“Prepare to race” – Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition

The racing games of the PS2 era make for a great illustration of convergence at work, even if 2005 was relatively early days in game genre homogenisation. Rockstar’s original Midnight Club was a PS2 launch title based on open-world street racing. Other racing games had their own niches, be they style or customisation. Need for Speed: Underground, with all the resources of EA, combined ideas from several of those titles in one game to massive success. And then its sequel added an open-world element too, and Midnight Club’s niche was gone as well. Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition responded by bringing in customisation and real licensed cars and customisation, and variety moved further towards being something within each game instead of between them.

As well as the real Chryslers and Mitsubishis and all, Midnight Club 3 takes place in representations of real cities (San Diego, Atlanta and Detroit) and the real world links go further. The DUB Edition of the title comes not from music, as I assumed, but from linking up with custom car culture magazine DUB. Yet for all the plays for authenticity, one of the biggest strengths of Midnight Club 3 is that they stay secondary to better parts of the experience. Your customisation options include changing the colour of the HUD you see on screen — speedometer, arrows pointing which way to go and all — because those are very visible to the player, and so they matter at least as much as some tweaks to the car.

Midnight Club 3 also keeps the racing absolutely central, and absolutely fantastical. My early impressions were of thinking that the brakes on the car were remarkably ineffective. After a short adjustment period, it became clear that was very much the point. Its races are on courses made up of fixed checkpoints, marked by big glowing flares, that you have to go between, picking whatever route you like. (Without having played previous Midnight Club games, it was still broadly familiar from the races in Rockstar’s own Grand Theft Auto III). In practice this means trying to control the car, look at the big guidance arrow pointing to the typical route, and read the map in the corner of the screen at the same time. All to try to find the straightest possible line to the next point. Do it right, and turning is barely necessary, never mind braking. The game does a great job of maintaining a dark and midnight atmosphere while almost always remaining easily legible, which is impressive and important.

As with Need for Speed: Underground, you race your way through traffic. But it poses much less of a hindrance; even before you get the power-ups that let you sonic-boom all the cars out your way, you can shrug off most impacts short of tram size. Likewise, you just obliterate any trees that get in your way. Sometimes the police take after you too, and can be taken similarly lightly. Everyone else on the road is pretty much an irrelevance. Races are well set up such that shortcuts are findable but not always obvious, and you can add smashing through glass walls to the list. Then you add nitro speed-ups into the mix, and the mechanic where you can gain such a boost after following a competitor for a short distance. 

The result is a game based on unstoppable speed and crushing momentum. Without going into full Burnout-style abstraction. it still feels closer to Wipeout than to anything else based on mere earthly cars. As pedestrians scream and get out of your way it’s certainly a fantasy including a toxic element, something spotlit with additional resonances when your mechanic encourages you to “drive like a man”. Midnight Club 3 is racing as an intense, intoxicating realisation of selfish, solipsistic power. Even as it was positioned closer to an increasingly homogenous genre, that can’t help but stick out.

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Top of the charts for week ending 23 April 2005:

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