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 with their vehicle. I wanted to be able to perform the amazing reverse 180s and 90-degree power-slide turns I did in Carmageddon (and especially Carmageddon 2) in order to win the race. Midtown Madness seemed to offer this, plus another desirable I hadn’t thought of: driving in a REAL American city, with modelled traffic and everything. Midtown Madness delivers the latter, but falls a little behind in the physics and stunt driving compared to Carmageddon.

The graphics are very good, with reflections and pleasing textures. The civilian cars are modelled much more simply to accommodate their sheer number, but the opponent cars have as much detail as your own. The environment, however, seems a little washed out in the colors they chose; Carmageddon 2 seems so much more vibrant. There are neat attentions to detail that I really enjoy, like the flying garbage when your car smashes into a garbage can and drags it down the street, the Doppler effect as opponent cars drive by honking, and civilian traffic obeying traffic signals. It does seem weird that smashing your car into a light post will topple the post, but a thin tree is a totally immobile pole in the MM world. You get the choice of four different play styles: cruise (great for just driving around the city running red lights, honking obnoxiously at other cars, and weaving at 120 mph down the highway), timed (race yourself against the clock through checkpoints), checkpoint race (a race against opponents in a live city, where the path you take to the checkpoints is your choice alone), and track (where you race against opponents in a blocked-off route through the city). All of them work pretty well, and the computer AI is a good challenge. Too bad you can’t change the difficulty level of the computer opponents. Multiplayer is fun even through a 33.6 modem on the internet, but as of this post (May 1999) the Microsoft Gaming Zone isn’t ready for MM play on its server because of the lack of a released DirectPlay update. Besides the races, multiplayer also lets you play cops and robbers, where two or more teams race to find the gold bar and bring it to their home base.

This game is fun. There are nine vehicles to drive, but most are locked until you win some of the races. The vehicles range from a VW Bug to a Mustang to a Ford truck to a city bus and more, allowing many different styles of driving, and they handle accordingly. The cars have a strong (artificial) habit of staying upright, and besides the handbrake spin, the engine doesn’t really allow much stunt driving (Carmageddon 2 wins here). The cars sustain damage, but aren’t visibly crushable (like Carmageddon 2). But MM is a cleaned-up Carmageddon for the censors; you can’t kill anyone. Pedestrians are always able to jump out of the way or hug a wall to avoid being killed, and there are also cops who try to maintain law and order in the Windy City. What’s great about driving in MM is the fact that you’re in the very real city of Chicago. Supposedly New York and San Francisco add-ons will be made available too. Although simplified (generic buildings, no back alleys, only a few landmarks), the city is reasonably modelled to scale. The bridges over the river are always up (totally unrealistic), but it makes the game more fun with the necessary bridge jumps.

Overall, this is a fun game and worth buying. It’s still just a racing game, and the novelty of being the obnoxious driver in simulated America that you can’t be in real life will fade, but it’s fun while it lasts. It’s the cops and robbers of multiplayer that will keep me coming back. Honking, cutting off and crashing into people in real life means trouble, but doing the same thing to the same people in Midtown Madness is entertainment and laughs for all.