Electricmonk

Ferry Boender

Programmer, DevOpper, Open Source enthusiast.

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Game review: Midnightclub Los Angeles (SUCKS)

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

I’m not normally into the game reviewing thing, but I’ll make an exception for Midnightclub Los Angeles because it is, without a single doubt, the worst ‘racing’ (and I use the word ‘racing’ loosely here) game I have ever wasted money on.

The story: None. But that’s okay. It’s a racing game, it doesn’t require a story.

The rest of the game, though, sucks so hard, it created a small black hole in my playstation 3 which then proceeded to break the game CD into 5 pieces. Oh, wait, no, that was me. This game is absolutely terrible. Know that old arcade racing game called ‘Outrun’? It would have been better if they slapped some new graphics onto that and otherwise release it exactly the same as it was.

Mightnightclub Los Angeles truly sucks from every side you look at it. There’s no manual gear change, the cars handle like shit, you keep having to spend your hard earned money on repairing your car every single time some puts drives into it, but it never tells you how much you have to pay to repair it. It’s an arcade racer for crying out loud! Cars should be indestructible (and have rockets on them, preferably). There are no prices listed for the upgrades, nor are the effects they’ll have on the car made clear. The customization is a wreck, the menu’s are a disaster, and mobile phone that constantly pops up must have been inspired by the one in GTA IV. It makes you want to pull out your hair and rip out your eyes.

When it comes to racing, Midnightclub Los Angeles is nothing more than an extreme exercise in frustration. During the daytime races, it’s almost always near impossible to see where you’re going. But since the game is called Midnightclub Los Angeles, it’s always impossible to see where you’re going. The roads are packed with traffic, which can be fun, but not when there’s shitloads of traffic in every single race. Now I’ve played ‘traffic’ racers before, but there were always at least some races without it. Given the fact that in this game traffic is just suddenly spawned in the middle of the road, there’s no way to avoid it. They probably put this in because the actually driving, and by driving I mean cornering, in Midnightclub is so immensely boring that during the fifth race I literally fell asleep, and when I woke up, I had still won. True story. Okay, okay, not a true story.. it turns out I hit thirty-nine lampposts and sixthousand and one other cars on the road, but that’s still the same as every other race.

Did I mention this game is utterly frustrating yet? But wait, there’s more! You see, it doesn’t actually matter at all how well you do in this game. Why? Because it has that nice catch-up built in. You know, the kind where it doesn’t matter if you give your opponents a head start of twenty-five minutes, you’ll still be able to catch up with them (and they with you if the roles are reversed) before the race ends. A true challenge. Fortunately, the huge, yellow, view-obstructing smoke plume makes the game lot’s more interesting. You never know what you’ll find behind it! (A traffic jam, probably, or a house). Another thing that makes the game much more frustrating and a totally worthless piece of shit that needs to be sent to hell and suffer an eternity just like its creators fun is that, while you have no idea where you’re going and keep bumping into all kinds of shit that shouldn’t have just spawned there, your opponents, being artificial intelligent with pre-knowledge of the entire track, every little shortcut, the traffic and everything else, never have this problem.

I could go on and on about this game, but what it comes down to is that it’s simply not a racing game. It’s not a racing simulator (which I certainly wasn’t expecting), but it’s also not an arcade racing game. This game doesn’t have a single racing element in it. The best way to sum it up is: A “look at the map while avoiding cars and steer left/right depending on where the next blob on the radar tells you to go” game. There’s no way to learn the track, since you always have to play multiple races right after each other. There’s no way to see where you need to go, because the game only tells you one checkpoint in advance where the actually racing track is. (sometimes these points are about 30 meters apart in the game, in a corner). The game is simply no fun at all. All it is, is… you’ve guessed it…

frustrating.

If I awarded a score, stars, or funny little cars between the number of 0 to five, I’d give this game a -15 gazillion and a half. But since I don’t do that, and hence cannot get the satisfaction of drilling this game six feet under, I’ll just say that I literally (and when I say ‘literally’, I do mean that literally, not figuratively) spit on this game and then proceeded to break the CD in half (in five, actually) and tossing it in the trash. I felt somewhat sorry for the other items in there having to share their nice garbage-bin with such a piece of true trash, but what can you do if you don’t have an incinerator at home.

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