Midtown Madness 3 : Web Wombat : Games

We're talking about a carbon-fibre drive shaft, six closely spaced gear ratios and a 3.5-litre V6 engine with molybdenum coated cylinder walls for minimal friction.

Slowly I wind out first gear -- still getting used to the electronic throttle control -- and slot it quickly from second, to third, then fourth, popping the clutch in and out with joyful abandon.

Wow - what a great time I'm… Aarrrrgh!! Where the f**k did he come from??? Gas, brake, honk! Gas, brake, honk!! Honk, honk, PUNCH!! Punch, punch…

You get the idea.

And that's my midtown madness - not fiction, not an episode of the Simpson's, but a very real experience. Scary, ain't it?

Now that my spooky flashback has receded back into the nether regions of my troubled mind, let's take a look at what numero three in the mad-cap Midtown franchise is offering - hopefully a little something from the above episode, hmm?

Midtown Madness 3 (or MM3 for acronym aficionados) is the best Midtown game available thus far. Sure, it makes sense for sequels to be improvements on their progeny, but this ain't always the case, and I always thought that the original and its successor were bloody good games.

So, with this in mind, what does MM3 offer the seasoned virtual insurance premium hike-meisters? Plucking a random aspect from a hat that once used to be coconut: Beautiful graphics.

The original game was very spiffy back in its heyday, and its sequel was pretty good; that being MM2, which was set in London and San Francisco.

Lots of burnt rubber, lots of crashes, lots of fun

But these were both PC games and rather than having to put together code that's gotta work on a million different systems, with different types of RAM, videocards, motherboards, CPUs and sound cards, the boffins at Digital Illusions have only had to optimise code for a Celeron 750Mhz processor linked to an Nvidia graphics board.

The result? Clipping that defies, errr, really hardcore super genius programming techniques, and um, stuff like that. In all seriousness, the viewing range is absolutely amazing, meaning you'll be able to see stuff that's miles away in the distance - assuming your viewing point is advantageous.

Cruising along the beautifully bump-mapped cobblestone streets of Paris during sunrise is an experience unto itself, with brilliant reflective effects on the thousands of small windows of the structures of yore in the historical French capital.

The effect is immeasurably pleasing, though it must be said that while playing, looking at the pretty scenery is usually the last thing on your mind.

The third game in the MM series is based in two cities: Paris, France and Washington D.C, America. This would have been a purely economic decision, seeing as most videogame sales occur in Europe and America. Still, I'm sincerely hoping that somewhere down the track - perhaps MM5 - there will be a Baghdad or Mazar-e-sharif download.

Moving along, and it must be said that the vehicle models complete a very pretty overall picture too, with high-poly counts, great texturing and one seriously drool-worthy damage model.

You can really bend these puppies out of shape, and even if you don't have nihilistic tendencies, even the odd T-bone with another vehicle or a head-on with a shop front results in satisfyingly realistic and geographically correct damage. Is it just me, or is smashing up cars heaps of fun? [It's you, loser boy - Ed]

Particle effects also show promise, with shattering glass, nicely opaque smoke, lots of sparks and even grass clippings all peppering the 3D make-believe world that hides inside your Xbox.

Why do bus drivers get such a bad reputation?

The levels themselves are massive, absolutely huge, I tells ya! And they're not only large, filled with cool areas to explore, malls to drive through and ramps to find (for death-defying aerials), but are faithful recreations of their respective real-world cities.

Granted, I've only even been to Paris, but they seem to have got it pretty much bang on the money.

And while the game is visually arresting, the sound is not.

It does get bonus brownie points for the ability to import your own ripped music tracks into the game (who else loves Irish folk songs sung in Hebrew?), but the way it always plays the first track of the album on each new track/mission is somewhat sucky.

Moreover, the important sound effects (engine sampling) fail to deliver the realistic impact that I, as a cultured gamer and lover of motor vehicles, yearn. I don't know about you guys, but a 2003-model SRT-10 Dodge Viper, what with its 8.3-litre V10 engine, should sound like a great big bloody truck revving it's tits off.

Sadly, this isn't the case, and instead you get varying buzzy sound effects that really broke my already twisted heart.

The smashing and crashing sound effects are good though, with plenty of bending/snapping/distorting of plastic/metal/carbon-fibre-kevlar composite material type effects. Wheel screeches also sound particularly sweet, and some of the in-game speech is quite a larf too.

Gameplay wise, and MM3 is rather cool. I suppose the graphics help out, but the game is setup to be much more endearing than its precursors, albeit in a rather schlocky, and wholly corny way.

While there are a number of game modes available, including Single Race (with checkpoint and blitz races, plus the cruise mode) and Multiplayer (split screen, system link and Xbox Live), the meat of the single player game lies in the Work Undercover mode, though sadly there's no stake-outs where you get pop a cap in a cop, coz he wasn't giving you props in Oaktown. [You're fired - Ed]

The Barker School of Driving Ecellence rewards
those who improvise with low-friction short-cuts

Working Undercover is basically a bunch of missions strung together, with both Washington D.C and Paris offering a good variety of jobs.

Each city has seven different jobs, and each "job" has on average four missions to play through, which makes for a grand total of about 54 missions, which is a pretty sweet deal on top of the other game modes.

You'll have to win races, smash evildoers off the road and take customers for a ride in a rather intriguing "Crazy Takushi" style cab affair.

There's heaps of variety, and there aren't too many missions that bite - the only frustrating aspects are losing by a whisker time and again. I blame the control pad…

By completing the Undercover mode and even by winning general races, you'll unlock new vehicles, and by cruising about through the two cities you can also find 'wacky' and 'zany' paintjobs for the cars.

Unfortunately at the time of writing we didn't have access to Xbox Live due to yet another frenzied Bunyip attack on the east coast of Australia, though after a few bouts of System Link it's safe to say that it extends the shelf-life considerably.

When linked (or online) there are four more game modes on top of the standard cruise and checkpoint. They are:

Capture the Gold
Tag
Hunter
Stayaway

Of these the pick of the bunch would be Caputre the Gold, where basically you've gotta find the gold, then deliver it to your drop-zone, like that movie of the same name where Wesley Snipes talks a lot of crap and says "Always bet on black, sucka!" Oh wait, that was Passenger 69...

The 8.3-litre Dodge Viper is quick, but only seats two

Anyway, the game becomes more attractive when someone picks up the gold, as the other players can extricate the bounty by slamming into them with a bit of gusto.

So, at the end of the day there'll be the gold courier trying desperately to get up some speed, while being tailed by a swarm of apocalyptic drivers out for blood. Cool or what?

The physics, while skewed slightly in favour of ye olde arcade cabinet, are tops, though it must be said that some sort of vile gravity modulator kicks in when you get air off a ramp or some such.

Sure, you'll always land right-side up, but where's the fun in that? I want backflips, McTwists, stiffy nose bones and rail slides dammit!

But, in the end, I had plenty of fun playing Midtown Madness 3 - just check that score. The gameplay is very addictive, and even when I couldn't pass a mission or beat a race, just driving around and seeing how the physics engine dealt with a head-on smash with a bus (at 274km/h, no less), was heaps of fun.

The game will eventually end, but the nature of the two cities (and their huge size) and the attention to detail and the damage model and the range of cars and the tasty visuals will keep you coming back for quite some time.

Best of all, it's dead easy to pick up, meaning that it's a game that non-gamers can play, perhaps even enjoy.

Game: Midtown Madness 3
System: Xbox
Players: 1-4
Online: Yes
Developer: Digital Illusions
Distributor: Microsoft

Rating: 85%

(Ratings Key/Explantion)

Midtown Madness 3 is on the shelves now.

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