Unfettered Blather

I typically don’t review games because there are plenty of sites out there already dedicated to that purpose. I simply do not possess a great enough sense of self importance to think that my opinion ultimately matters for much. I do like to talk about games though, and I particularly like to talk about the games industry and game design. Occasionally a game has a design that intrigues me enough that it becomes worth talking about. Midnight Club: Los Angeles is one of those games.

I would be remiss if I didn’t give a quick history of my experiences with the Midnight Club franchise. My first encounter was actually with Midnight Club 2 on the X-Box. I didn’t care much for the game. The idea of open world racing where you could determine how you finish a race sounds good on paper but doesn’t work so well in execution. The AI has an obvious advantage here as it doesn’t get lost, doesn’t make wrong turns, and never has to look at the mini-map while flying through city streets at 150mph. The game had another problem which is that the player is always driving the worst car. You get new cars by beating drivers with a better car and the entire game played out this way. After beating the first city and moving on to find the game was just going to repeat this cycle ad nauseam I decided I had enough.

After such a poor experience I took a pass on Midnight Club 3 until they released the “DUB edition” as a Platinum hits title and I had read enough reviews to convince me it was worth $20. Well, the game was fantastic. They still had the open world races and unordered races that made the previous game so frustrating, but they were a minority now. Motorcycles were a fun if somewhat useless addition. Different car classes had special abilities that added to the gameplay. Also, races attempted balance so that you were usually racing similar cars. I’m not totally ok with that as I think it’s acceptable to have a superior car but it was better than always racing at a disadvantage. The game was focused on fun and player choice. Of the last generation, there is no other racing game I had so much fun with.

So now we have Midnight Club: Los Angeles and the entire franchise has taken a giant step backwards for the sake of graphical fidelity. Not that the game is bad, there is just less of everything. We’re down to one city, which is more detailed than the 4 cities in the last game but I can’t say there are more roads. Just more detail. There are fewer cars and they all have fewer customization options. You still have special abilities but now they are all powered up the same way (Driving “clean”) and you select your ability instead of it being according to car type. That feels like a copout, since the different special abilities were one way that help differentiate the different car classes. Also, I can’t say that the cars feel all that different. I feel like there should be a big difference between how a 2006 Lancer Evolution accelerates, handles, and performs versus a 2008 Charger SRT. Yeah, the Lancer corners better, somewhat, but I don’t feel like they’re two distinct automobiles. In the previous game there was a world of difference between cars like that.

Not that everything is less. The in car view is nice, but largely worthless since looking around in the real world and in game is still completely different. Chances are good you’ll be playing this game just like the last one, in third person so you can actually see what is going on around you. Also, they included pink slip races and wagers.

Now, I want to talk about this in-depth because with a game so focused on “fun” instead of “realism” this seems like a really odd choice. The entire point of Midnight Club is that you have these cars, you see, and you’re encouraged to love them. You put serious game money into them, modify them, tune them, make them look the way you want them to look. Every car you have can be changed to reflect your own personal statement about yourself. Also, performance parts aren’t cheap, but you can effectively use the same car for a good chunk of the game by upgrading it and keeping it competitive for as long as possible. You get to know that car very well. So imagine this car you’ve spent a lot of time with, tweaked, customized, and won many a hard race, and then lose that car in a split second because you missed a turn, had a head-on collision, or any number of things that commonly go wrong in a race. Watch as your AI opponent gleefully speeds to the finish marker that you can visibly see as you’re at a dead stop. Your car is now gone. There are no retries in pink slip races. Also, you can’t simply turn the game off. They subtract your car from your garage at the beginning of the race and re-add it if you win.

This is one of those ideas that sounds good in theory but works out really crappy in reality. How many times are game developers going to try this before they realize that people don’t like it? Kind of like Steel Battalion erasing your save game if you die or the Fable II development when they realized in playtesting that people were loading old save files rather than living with a disfigured character. These are GAMES that people play for FUN. While I think there is some value to having consequence in a game, the consequence should not be so harsh as to discourage playing. I know the first time I lost a pink slip race I shut the game down for the rest of the day. It was devastating. I almost took it back. I’m glad I didn’t, but I have resorted to gaming the game in order to not suffer the consequences because some of those races are necessary to advance the game. So now I keep a back-up on a memory card. I hate that I had to resort to that and I consider it cheating, but I’m not about to lose another car like that.

If they wanted to do this, then they should at least have a retry. If you just got yourself into a race you can’t win, then you’re not going to win and you’ll lose the car. I’m sanguine about that. That happens and there should be a penalty, even a harsh one, for trying to reach too high too early. However, at least with a retry I don’t suffer a harsh penalty for a stupid split second mistake that costs me the race. These races take a game that is a shallower prettier sequel to a still pretty fun game and make it maddeningly frustrating.

Overall, I think the game is good minus a few really bad points. I hope they’ll release some cars in the future as downloadable content. That’s wishful thinking though. Out of the box, it is inferior in almost every way, except visuals, to its predecessor. That’s surprising, but also exactly what I had predicted with this generation. All this additional horsepower and all we get are better looking games? Midnight Club: Los Angeles is a tale of wasted potential. A game that could be great and settles for “good enough”. There is a reason I picked this up at a bargain, even though it still sells full price. “Good enough” is not going to get $60 out of me.

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