First Look: Midtown Madness 3
The original pair of Midtown Madness games on the PC were a source of great joy to those online gamers that gave Angel Studios' real world-real crashes style of gameplay a chance. The online experience of dashing through true-to-life maps of Chicago, London and San Francisco in police cars, buses, firetrucks and red sports cars with other players was a breath of fresh air back in 1999 and 2000.
For Midtown Madness 3 on Xbox, we're getting a new developer, Digital Illusions (creators of the magnificent Rallisport Challenge), two new cities (Washington D.C. and Paris) and more than 30 vehicles to choose from. Twenty of those vehicles will be licensed, so you'll just have to forgive DICE for the generic police cars and buses they're giving us. There are more features, but it's better if we present them as a list
The Features
Drive through two re-created cities Washington D.C. and Paris
Choose from more than 30 vehicles, including 20 licensed cars
Two player split screen gameplay
Blitz, Cruise, Checkpoint and Career single player modes
Multiple online multiplayer modes
Customizable soundtracks
The different race modes should be familiar to veterans of Midtown Madness, but this Xbox version should be going after an entirely new audience. Blitz racing basically requires you to cross a finish line at some distant point in the city before every other competitor. How you get there, as far as taking shortcuts or brutally bashing your enemy, is up to you. Checkpoint is more or less a race though the city but you have to follow the prescribed course by hitting a series of checkpoints in order.
Cruise is Midtown Madness' version of free ride, but for MM3 there will be added incentive to explore Washington and Paris. Cool powerups and goodies, like new skins for your car, can be found in the craziest places, like some narrow dead-end back alley or underneath some bridge. This is basically a re-application of the "hideouts" seen in the "Cops & Robbers" multiplayer mode which, by the way, is making its triumphant return in Midtown Madness 3.
Full details on the potential online multiplayer component of Midtown Madness 3 will have to wait until Microsoft reveals more about Xbox Live. But the fact that the lovable "Cops & Robbers" mode is back, is reason enough to be excited. In the PC games this mode put up to eight players, hopefully an equal number of player in police cars (the Cops) and players in non-police cars (the Robbers), against each other chasing after a pot of gold. Once the gold was picked up it would have to be delivered to either a hideout (for the robbers) or the bank (for the cops). Of course, on the way to that drop off point, any collision with an "enemy" car (cops couldn't hurt cops and vice versa) would cause you to cough up the gold on the spot. With the gold sitting their in the street, the madness would start all over again. This game mode, online will rock.
Enhancements to the single player modes include better balancing on the Blitz and Checkpoint modes. If you pick a sports car you'll be matched up with a field of similar speedy vehicles rather than a mixture of slow, but powerful trucks and whatnot. This way if you absolutely love driving those big sluggish vehicles, you'll be competing against those same slow and enjoyable power monsters. The fringe benefit of this is that Digital Illusions can tune the vehicles even more since they won't have to worry about unfair advantages in the single player mode. The fast cars can be even faster and the strong trucks can be even more powerful. It will be interesting to see how this balance plays out if and when Midtown Madness 3's online component is developed.
The career mode is intended to improve on the stunt driving and cabbie single player missions seen in Midtown Madness 2 on PC. There's full fledged character development that unfolds as you take your hero through a variety of careers. How else can they get us to drive all of those different vehicles? Each career chapter is going to be broken down into four parts, three of which have to be completed to advance to the next chapter. You can complete any three missions, but if you decide to go back and complete the fourth, you'll unlock something nice for yourself. So while you'll start off as a delivery driver, you'll eventually end up as a cop among other things. There's one overall compelling reason you're doing all of this, but that magical motivating item is well-guarded secret for now.
There will be full blown cinemas to advance the storyline throughout career mode. An original score in both the cut scenes and during the run of gameplay itself is something new for Xbox owners. Custom soundtracks will be featured in Midtown Madness 3, as it is in all good driving games for the Xbox.
Other improved audio elements include voices for the pedestrians as you drive by or at them. The best part is that you're getting French and English comments from the folks whether they're just commenting on your driving or screaming at you for trying to run them over. The narrators for the game all come with genuine accents appropriate for the city that you'll be driving through.
The scope of the cities in MM3 is going to be even greater. If you're only going to have two towns, it's best to make the most of them. Christina Chen, the Program Manager for Midtown Madness describes Paris this way:
With San Francisco and London (in MM2), each of those cities was about one and a half times the size of Chicago, in the first version. Paris is about three times the size of San Francisco. It's almost to scale, but for gameplay reasons we remove a lot of the side streets and add alleys and shortcuts. We have more landmarks now than we did in San Francisco.
Both Paris and Washington should have all of the famous landmarks and most of the not-so-famous places that locals should recognize. The Champs-Elysees, Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower and the River Seine are all no-brainers for Paris, but the proliferation of easily identified street mimes populating the sidewalks is that good stuff you can only get on Xbox. You can try all you want to run those suckers down, but they'll always dodge you in creative, mime-like ways. But the Arc De Triomphe will have all of those roads leading out of it in every direction along with all of the other narrow Old World Parisian streets and pathways.
Outlook: The two Midtown Madness titles on the PC were games that wouldn't have worked if it hadn't been for the online multiplayer component. The all out fun of those two previous games should lead to great things on the Xbox as well where the stable platform and pure power of the system should really optimize the driving experience both online and off. This way gamers can focus on all of the fun their having as they roar past the Washington Monument in a fire truck chasing down a runaway bus. We'll have more on Midtown Madness leading up to its Fall 2002 release.
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and when MM2 came out I just had to buy it! I spent alot of time playing cops and robbers, kicking peoples butt, and getting mine kicked by others. I've had the most fun with MM2 then any other game I have. I can't wait till MM3 comes to xbox
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