Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition

PSP review by Matt Wadleigh, published on Sunday 17th July 2005

I’ll tell you about Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition just as soon as it finishes loading. It’ll probably finish in a few seconds…or minutes. In the meantime, uh, how are you? What have you been doing? Working a lot? Oh wait, I think it’s done. Wait, nope, it’s still loading. It’ll be just a little bit more. I apologize. Do you like baseball? The Yankees are terrible this year. No more baseball in the Olympics either. Hey, it’s done loading. You want to give it a shot now? No? You’re tired? I can’t blame you really, if I had to wait that long to do something, I’d be pretty tired too. I guess I’ll play it then…

The worst part about Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition on the PSP is, obviously, that it takes forever to load. Seriously, the load times are obnoxious. I can’t really stress this fact enough. It’s the worst part about the game. The racing is superb, the amount of customization that you can perform on your rides is obscene, and the graphics are some of the best on the PSP.

It’s just too bad it takes three minutes to see any of it.

Even with this loading problem, Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition is a great game that you should add to your collection. From the moment you start it up the game feels familiar and comfortable. You’ll spend a lot of your time in the in-depth career mode where you’ll find yourself once again racing to become one of the top street racers. Along the way, you’re going to make friends, make enemies, and make a whole lot of serious cash. It’s just going to take you some time because of how long it takes to load.

The game opens up with you being the new guy going into a shop looking for a ride. You have your choice of a set of different stock Japanese race cars that we’ve all become accustomed to in these types of games. I chose the Mitsubishi Eclipse, but there are cars from nearly every manufacturer in this game, including Chevrolet, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Chrysler. There are even other vehicles, including trucks and motorcycles that you can customize the crap out of.

Of course, to customize the crap out of things, you have to earn money. You earn money through racing. Initially, the only city you can race in is San Diego, but within no time at all you’ll find yourself racing through the streets of Detroit and Atlanta. Racing is where this game really shines. The customization options in the game are great and all of that, but even without that portion of the game it would still be excellent.

This is all because of the mighty power of the PSP (or programming). There’s just an incredible sense of speed here. You really feel like you’re speeding along. I don’t think I ever even needed to look at the speedometer to tell how fast I was going because I could pretty accurately gauge it just by the motions on the screen. Couple this sense of speed with really, really tight control that allows you to make very precise movements through traffic and you’ll find yourself addicted to racing in no time.

Finding a race is a snap too. There are dozens and dozens of different races you can complete in each city. Some give you access to new cars and some give you piles of cash, but all of them are a challenge. At first I was winning a lot of races by five seconds, but in later races I was lucky if I was winning by more than a half a second, even when driving without fault. This is a game that you’re going to be spending quite a bit of time with. You can even spend a bit of time playing multiplayer with this game too. Rockstar somehow managed to fit in six different modes to play against your friends.

Of course, that means you’ll all have to suffer through those load times. The load times are so depressing because this really is a great racing game. It could have stood toe-to-toe against Ridge Racer if the load times had been a bit better. It even looks really good too. Sure, there are some framerate issues at times, but you’ll forgive that because you can race through three massive cities. Even if you can’t forgive them, the reflections of the cars will likely distract you, so you won’t even notice. About six million (okay, so maybe 106) or so different songs from the likes of The Game, Jimmy Eat World, Ash, Fat Joe, Queens of the Stone Age and many more ensure that you won’t hear the same tune twice either (at least, not for a while anyway).

So, I encourage you to pick this up, even with the load time issue. Really, it’s because they tried to fit too much game in this one. It’s simply too big for the tiny PSP to handle. This is certainly a great example of how a major console game should be brought over to the PSP, loaded with nearly all the gameplay features of the original, but the developers need to optomize the game better to fit the PSP and that just didn’t happen here.. As it is, Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition might not be the most technically sound PSP game available, but it is deserving of your attention, even with its faults.