Reader Reviews
Midtown Madness 3, Freak Out, the PS2 itself and someone's opus on ICO.
Star Review: Midtown Madness 3 (Xbox)
by pjmaybe
Ah, Paris in the springtime, or for that matter Washington. What finer way could there be to spend some time, than driving around one of these cities in your overpowered sports car, bowling past startled citizens as you trash yet another badly-positioned park bench in your quest for the ultimate speed thrill. Well, I can think of several better ways to spend an afternoon than indulging in this dubious pleasure via Midtown Madness 3. Watching paint dry, that'd be preferable... or perhaps inserting lit matches under my toenails and watching them slowly burn down.
The developers of MM3, (DICE) have a good past track record on consoles and the PC but to be honest, getting MM3 up to scratch is a pretty mammoth task for any console. Streaming massive amounts of data to simulate a "living city" can't be an easy task and perhaps the development team spent so much time trying to achieve this that they actually forgot to put a game in there. MM3 is dull, repetitive, incredibly frustrating and annoying at times and really does look like an old Xbox title rather than a recent release. Compare and contrast the visuals and the gameplay with the now rather crusty Project Gotham Racing, and MM3 begins to look like a toothless hag out on the pull at Stringfellows. Ugly and untouchable.
It has its saving graces when hooked up to Microsoft's awesome Live service, that much I can tell you. The multiplayer modes are interesting and varied (the excellent cops and robbers mode from the previous PC versions is still intact thankfully), but in single player mode you're pretty limited to a series of very similar checkpoint style races, some even thinly disguised as a sort of poor cousin to Crazy Taxi.
Playability wise, the whole thing feels as arcadey as DICE's mediocre Rally game, Rallisport Challenge (even sharing some odd camera quirks with the title). The selection of vehicles is odd ranging from ridiculously slow (Yay! Let's spend an hour racing around Washington in Refuse Trucks... we’re back to watching paint dry again) to ridiculously fast and uncontrollable (if you think I'm going to try and spell Koeninseg you’ve got another think coming!)
Compare this to any other street racing game on any other format and it comes out badly. The Xbox is snowed under with this sort of title at the moment and this in my opinion is the worst of the bunch. Much faster and graphically spectacular thrills are to be had with the excellent Burnout 2 or if you’re really hard up you could always plump for Midnight Club II instead.