The police obviously take a dim view of unauthorised street races, and once alerted to a felony will be all over you like a cheap suit.
The latter two modes take place with incidental traffic in full effect, often leading to the midtown madness of the title. Circuit races are over charted courses, with other roads blocked off Blitz races take place against the clock and Checkpoint races involve clearing all points before your opponents.
Planes fly overhead, traffic stops at red lights, and the police even have their own network.Ĭity simulation is a different game altogether though, and what we're talking here is action-packed racing, the game featuring a variety of different modes, with success unlocking further vehicles and tracks. It's very well done though, and effortlessly conveys the sense of being in a fully functioning, living city. Clearly, some kind of artistic licence has been taken, and what we have is a slightly compressed version of the real thing, comprising all the major landmarks. That city is Chicago, Illinois, which to the less geographically minded is somewhere in America near a big lake. No guns, no gimmicks, just accurately modelled cars and a meticulously recreated city. Instead of pissing about inventing hover vehicles that race on the moon, or resurrecting some obscure sport, what they've done is to take a modern-day city and fill it with authentic vehicles. Not so Angel Studios, the talent behind Microsoft's Midtown Madness. And when it comes to racing games, you might as well forget it, with most developers showing about as much ingenuity as the average boy band. This game only gets a 2 out of 10 from me because of the two-player mode.In these cynical days of 'reissue, repackage, reevaluate', an original game is about as rare as proverbial rocking horse shit. Sure, it is set in the middle of a town, and it may well be the third game in the series, but the madness part is very highly questionable. In short, the game borders on false advertising, especially since pedestrians cannot be run over and cars cannot be totalled in an assaultive style. Nobody is going to want to bother playing all of the single-player levels in order to unlock them, but they make the two-player mode so much more fun.
This is the only genuinely fun part of the game, as well as the reason why the code to unlock all the cars and tracks is so frequently used.
About the only salvation for the game is the two-player mode, in which the two players race cars through a series of checkpoints in order to see who can get through in the quickest time. The voiceovers, quite obviously done by the programmers, are insulting and annoying enough to prompt throwing the controller at the display. The disciplinarian style of the game gets in the way of any fun whatsoever, and insult is added to injury when you're in the undercover mode and should happen to fail a level. This in itself is not so bad, but the problem is that if you should take so much as one late turn or one roll off the middle of the track, you can count on losing, and thus not progressing at all in the game. All of the races involve racing down a very strict and narrow path through checkpoints. This is exactly what doesn't make Midtown Madness 3 any fun. Players were free to go anywhere and do anything they liked so long as they eventually completed one of three goals in each level. What made Carmageddon fun was the total freedom it allowed. It tries very hard to create an atmosphere, but what it eventually comes off as is a very tryhard Carmageddon.
To put it in a nutshell, this is one of those games that they give away for free (being part of the X-Box Beast Pack) because people would get very ticked off if they were made to fork out a good hundred dollars for it.