Midnight Club: Street Racing (Sony PlayStation 2, 2000)

Midnight Club: Street Racing takes the basic concepts and modes that made Midtown Madness so much fun and adds to it more hidden vehicles and a rudimentary plotline.


The plotline is as simple as it is unnecessary. You, as a New York City cabdriver, need a little spice in your life. One night, while driving around aimlessly, you happen upon Emilio, a low-rider driving chump with a turtleneck sweater and an accent that bounces between Latino and Italian. After showing that you can keep up with Emilio's ride, he introduces you to Midnight Club, a secret organization of late-night street racers. From there, you cruise the city, looking for trouble in the form of hookmen. These hookmen are visible on your map. Once you get behind them, you'll have to keep up with them until they feel that you're worthy of a race. The hookmen races pit you against that driver's entire posse. But calling up one of the hookmen on your handy cell phone puts you in a one-on-one race. When you win the race, you add the opponent's car to your garage. Most of the races are checkpoint races, mean you can go just about any direction you like, as long as you hit all the checkpoints and get to the finish line before the opposition. While you're given an insane amount of freedom in the races, there are usually only two or three viable paths to success. Eventually, your Midnight Club exploits lead you to London. Both cities are extremely large and full of life. Aside from the main career mode an arcade mode, which lets you set up head-to-head, checkpoint, and two-player races. There's also a capture the flag mode, which lets you play against another person or against computer opponents. The two-player splitscreen mode introduces a bit more pop-up into the equation, but it's still very playable.

If you like Need for Speed your bound to like this game. It has a bit of a different twist on it. You must hit the markers in the race if you don't then well...your screwed. Its a lot fo fun. You can't do as much to your car as if N4S but it's still just as fun to do. A must have game for any racer fan.

...but Midnight Club is still a great game. I think this was the first game of it's kind on the PS2 and the graphics, gameplay, and fun still live up to today's standards.

the grafics the cars you have to choose from are the best and it keeps getting better with the next midnight club there just stepping it up a noch and keeping ya into there games.

It's an "OK" game. It's no Need For Speed Underground, but for the right price it's worth trying out. I had fun playing it, but there are better titles out there.