Midnight Club 3 : DUB Edition (PSP)

Product Information

The mixing of the background music, the sound effects, and the car noises is also never ideal, always just sounding like a big hodge-podge of sound.

I., 50 Cent, Big Tymers, Mannie Fresh, Fabolous, Bump J, Calyx, Deep Blue, Ash, Aztec Mystic, Jimmy Eat World, Kasabian, Marilyn Manson, The Explosion, Nine Inch Nails, Sean Paul, Pitbull, Lil Wayne, and other artists. About six million (okay, so maybe 100) or so different songs from the likes of The Game, Jimmy Eat World, Ash, Fat Joe, Queens of the Stone Age and many more ensure that you won’t hear the same tune twice either (at least, not for a while anyway). The Paint mode just has you turning colors on at checkpoints, so can't we just reset those colors and play again right there? The game can't make use of some of the PSP's ultra-swank features -- it doesn't have online play, and there's no Game Sharing -- but the six-player span is truly outstanding (and, we might add, a big "FU" to EA's two-player cap in Need For Speed), and what's here is still fun for those who can spare the time and patience. The name is derived from a partnership between Rockstar and DUB Magazine, which features heavily in the game in the form of DUB-sponsored races and DUB-customized vehicles as prizes.In this case, it's an even bigger door ding disaster, because you've got as many as five other people waiting with you.

No amount of pardons or acceptances for the detail and depth can give me back the time I spent NOT playing this game when I was trying to play it. The owner, Apone (Dexter Tillis), introduces himself, but is distracted by his most prized possession: a 1964 gold painted Chevrolet Impala that he customized and is constantly tinkering with. Better-performing games will come along that provide these kinds of thrills, but this game was ALMOST there right now, and I would have been perfectly happy with MC3 as my go-to racing game this summer if it had been polished off. Once the player defeats Phil, Vanessa will challenge them again, this time, driving an upgraded Mitsubishi Eclipse GT-S. As high as the PSP raises the bar for handheld gaming, there are standards set down by portable games that still have their purposes.Defeating Vito unlocks the Original Riders (Sport Bikes), defeating Dre or Lamont unlocks the Big Playas (SUV/Trucks). One of the more amazing aspects of the PSP version of Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition is that it has no problems playing like a Midnight Club game. I would have liked to have had camera options available in the menu, since the first-person cam gives an intense sense of speed (but also, obviously, isn't as pretty since you can't see your pimped-out ride), but the option is there on the pause menu. The only thing that really got lost in the translation is the pedestrian population, and frankly, except for the flag girls who started the races, we don't miss those walking targets much. Couple this sense of speed with really, really tight control that allows you to make very precise movements through traffic (even with the PSP’s notoriously nearly universally hated analog nub) and you’ll find yourself addicted to racing in no time.

Even the menus take their dear, sweet time to load, and forget about the FMV -- having to reload the game just to take a quick refresher glance at the cinematic of one 15-second tutorial clip is like a rule across your knuckles when you're trying to learn. It took me a long, long time to warm to this PSP game at all; I wouldn't expect most other gamers to give it that much time.

This version of the game also allows the player to import the original game data on their memory card to Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition Remix to make up for lost progress, thus saving the player from starting all over again. Thank the Lloyd that the game doesn't require you to reload the game every time you have to restart a specific race -- now why can't the entire game just cruise along and move quick from task to task just like that? Every button can be mapped to any function in the game, so if you're used to the Xbox version of MC3, you can toss the gas and brakes up on the triggers (and if you really feel like it, you can go with digital steering instead of the analog controller. Eidos Montreal deftly updated the game to give it more modern sensibilities while retaining the core of what captivated us with the original. It's amazing that it all got on a system with just one stick and this many buttons, and there are times where you will wish you had three hands to hit one button more than you have spare fingers for, but the control set-up works well.