's weather. What awesome writing. Anyway, the game features a range of different weather effects one would normally encounter in LA, including rain, smog and earthquakes. I made the last one up. I did ask to see a thunderstorm, remembering how spectacular they looked in GTAIV, but they apparently were still fiddling with that (turning the awesome up to 11, possibly). Like GTAIV before it, Midnight Club: Los Angeles features a 24 hour cycle, with night and day affecting the lighting, traffic patterns, and the availability of certain businesses and drivers. I always thought that the subtle differences in colouring and tone between dawn and dusk in GTAIV were one of the more impressive aspects of it, and Midnight Club does not disappoint either, with LA's characteristic sunsets being captured nicely, for example.

There are a couple of things that could yet doom Midnight Club: Los Angeles. One is long term playability. Having online play is a big factor in this, meaning there will always be races that are fresh and dynamic. But some of us don't much care about online games (because we're bitter and angry) and even the most amazing of short play tests can't determine long term gaming goodness. The other is the story.

Midnight Club: LA does have a story. Honestly, I don't know why. Drive car. Win races. Story in a game like this is pretty irrelevant in my opinion, but there IS one in place. How good it is and whether it adds to the game I couldn't really say. We saw a few cutscenes to set the stage for our new game, and we saw actually looked really good. I always thought that the characters in GTAIV looked like they were carved out of potatoes, but Midnight Club: LA has a clean and crisp look to the characters that is a clear and noticable improvement.

Muscle cars doing their thing

There are a series of different race types, which have pretty dramatically different styles. I was particularly fond of Freeway Race. The normal plan is to weave through traffic at high speeds, winning the race and also avoiding police pursuit. At least that's the usual system. My tactic of crashing into the back of almost every car or other obstacle was a long term strategy that I think may have been too deep and complex for a simple creature like Yug to understand. The freeway drives are particular fast and fur... furry. But the street races are also impressively speedy, especially as you get better and know the shortcuts. We saw rockstar guys hurtling through shopping malls with enticing debris flying everywhere and pedestrians gratifyingly leaping for their worthless little lives.

And before you ask, no, you can't hit them. They're deliberately too fast for that. But it's still kinda fun to try.

Anyway, I'm going to wrap this up now. I'm looking forward to giving the game a full play, and you can rest assured that we'll have a full review up soon.

In closing I can say only this, and I don't think there's much greater praise than this: after Little Big Planet there's no other game I'm looking forward to playing this year more than Midnight Club: Los Angeles. I'd like to thank Rockstar for introducing me to a game I otherwise may have let slip by. I can only hope this iteration of Midnight Club will get the attention it deserves.