Midnight Club LA  

Okay so it's a racing game, you win races, you get money, you get more/better cars. It's not original in that respect, but whatever. It's got a story, a premise for why you'd want to be street racing to begin with, but it's extremely threadbare as it should be. On the other hand, I actually found myself liking the characters and their lines whenever they came up. I gather the new guy needs to win either respect or rep, before he can be taken seriously and allowed to race with the pros. The City's the real star of the game, i found it very intelligently designed. I'm not sure whether that's a testament to the skill of the game designers, or the city planners who designed Los Angeles itself. Whatever, it's actually fun to drive around in. The GPS map system is also cool, your map view is a live (besides you, of course) representation of the city night and day. I don't like how you can't zoom in though. Instead of a proper zoom, it tilts the view in and out.

I also don't like the cops. Not only are they much too aggressive, they are everywhere. I've been busted for stopping behind some other car at a red light. I've been busted on my way to an event, dumped at the police station, then busted again the second time i made my way to the event. I think a patch or something made it so they don't have a chance of appearing in all races, only some, but in free roam there's no such luck. If you see a cop coming, don't just park and wait for him to go by, actively avoid him. Do a handbrake turn, and go the other way. These days I free roam online, because there are no missions, no pedestrians, and most definitely no cops.

Another thing i don't like is the mission acquisition system. You get missions by way of a call on your t-mobile sidekick. Not a problem in itself, the problem comes because the sidekick blocks your mini map entirely. Sure you can dismiss it, but considering that the main map is also unavailable while it's blocked, it's a pretty big negative. For some reason (maybe it's just me), it also pops up at the worst of times. Like, in the middle of a Freeway race, or when the cops are after me, or in a Red Light race. I really hate getting missions in Midnight Club LA. A little envelop would have sufficed to let me know I had mail afterall.

I don't like night time in the city, because the races automatically become harder. For some reason, even though you flash your high beams at other drivers to initiate a race, you can't toggle them on or off for night driving. And your low beams are nowhere near bright enough. The game is also unfairly hard. Apparently it used to be insanely hard, but now it's just unfair. I don't know how to explain it, but it's not just rubberbanding AI, or magically increased traffic density. It's the feeling that you're not going to win the race right from the start despite having a car on equal footing with the rest of the pack, and slighty above average skills. Whatever happened to proper difficulty settings? Even though almost nobody plays Halo on Easy, it's still an option. A phrase I heard somewhere regarding easy difficulty is: "My grandma should be able to play it and have fun" or words to that effect.

In the game's defence, winning all the races is only a required for some of them, not all. I think you have to win all the mission based ones but the free roam races can be lost, and you'll still get money and rep (more for winning, obviously). That's basically what i've been doing although there's this one race that i still can't win, despite changing up to a better car. Hum. The game's audio is weird. It sounds like they mixed the music with the sfx, meaning the engines always sound louder than the music, and both sound louder than the mission descriptions. This is also a problem i have with Burnout Paradise so it might actually be something to do with my set up.

It's a really good game, the cars handle as expected, sound as expected to. It's faults are just too... irritating to make you truly enjoy it for long stretches.