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jp's Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition (PSP)

[June 11, 2007 12:04:41 PM]

I friend lent me this game for a few days hoping I would buy it off him. The truth is I'm not interested because, after playing the game for a while, I felt that the gameplay simply wasn't very attractive. It did start to grow on me the longer I played, but not enough to really get me excited.

Curiously, I felt that the experience loses a lot because the game has no real strength of character. When I first thought of it that way I was surprised. After all, this game has a very impressive roster of licensed tracks, cars, etc. It doesn't help that I'm not a particular fan of hip-hop, but I do have enough sense to realize that the game does have some heavy hitters from that scene. Also, the "DUB" in the title refers to an urban culture magazine whose brand also appears in other parts of the game. Basically, this game has all the right brands and properties appearing in-game to give it as much legitimacy as possible with regards to the real street-racing scene. (or so I would think, because I'm not exactly into that myself...)

Given all of the above, it seems really strange that I would consider this game as "weak" on the character side. Right? Well, not if we talk about gameplay. When I try to describe how this game plays it's sort of like Grand Theft Auto III trying to be like Burnout, but not quite getting there. This game probably uses the same engine as GTA (the minimap on the lower left corner even looks familiar!), but the general floatiness the cars have simply doesn't help with achieving the fast and tense feeling of playing Burnout.

I felt like the designers tried to give a greater urban flavour to Burnout, but focused on the urban aspect and were hamstrung by their driving engine. GTA isn't exactly the cream of the crop...right?