	Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition
	Developer: Rockstar San Diego Publisher: Rockstar Release Date: Out Now Players: 1-2 offline, 2-8 online	Words By:
Intro Midnight Club 2 was a great game but compared to the other street racing games on the market it was missing something: customisation. Rockstar have teamed up with American car magazine DUB to bring the DUB culture to games. ‘What’s DUB culture?’ I hear you cry, DUB culture is all about the ‘bling’, as opposed to the street racing culture that’s just about speed and spoilers. So get ready to pimp your ride. The game You start the game as a new racer in the San Diego race scene. You get introduced to the dude who runs the best garage in town in a nice FMV cut scene. Then obviously you need your first motor. You only have six starting cars to choose from, two muscle cars and 2 tuner cars, once you’ve chosen one it’s time to hit the streets. Like I said, San Diego is where you start and after a quick first race you’re free to explore and do any race you fancy. One of the cool features is the way you can play the game, you could just challenge other street racers and enter tournaments to unlock everything as fast as you can, or you can enter city races that just earn you money and aren’t necessary to progress the game. If you’ve played any of the previous Midnight Club games you’ll know what to expect when it comes to the actual race. The most regular race type is the ‘ordered race’ which consists of a series of checkpoints you have to cross in a certain order to get to the finish line, which leads me to another cool point about the game, and something that is one of the series’ trademarks, and that’s how open the races are, you’re not stuck onto the streets with barriers everywhere, you can take shortcuts and different roads to reach the next checkpoint. If you love the free roaming races you’ll love the race type ‘unordered race’ which is about hitting the checkpoints in any order you please, it’s really cool/different when you see your opponents splitting and heading off in completely different directions. The other race types are ‘circuit’ which is just an ordered race but with 2 or 3 laps and ‘timed run’ which is on a track but only used in a few tournaments. There are 3 big cities to drive about in; San Diego, Atlanta and Detroit. San Diego is urbanized with tall buildings, Atlanta is more ‘hood’ with smaller buildings and ghetto areas, Detroit is the industrial one with factories and such to drive through. The cities are full of life, a lot of cars, trucks, emergency vehicles etc especially when you hit the freeway - it’s similar to Burnout’s amount of traffic. There will even be accidents on the road ahead of you with a fire truck every now and again, usually with a ramp to avoid it with, it just adds that little bit of variety. The actual driving part is great and easy to get to grips with. The sense of speed is crazy and you’ll be surprised when you first hit the boost button, everything really whizzes by. Talking about boost, MC3 features some cool ‘moves’ that you don’t usually find in racing games. Some making a come back from MC2; like the ability to pop up on 2 wheels to squeeze through narrow gaps, or slipstream opponents to charge up a boost meter. The courses are varied and range in difficulty, maybe I’m rubbish but initially I seem to hit every ‘sticky-out bit’ on every turn and end up having to restart my race. And that becomes a recurring theme on the longer races. The cops are pretty dodgy; they’ll ruin some races by just smashing you off the road (usually near the end) and they seem to have the ability to stay right behind you even if you hit the nitro. Cars and customisation While only tuner and muscle types are available at the start you’ll soon unlock more vehicles like SUV’s, luxury sedans, choppers, sport bikes and exotics. There are over 50 vehicles from these top manufactures. • Cadillac • Chevy • Chrysler • Dodge • Ducati • Gembella (Porsche looky-likey) • Humvee • Hotmatch Choppers • Lexus • Kawasaki • Lamborghini • Lotus • Mercedes • Mitsubishi • Nissan • Pontiac • Saleen • Volkswagen • West Coast Choppers A nice list I think you’ll agree. Other street racing games are limited to affordable cars but as you can see from the manufacturers list, MC3 features motors only the rich and famous can afford, and of course bikes too. These days it wouldn’t be much of a street racing game without customisation options. Luckily MC3 features a huge range of real parts, huge rims, bumpers, spoilers, side skirts, grills, decals, custom paint and your own license plates to name a few so you’ll be able to create your own styled motor. Xbox Live Xbox Live play is like any other game, decent depending on the type of people you get in a race. Pretty much lag-free and any race you’ve done on the single player portion can be selected. You’ll find a lot of people select the cruise option and if you enter one of these rooms it turns into like a virtual car show with the other people checking out your ride and talking about what looks good. Graphics This is where I think MC3 is let down just a tad. The game looks really nice, highly detailed vehicles, lots of stuff on screen (including pedestrians), and once you hit a big jump you see the massive draw distance where you can see the whole city sprawled out around you. The frame rate seems good when you’re cruising about but when you enter a race it seems to take a hit and you can feel it, it’s not unplayable but you do notice it when it drops. If it rains during a 7 car race prepare for what feels like about 2 frames per second when everyone’s kicking up spray. Sound The sound is one of MC3’s (and indeed Rockstar games as a whole) best parts. It features a huge assortment of real artists. Hip Hop artists like Fat Joe, 50 Cent & The Game, Fabolous, Twista, T.I and many more. Rock is supplied by the likes of Kasabian, Nine Inch Nails, Queens of the Stone Age, Ash and more. They’ve also thrown in some quality Trance and Drum & Bass. A cool feature is the ability to choose a certain genre to listen to, it also lets you change tracks with the D-Pad so you can put your favourite or ‘lucky’ song on at the start of a race. Custom soundtracks are also supported. Overall Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition is a great game let down by an occasionally poor frame rate. If it was as smooth as its predecessor then this would be a strong 9/10.

Best Bits
- Exciting racing.
- Great vehicle selection.
- Top, top music.
- Looks nice.

Worst Bits
- It gets really hard.
- Cops can be dodgy.
- Frame rate.


by: SteMacD