Although Rockstar is best known for the titles that cause politicians to burst a blood vessel, it has been tirelessly developing some fairly decent racing games for a number years under the name Midnight Club. The latest in the series is due to land on PS3 this September.
The series has often been overlooked in the past, struggling to keep up with competition from the Need For Speed and Burnout series. It has always been a forward thinking series, known for its focus on open-world racing without tracks or barriers, but in the pre-HD era this led to some rather bland environments that let the game down.
Well, this is the HD era, and as you can see from the screenshots that it’s making a pretty big difference. After the hit-and-miss Burnout Paradise offering from EA earlier in the year, this could turn the tables for the franchise.
For its fourth iteration, the series is taking to the streets of Los Angeles, hence the name. The Rockstar San Diego team has recreated much of the cities real-life layout, but added in a few “twists and turns” to keep things interesting. As we’ve discovered from the many games that tried so hard to replicate real life cities a few years back, real life just doesn’t make for a great game experience, and why should it really?
Car customisation is playing an important role once again and players will be able to tune up the performance and appearance of the officially licensed vehicles to suit their tastes. The vehicle selection will also include muscle cars and motorbikes, and official rims, spoilers and stuff. There’s no full list on what’s available but we’d only expect that nearer the time.
The same open world racing style is back of course, thus giving LA residents a bit of an unfair advantage on the rest of us, although I suspect their first port of call will be to try and find their houses and offices.
Other exciting features include zero load times, in the same spirit as GTA, no tracks and no rules. So that’ll be lots of shunting then.
As you can probably tell by no, the game engine is capable of producing some pretty jaw-dropping graphics - you can see some equally impressive video over at the official site too.
Midnight Club LA is coming to Xbox 360 and PS3 on September 9th in North America and arriving on the 12th here in Europe. A PSP version, Midnight Club: LA Remix will hit the PSP at the same time.
via http://www.pspsps.tv/2008/04/midnight_club_los_angeles_date.html