Midtown Madness

I couldn’t wait to buy Midtown Madness. I was looking for a driving game that gives me the freedom and physics of Carmageddon but with opponents focused on racing rather than crushing you to death. I wanted to pull off the reverse 180s and 90-degree power slide turns I did in Carmageddon and Carmageddon 2 to win a race. Midtown Madness seemed to offer that, plus something I hadn’t thought of: driving in a real American city with modeled traffic and everything. It delivers the city. It falls a little behind on the physics and stunt driving.

The graphics are very good, with reflections and pleasing textures. The civilian cars are modeled more simply to accommodate their sheer number, but the opponent cars have as much detail as your own. The environment seems a little washed out, though. Carmageddon 2 looks so much more vibrant by comparison. There are nice details I genuinely enjoy: garbage flies and drags down the street when you clip a trash can, opponent cars honk as they pass you with a proper Doppler effect, and civilian traffic actually obeys traffic signals. It does seem weird that smashing into a light post will topple it, but a thin tree is a completely immovable pole.

You get four play styles: Cruise (great for driving around the city running red lights, honking obnoxiously, and weaving at 120 mph down the highway), Timed Race (race yourself against the clock through checkpoints), Checkpoint Race (race against opponents through a live city, your path to each checkpoint is your own), and Circuit Race (race opponents on a blocked-off route through the city). All of them work pretty well, and the computer AI is a solid challenge. Too bad you can’t adjust the difficulty level of the opponents.

There are 9 vehicles, most locked until you win some races. They range from a VW Bug to a Mustang to a Ford truck to a city bus, and they handle accordingly. The cars have a strong, artificial habit of staying upright, and besides the handbrake spin, the physics don’t really allow much stunt driving. Carmageddon 2 wins that fight. The cars take damage, but they don’t crumple visibly the way Carmageddon’s do. Midtown Madness is the cleaned-up version of that game for the ratings board: you cannot kill anyone. Pedestrians always manage to jump clear or hug a wall. There are also cops trying to maintain law and order in the Windy City.

What makes Midtown Madness genuinely great is the fact that you are driving in the real city of Chicago. Supposedly New York and San Francisco add-ons are coming too. The city is simplified (generic buildings, no back alleys, only a few landmarks), but it’s modeled to a reasonable scale. The bridges over the river are permanently raised, which is totally unrealistic, but it makes the game more fun since you need those bridge jumps.

Multiplayer works well, even over a 33.6k modem. As of this writing (May 1999), Microsoft Gaming Zone isn’t ready for Midtown Madness on its servers due to a missing DirectPlay update, but it’s coming. Beyond racing, multiplayer includes Cops and Robbers, where two or more teams race to find the gold bar and bring it to home base. That mode alone is going to keep me coming back. Honking, cutting off, and crashing into people in real life means trouble. Doing the same thing in Midtown Madness is just entertainment.