Midnight Club: Los Angeles

[Lok]

How big is the map or "world" in this? Is it the sort of virtual place in which you can drive for ages & get lost & all that?

Put it this way it will take you quite a while to sus this world out awsome

[saturn-gamer]

Its quite a big map, but some races feel repetitive. Lots of shortcuts and landmarks though. I believe I saw Staples Centre.

[Redoilcan]

Is anyone still playing this? If so can you send me an invite for some online fun, I'm on every night between 6 and 9

GT: RedOilCan

[J0e Musashi]

How does this compare to NFS: Most Wanted?

[FatGit_UK]

How does this compare to NFS: Most Wanted?

Been a long time since I played MW, so hard to comment on the graphics, but I think it does have a very similiar feel - sliding around corners, smashing though fences for shortcuts, weaving in and out of cars etc. So far though, the dozen or so police chases I've had haven't had the same intensity as MW and not sure if things do escalate to the extent of spike strips/helicopters/rhinos which made MW so much fun.

I do like this though and my only complaint would be that it can be very easy to get lost if you're not constantly checking the mini-map. For instance, it's VERY easy to go belting down the freeway (with a nice lead) and then suddenly realise you should of taken the last slip road down onto the road that runs along underneath.

[Strolls]

Very well impressed indeed with this game - I honestly don't think words can do justice to how I feel about it game.

It definitely helps to learn the tracks - like FatGit says, it's easy to go past the odd turning & find yourself screwed. But that's the case for only a few of them, I've found - the vast majority of checkpoints are very obvious in distance, as is the direction indicator on them. I'd say it's only the ones where there are two turnings right next to each other or you're on an overpass freeway and the checkpoint is below you (so that the direction indicator is hidden by the freeway bridge as you approach it) that have been a problem for me.

Also, because many of the tracks share the same roads, once you've had to replay one race a few times, the knowledge of that prepares you for other later races. But sharing the same roads isn't a detriment to the game - it doesn't make the later track feel less varied or interesting (to me, at least).

I just really like the whole way the game progresses & stuff... the way characters call you on your phone & tell you to go & meet someone new at the fast food stand... the person there then giving you a mission to race someone else. Consequently, races are interspersed with cruising over to the next destination, and the game just seems to me to hold together very well - it has just really drawn me in. You start off picking up a cheap secondhand car and racing with some guys who hang out in the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant, then encounter other "cruising drivers" who you can challenge to a race by flashing your lights at them. Later you get time trials and delivery missions - the latter are time trials across town with a damage forfeit, basically, and no fixed route. I really enjoyed them. Both these time-trial varieties are very pretty difficult - those I've finally completed have all been with fractions of a second to spare - and I found that one delivery mission in particular was really aided by taking a pass at it very slowly and working out the route.

But for me, the races against other (AI) drivers are the focus of the game, and I would say these races are about the right level of challenging for me. There has been one series that really pissed me off - one of the AI opponents called "Brian" kept beating me, the other two cars were just like filler - but when I came back to it the next day I won the series pretty quickly. If you do get pissed off with one set of races then you can just cruise about, find the next nearest mission or "cruising driver" and try something different. There's plenty of missions & the tracks to choose from - and definitely enough variety between them - that I can't see you getting stuck "grinding" trying to complete a track that you really really hate.

Even if you lose a race then you still get kudos points - and a few dollars - for participating, so you can go back to the garage, buy more shots of nitrous and come back to that race "series" better equipped to win. I'm the kind of person that likes to save often in a game - I'd like to be able to go back to before I lost the last race, and keep racing it again, building up a character or profile that has never lost a race. I guess that automatic saving - and the lack of a save game feature, basically - is really common in racing games? Because MC:LA has a bit of a story, this feels a bit unnatural to me, but it does make the game - and the whole city - very seamless, and I guess these rewards for participating are a good compensation for not having a "perfect score" like that. It just pissed me off when I bought the wrong car accidentally, and then immediately found that I couldn't buy the one I intended because the trade-in value was lower than what I'd paid for it - that's when a game save would be really useful. It's also kinda difficult to compare two different cars when you purchase them - they have bar charts showing speed, acceleration & handling, and if you're comparing two cars that are far apart on the list of available purchases then the charts of all the cars in between are shown as you navigate through them, which is confusing. It'd be easier if there were a compare function in the showroom, or if speed, acceleration & handling were shown as scores out of 10. This is a fairly minor niggle, though, and whilst mentioning that I'd better remark on how brilliant the customisation shop is - the part that lets you put graphics on your cars is very sophisticated indeed.

I don't pretend to be any kind of expert on gaming, so I've not got much to compare it to. I've only played the "HD" tech-demo version of Gran Turismo, and I enjoyed Motorstorm more. I really got into Motorstorm quite a bit when I first got my PS3 - but I love Midnight Club: LA a lot more, perhaps just because of the car customisation options. The game's got a lot of Rockstar flavour to it, and the shortcuts and alleyways remind me somewhat of the PS2 series of Grand Theft Auto. As well as the mandatory turbo-boost - nitrous - the game has banana skins to throw under your competitors' wheels in the form of "special abilities" such as "EMP", which causes the nearby cars' electrics to die for a second or two, leaving them coasting.

I think this game is going to have quite a bit of replay value for me. I barely play online at all, but may even make an exception for Midnight Club. Right now, if you asked me for my top 3 games of the year, I'm pretty sure this would be one of them. Perhaps I've just discovered the genre - this is an "arcade racer", I guess? - but I'd expect a lot more comments here for a game of this quality, and the price it is at the moment make it an utter bargain, IMO, which shouldn't be missed.

[ezee ryder]

I agree with you with mate. This is a really good racing game, shame more people aren't picking it up as it is £17.99. I think I actually saw you playing it the other night, looked at my PSN friends list and was like "wow someone other than me is playing this game!"

[Sane]

Does anybody know what I have to do to be able to tune my car? I bought a Mitsubishi Eclipse and I've done loads of races with it, my rank is Driver, but it won't let me tune it aside from putting in a nitrous and changing the tires.

[Strolls]

I think different tuning levels are unlocked with experience / rep. My previous car had loads of tuning mods, but the current one is maxxed out with only tyres, nitrous + exhaust.

Sorry if that's not helpful - I'm not sure what level the Mitsubishi Eclipse is.

BTW: Please vote me +10 on "Rate My Ride" - it looks like hardly anyone's using it & that many of those who are are also vote-rigging. It should be easy to get high points.

[vanpeebles]

Whats the in car views like on this? Do the muscle cars sound superb?

[joe90]

does this suffer from the Oblivion levelling issue?

[Soundwave]

Finally ordered my copy from Play-Asia in the amazing £10 deal which was shipped yesterday.

Looking forward to getting online with you lot when it arrives (Which I expect will be after christmas now)

Glad I waited this long...got it as an absolute bargain

Neil

[Strolls]

Anyone created any courses for this yet?

I've found a couple of amazing unmarked "shortcuts" this week. One is a car park, which has a ramp you drive up to enter - inside it's quite long, and filled with stationary cars, then you exit by driving out the window. That final jump is quite high and a good laugh, but so far I haven't found any races which would benefit from it - I really need the incentive of a race in which to experience such interesting roads, as I don't have the tendency to put my foot down so much when I'm cruising.

I've found another "shortcut" underneath a mall or something - a very long underground section, and another through a different mall near the beach, and it really makes sense when you find it, because for some races it saves you having to make a sharp turn into a pedestrian area which contains some nasty obstacles which are easy to get smashed-up on.

I want to put together a course which involves guiding you through a bunch of those shortcuts which are usually a bit hidden - for the uninitiated, most course markers are on main road intersections, and you have to work out the shortcuts for yourself - and which will probably include the high jump from the railway tracks into the storm drain.

Still really enjoying this game & am at c 32% in "career progress". I noticed after making my long post above that I kinda fixated on my niggling criticisms of the game, but really my feelings about how fun and "right" this game feels should carry far more weight. It's just hard to write at greater length about how this fabulous game is sheer brilliant - any more words fail to do it justice, IMO.

Stroller.