FutureFive New Zealand - Consumer technology news & reviews from the future
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Thu, 1st Sep 2005
FYI, this story is more than a year old

Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition for PSP is essentially the same game that Rockstar Games released for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. As such, Midnight Club 3 features three fully open-ended cities - you’ll begin in San Diego, but eventually your travels will take you to Detroit and Atlanta with all of the cities being vast, offering many shortcuts, hidden jumps, and race track varieties. The game includes a cruise mode so you can explore the cities before the races and getting intimate with the tracks is vitally important if you want to get the best times.

In Career mode, you begin as a chump in the underground racing scene where you’ll have a bit of money, a basic car, and an introduction to the scene. From there it is up to you how you want to proceed, with tournaments available to win new cars and cash to customise them. All in all, you can expect a solid 20 hours of gameplay from the career mode. Aside from career mode, there are a number of offline (and online) modes available. If going through the underground circuit isn’t enticing, you can simply chose which arcade game for a quick race, or one of the many multiplayer modes (Capture the Flag, Tag, etc) offer a lot more depth (local wi-fi multiplayer is supported for up to six players).

The multitude of vehicles have their own strengths and weaknesses and range from motorcycles, trucks, SUVs, tuners to muscle cars (over 60 cars to be unlocked). All the vehicles are completely customisable and aesthetics play a major part too, as you can spend insane amounts of money upgrading the car’s rims, giving it a custom paint job and the like, to “pimp your ride.” The graphics of the PSP show off all the detail of the cars and the lighting effects from street-lights are truly a sight to be seen. The game essentially moves like an arcade game, with fast paced driving and special abilities for each vehicle that can give you an extra edge.