In this review, we speed to the flag in the Game Boy Advance game Midnight Club: Street Racing. We find out how well this racing game plays.
This game was released in 2001 and is a port from the Playstation 2 version.
You start off as a cab driver trying to get in on the midnight club racing scene. You catch the attention of a hookman who scoffs at your attempt. It is up to you to keep up with that hookman as he is the man that will let you in on the scene. That’s about as much storyline as I could decipher from the game directly.
The main mode for this game is career mode. This will allow you to unlock races, and more importantly, cars.
There are three types of races in this mode. The first and most obvious is the tailing mode. With the exception of the first race, you basically are put on the streets in a free roam mode. You need to find one of multiple hookmen roaming the streets. Once you find one, you need to tail them for a certain period of time. If the arrow above their car is red, then you haven’t done this for very long. Yellow means you are getting that hookman’s attention. Green means you’ve almost got him. If the hookman hits the breaks after, that means that they’ll permit you to race against them.
Once you’ve successfully got a hookman interested, the next mode is known as waypoints. There are a number of waypoints throughout the city. The goal is to hit all the waypoints before crossing the finish line. Be aware that your opponents generally already have the most efficient rout in mind already, so you are generally better off sticking to their quirky rout. When I played, the only shortcut I found was cutting through a field a little bit better than the opponents in the UK city. Otherwise, I couldn’t find any real shortcuts in these routs.
Also know that you have 4 or 5 opponents to contend with in the waypoint races. First place is the only place that matters, so beat them all.
Once you beat the race, you’ll be given the number of your main opponent. You can challenge that opponent head to head. This is optional, but considering how difficult this game gets, it’s practically mandatory. Beat your opponent head to head and you’ll win that opponents ride. Lather, rinse, repeat.
You start off in an American city. Once you beat all the races, you’ll be invited to take on opponents in the UK. All the information I have says that this is the second half of the game, but I never beat it myself to know for sure.
You do not have a radar in this game, so you’ll have limited information on planning your rout to begin with. The only thing you have is an arrow. This arrow only points to the nearest objective. Unfortunately, this is a highly flawed system as you’ll be spending chunks of your time driving away from these objectives because it is by no means efficient.
Another element you have is a damage meter. If you get into too many accidents throughout the particular event you are racing in, you’ll wreck your car and be forced to reset the event.
Cop cars are present. If you run into any of them, they’ll chase after you. They won’t chase you for very long, but chances are, they’ll give you a good head on collision to slow you down in the race. Often, this is what kills your chances of winning. They do not pursue your opponents.
There are areas in the map that you can travel underneath. Usually, it’s just a small light on the side of a building. This is all you get as an indication that there is a shortcut here. All of your opponents, of course, know all the shortcuts too. So, you won’t really get an advantage knowing this. There are also tunnels in the UK.
The first big problem of this game is the difficulty. The game starts off as challenging and only gets harder from there. You’ll frequently be finding yourself restarting races a lot. This is because the game leaves very little in the way of margin for error. Opponents will crash into cars a lot, but this only serves to slow them down slightly. You, on the other hand, can lose almost a whole screen worth of distance to your opponent for similar crashes.
Additionally, you are provided with very little information about the maps of the city. As a result, you are already being asked to more or less memorize the streets already. With opponents knowing the most efficient rout throughout every race, you are also being forced to memorize the rout inside and out after a while. This is because if you manage to obtain a lead in any race, it’s very difficult to tell where you really need to be going. You could very easily see the arrow point North, but when you take a street that heads North, you could be looping around a lot, ensuring that you’ll be crossing the finish line last. So, a large amount of information you get tends to be very misleading.
You also have to deal with a top down perspective for this game. While there are plenty of racing games that feature this perspective, in this game, your reaction time is reduced down to almost nothing. If a cop car sees you, the only thing you’ll see is that you go from cruising down the street narrowing the gap between yourself and the lead car, then, instantly, a head on collision with a cop car, stopping you dead in your tracks. Since cops are out to get you, that cop car is also doing everything possible to slow you down anyway, so you’ll be losing tonnes of precious time trying to get unpinned by the cop.
Generally speaking, this game is hugely frustrating. Not only is the difficulty ratcheted up to the point of being next to impossible, but so many things are also broken on top of it all to make sure your playthrough is as frustrating as humanly possible. The information you have on races is not only extremely limited, but what little you do get has a lot of misleading elements to boot. The only positive I can see is that the learning curve for the basic concepts is quite good. Beyond that, it’s almost all negative points from there.
Graphically speaking, this game is OK. There is some OK special effects and the overall look of the different areas of the city is pretty good. Keep in mind that third person perspective racing games already exist on the system by this time. This includes titles like GT Advance Championship Racing and Mario Kart Super Circuit in the same release year. So, while it’s good, it’s not particularly amazing either.
Meanwhile, the music is pretty dated. This game sticks with the chiptune stuff heard on the Game boy Color. The only thing that is pretty good is the sound effects and the speech samples. So, while the music leaves a lot to be desired, the speech samples and sound effects do pick up some slack.
Overall, it’s difficult to really recommend the game. First of all, it’s extremely difficult. Secondly, the top down perspective used ensures you already have really bad reaction times. Third, the physics and overall mechanics are somewhat broken. Fourth, the information is limited. Finally, fifth, what information you do get, some of it winds up being misleading. The learning curve for the basics is decent, but that’s about it. Graphics are OK, but nothing amazing. Audio is decent, but only because the sound effects and speech samples pick up slack left behind by the music. So, I would give this game a pass.
Overall
Furthest point in game: Lost to the first female racer (Emily?) in the UK. All playable head to head competitions beaten up to that point.
General gameplay: 11/25
Replay value: 5/10
Graphics: 6/10
Audio: 3/5
Overall rating: 50%
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
