Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition (Xbox)

Animations

Certain parts of the cars/vehicles are animated, spinners and elements of the bikes/choppers, the riders look good when they move and roll around amusingly when they fall off. There’s also a nice little trick when you’re cruising around, if you pull up next to a pedestrian, they will admire your car and even walk around it – if it looks good enough.

Sounds

The engines of these machines sound good on both consoles and take advantage of their sound hardware; the rumble of the muscle cars is distinctive enough to be discernable from the purr of a tuned sports car or a sport bike. The screech of tires and the whoosh of the air as you tear past another vehicle are exceptionally well done.

Music

A mix of techno, rock, hip-hop and other styles adorns both versions and the choice of custom soundtracks on the Xbox of course makes it even more killer compared to the PS2 version. Rockstar have chosen some of the better and brighter bands around now and even the default music can be switched to play all or just one of the genres, we spent most of our time listening to the rock part of MC3s soundtrack on the PS2 version since we couldn’t use the custom soundtracks.

My only gripe with the Xbox version was our soundtrack required the other sounds in the game to be turned down, and the TV to be turned up so we could hear it – it seemed a lot quieter even at max volume than other games with custom soundtracks.

Voice Acting

There are CG scenes that move the story of the boy racer along, these are pretty well acted and the in-game dialogues have the right flavour, we’ve come to expect from Rockstar’s stable of available talent.

AI

This is where I have a lot of my troublesome issues with the game, the AI seems to be on a perfect driving line at times, and then other times it’ll act as dumb as a nail. But that’s not the real problem, what really irks me is that there’s a ridiculous amount of ‘rubber band’ catch-up which can’t be disabled on the opponent cars, you pump the nitrous and tear ahead only to be caught up moments later by a car driving at default speeds with no nitrous or slipstream turbo activated.

Just no, please, no more rubber band catch-up, those days are over…we have better methods for keeping the driver’s difficulty challenging. Or even if you do use it, just make it less than a full taught elastic band next time.