The Greatest Franchise Rockstar Abandoned

If you hang out in the same kind of gaming circles as I do, there's one company you probably hear about all too often and that's Rockstar Games. Today, Rockstar is known for many things creating some of the best and best-selling games of all time, especially in the 2000s and creating some of the most influential games of all time, while eventually falling into complacent designs. and recycled, little to no new and innovative releases and, in many cases, placed too much emphasis on microtransactions, but if those complaints sound familiar it's because they are also the complaints that many have had with games in general over the last decade, Although I see a particularly strong parallel between Rockstar's plight in racing games, in reality around the time many considered it to be the peak of Rockstar making its own racing game and for a time it was arguably the best on the market.

Let's start at the beginning, not with Midnight Club, but with the people who created it. Angel Studios was formed in 1984 with the purpose of creating and progressing the field of 3D computer graphics primarily in different forms of media such as films, music videos and finally video games. They began with animated music videos and advertisements for various clients, but eventually expanded into the world of video games working on such legendary titles as Echo the tides of Time Ken griffy Jr's slugfest and my personal favorite. Mr Bones, she has no body and I have no skin, it could work, it could happen, oh you lewd old leous bastard, but after partially working on titles for various developers, they caught the attention of Microsoft and they would partner with them to do Midtown.

Madness, an open world racing game set in Chicago, which was a novel concept in the racing game world at the time, as it had an open world that the player could explore and eventually learn well enough to find The best routes to win races and have that map is based on a real-life location, although very simplified, it also performed quite well from a critical and commercial point of view, which caught the attention of Rockstar Games, a then new publisher recently acquired by Take 2 Interactive in the late 90s and early 2000s. Rockstar was absorbing the studios. left and right to work on games for them, the two most notable being the creators of DMA Design Limited of the GTA

franchise

and later renamed to Rockstar North in 200 2 and Rockstar San Diego, creators of Red Dead and Smuggers run

franchise

s, although before of being bought and renamed.

Rockstar was finally able to repeat the ideas laid out in Midtown Madness in the late 90s and early 2000s. Tuna culture began to emerge in major cities across the US, primarily inspired by the designs and performance improvements of the Japanese tuners and stores around the world. At the same time, seeing this trend steadily increasing in popularity, Angel Studios made their next racing game focus on this rising subculture and in November 2000 we got the Midnight Club. I now know that this game is very important in the development of the Open World Racing game in the future and at the time, this was received quite well by critics and consumers, but it has not aged well.

I'm not even saying it's necessarily bad, just that it's very primitive and outdated. The main gameplay loop is finding a driver to challenge and having to follow that driver to the end. at the exact opposite end of the map you found them on, luckily the maps aren't that big and then by beating them in a race you can call them up to challenge them to a pink race and get a better car or repeat the above process. To get further into the game, this idea in itself is fine, but it's the way it's executed that makes it at best inefficient and at worst downright annoying.

The characters themselves don't bring much to the table, although they do bring a distinctive feature to Midnight Club. games would have in each main installment in the future, that is, the racers themselves would talk to the player during the race. I think they want your autograph, this adds some character that the game's opponents desperately need as the character in everyone else is severely lacking in music. in the game it's okay and it's pretty decent for my Drumm and bass and trance lovers, sorry I'm not one of them, I'm actually more of an Italo disco and house guy, although compared to the music, the art direction and the graphics.

They don't really hold up very well, the art direction is lame, the menus and overall game design are very basic and arcade-like, and the graphics just don't look that good for a game from 2000 because this is what Ford Racing and NFS Porsche Unleash were seen at the time and if you think it's unfair to compare it to PC gaming, here's a test drive of Lal and Metropolis Street Racer running on the Dreamcast, a less powerful console in comparison. Midnight Club 1 looks surprisingly flat and blocky. In itself it's also not that engaging as the opponents don't really challenge the player with his running ability, but that doesn't mean this game is easy;

Quite the contrary, in fact the Midnight Club games as a whole have a great reputation for being very difficult and the first one is no exception, the runners themselves have no spatial awareness of the player, so it is very likely that they will push you out. off the road or against buildings. Traffic AI has the same lack of awareness, so very often they will drive straight. In you and the police exist, yes you would expect the police to be a more contributing factor to the difficulty of the game, but surprisingly you know that they only appear in certain events and usually do not affect the outcome of the race, apart from maybe slow down all drivers.

For a moment, the driving actually has more of an impact on the difficulty than the police, as the physics feel very strange coming from more modern arcade racers. The key to running well at Midnight Club is managing your momentum and I'll give you three main ones. Tips for this one: Your car's forward momentum, unlike any other racer, is not based on your car's forward momentum, it's based on how fast the transmission spins and I phrased that very specifically because what I want What I mean is if you're going 90 mph and then hit the wall on your side, you'll start accelerating faster than if you hit it from a dig.

This can be used to your advantage when cornering in worse handling cars, but it can also lead to this. The handbrake is your best friend, almost all cars turn immensely and because of what I said before about momentum, your best solution in many cases is to remove the handbrake and slide into the corner, which makes it very difficult. easier and three, this game can be a little inconsistent. with its physics for a while I thought this game had functional mechanical damage but that's just for moments like this this wasn't fun for me but that doesn't mean you won't have fun with it more than a few people speak positively about it this. game and from what I've heard, the multiplayer and arcade modes are pretty fun.

I wouldn't know. I never owned the game physically and will play it on an emulator later alone in my room, but 2 years after midnight club street racing. Rockstar would buy Angel Studios and rename them Rockstar San Diego and a year later they released their first title under the new name. Midnight Club 2 improves on the original in basically every way. To start, the game looks much better across the board, both in gameplay. and in its presentation with the menus, visual atmosphere and music it is miles ahead of where it was in the first game, it also has a lot of character for its characters as it increases the number of unique characters you interact with from 6 to 28 and It also gives each of them a unique animated FMV cut scene before and after each race, as well as having more dialogue during the races.

Look, I reached much higher than you, you will meet characters as eccentric as the average French American stereotype and all women. who think they are the coolest people walking the earth until you beat them and they try to sound cool while giving you the keys to their car talking about racing, this is where things get really interesting, as some of you will know. Midnight Club is a series that has a history of being tremendously difficult and the story started here because Midnight Club 2, with few exceptions, is the hardest racing game I've ever played, now those of you who haven't played it before maybe they wonder why.

Seeing from the Midnight Club is and always has been firmly an arcade racing game its difficulty doesn't necessarily come from its physics, well it does, but I'll get to that, so its difficulty doesn't necessarily come from hyper-realistic physics, So where does it come from? comes from here, I'll give you an example. Midnight Club 2 doesn't feel hard to drive like this because you lost or even this one opens up to the right of a splash, stay in the middle of a jump 0 flat right in six to the left, an extra long one opens up. It's more like how the Midnight Club likes to throw you so much at random to the point that some events don't have a scratch on you and some specific races can take hours just to get through this comes from a lot of different factors and also comes in three different levels that Experience on each of the three different maps in the Los Angeles game is a good starter map, familiarizing you with the intricacies of the handling and mechanics of the game or also giving you a slight idea of ​​the difficulty.

The is a good teaching ground on how the game works like how AI traffic cars have no respect for human life, both yours and theirs, so they will actively drive towards you if you approach them in front of them. an intersection, officially making them the most annoying character in gaming history. Never say a single word, you also quickly learn that on tracks where you don't have to reach checkpoints in a set order, the AI ​​usually chooses a pretty good route, but doesn't always choose the best route, which greatly increases the player sense. of freedom and achievement when they take a route none of the other racers thought of and end up faster, which will come in handy when you leave Los Angeles and move to Paris.

Paris is where the game begins. Really cooking with the difficulty, the AI ​​becomes faster and more sporadic, the traffic seems to be three times denser than an LA, which I don't think is accurate, and the map itself becomes much tighter, much more dynamic in terms of setting and structure, and also has more changes in elevation than La, making it a much more complicated Beast Paris, it's really where the game starts to test the player in every way, it's where you find out how good you really are at the racing games and also find out if you have unfortunately been diagnosed with Skillus iselius. which makes it impossible to progress if you just suck, but if you manage to beat everyone in France you can finally move on to the final area of ​​the game.

Tokyo Tokyo is where the game says "okay, you had a good time until you died." Ely some of the hardest races I've done in a video game before, like GT2 Mission A4, the North American version, underground, Curts Killer Ride f123 Williams, just Monaco on difficulty 110, no, Tokyo is harder, actually, no, Tokyo starts off not so bad. The first two races are actually easier than the last ones in Paris, but then you're introduced to things like backtracking checkpoints, bus blocking, and whatever, all of which is combined with faster AI, faster races, and more. long and even narrower streets making it exponentially more difficult and the final race like here this is the layout for the first race against the Paris Champion seems pretty simple, well it took me 35 minutes to get through it and somehow longer than the second race, this is what the final race against the world champion looks like Actually, because I never had this game when I was a kid and because I wanted this video to come out in a reasonable time, I still have to face the final boss Savvo, so yeah want to see it, I guess I could do it on the stream if that's enough. people really want to see it outside of the immense difficulty in terms of premise, this game really isn't that different from Midnight Club 1 as it takes all the ideas from Midnight Club 1 and really does them well, although there were some new additions. such as the online mode, which was a first for the series, although the servers were shut down in 2014 and the game was released on both PS2 and Xbox and also PC, which interestingly, this would be the only Midnight Club to have. a PC release, which I believe.

I think it's really unfortunate because I would have loved to have played this upcoming game natively on PC. The house received the blow of suicide as I climb from top to bottom. Lu King Standing Tall looking down on BL Midnight Club 3 was another big step forward from its predecessor as much as those whoYou might think that Midnight Club 2 is the best, you won't agree with me. I think the jump and quality from Midnight Club 2 to three was almost as big as the jump from 1 to two and although there are many contributing factors. As for that progress, I'd say the biggest one was the change in the game's focus.

If I had to sum up Midnight Club 3 in one word, it would be Freedom, not only because this is the only Midnight Club that is said only in the United States, no. I didn't forget you, but also because each part of this game gives the player more options and freedoms on how they want to adapt their experience to their preferences, this is immediately noticeable in the career progression and the player has the option to choose between several different. car categories, all with their own unique characteristics, as well as events limited to just that type of vehicle, such as tuners, sports cars, luxury sedans, various types of bikes, etc., and the game allows you to choose from scattered random races through the map.

Specific rivals that, when defeated, allow you to challenge specific car clubs that compete with a certain type of car in championships that usually allow the player to win a new type of car and expand the variety of their garage and the variety is somewhat That this game has a lot in both types of events adding a new one to the series in the autocross and track events, they basically restrict the player to a track racing style, street circuit where they race against the clock or directly against other players. In fact, I used to think this is one of the hardest types of events growing up, but I come back to it Now it's one of the easiest.

They also added something new to help players in more difficult events: special abilities in the form of Zone, a sort of Matrix-like slowdown effect that is obtained by driving cleanly in a race and is limited to tuners. Exotic and sporty. aggro bikes, an effect that causes all the cars around you to fall apart the moment you hit them, which recharges by smashing objects on the side of the road and is limited to luxury SUVs and sedans, and Roar, which is Like a shock wave that disrupts all the cars and traffic around you that you refuel by drifting and is limited only to powerful cars and helicopters.

Another area where player freedom is reinforced and this is important was in customization in which everyone was involved in creating a very deep customization system as you go from just being able to change the color of your car in Midnight Club 2 to having the option to choose from 20 different bumpers, side skirts and spoilers, the ability to install a carbon fiber hood, tons of wheel options, different wheel styles and profiles, the ability to adjust suspension heights. and tire dimensions, a paint and livery editor, the ability to paint the exhaust and a bunch of other things that are too long to list, but suffice it to say that this was a very deep customization system for its time that even some modern games are still missing.

I can say they were definitely going for Need for Speed ​​Underground in terms of the depths they go to get that kind of customization and in my opinion they arguably do it better than Underground 2. This game also changes from Midnight Club. 2 and how it handles difficulty in that game, more than a few races could require an average driver or even an expert driver a dozen tries before they can beat it, in this game most events would take a fraction of the number of attempts to beat, not to mention the The events were easy it was just that they were less random and a little more predictable and when you made a mistake it was often much easier to recover from this lower difficulty, combined with the fact that there were more races in Midnight Club 3 which in two meant that the player felt like he was making much more progress than in my case while playing with both in this video.

I often spent much more time in a given session on this than on mc2, not just because of the easier progression. but also because of everything around it, like the impeccably designed atmosphere of the game, as I mentioned before, this was the only Midnight Club game that took place entirely in America, except for the Tokyo campaign that was in the remix, but I'll get to that in a minute. and this game really feels like American car culture and, to some extent, culture in general. Around 2005, music was finally more varied, with rock rap, reggae and electronica being the notable genres represented, with hip-hop tracks in particular taking center stage in this game. the crunk and Dirty South producers of the 2000s.

I actually really like this aspect in particular, as it relates to being right in the middle of the heart of these types of rappers and producers. Well, Midnight Club 2 felt like going to a rave in a western. European country until midnight Midnight Club 3 was like going to a club in Atlanta and staying up until 4:00 in the morning and talking about Atlanta, which appeared as one of the three cities in the game, being the center of musical and automotive culture. from the game San Diego is the representation of the west coast scene as well as ground zero of tuner culture in the late 90s and Detroit, the home of the American automobile, this game also made these cities look cool for 2005 and overall the menus and visual presentation really brought the game together, this game was also the first Midnight Club to get a PSP port with almost all of the same content as the original, albeit to bring all that content to a handheld device they had to downgrade the graphics so the frame rate isn't necessarily consistent and makes loading times longer than it takes me to make a video, although despite this it somehow became the best selling version of the game , I'm not sure how that happened, although a year after the main release we did get Midnight Club 3 DUB Edition Remix. which was an updated version of the game that featured more cars, more customization, more music, and even a new Tokyo challenge progression that allowed you to race on the slightly updated Tokyo mc2 map and eventually rise through the ranks of the street racing scene from Tokyo.

Funnily enough, this would also be my introduction to the series on Xbox back in 2006. I Even Stu my original copy here, damn it's scratched, I guess it's because of all the time I put into it because this was truly one of the best racing games I've ever played. I played it at the time and it still holds up for an amazing day if you haven't played Midnight Club 3. I highly recommend giving it a try, either by doing a physical or reading it like I've done here, but along with Midnight Club 3 I would also recommend getting its successor because, in some ways, It Could Be Even Better, the game in mid-2004 EA bought out British game developer Studio C Ian Games, who at the time were mainly known to the public for their recent Burnout games which were a mix of arcade racing and destruction of Derby Carnage style car combat. but behind the scenes they were well known in gaming in general for developing the renderware engine.

That name may sound familiar, but in case it's not, renderware was one of the most powerful and popular game engines that developers created their games on. in the early to mid 2000s, you had the takedown of Burnout 3 Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3 The Incredibles Manhunt Battle for Bikini Bottom Dragon Ball online and Shadow, the best hour mortal RPM basically, if you played more than three games during the early and the mid-2000s, you probably played something running on renderware and the reason I mention this is because some of the most notable games made with this engine were those from Rock Rockstar, i.e.

Bully, the first Manhunt and the first three 3D GTA games, meaning Rockstar relied heavily on this engine to create. some of their best games after EA bought the rights to Criterion and their engine, Rockstar decided that they had to stop using an engine that was now owned by one of their competitors, but instead of licensing a different engine from another company, They decided to do it completely. internally and after some deliberation they decided to take the Angel game engine that Rockstar San Diego had been using and rebuild it into the Rockstar Advanced game engine or the Rage engine, surely this would become Rockstar's main development engine in the future. with Max Pane 3, GTA 4 and 5 and both Red Deads developed using this engine, although before it became Rockstar's workhorse, its creators were able to test it in their best franchise.

Midnight Club Los Angeles was the first Midnight Club created for the seventh generation. consoles and it was also the third game to use the new Rage engine after a test game of table tennis and GTA 4 and you can really see that power on display because even today this game still looks great or at least looks like it. came out at the end. from the 7th generation instead of just 3 years old, note this strange dithering effect and the fact that some of the daytime images have strange green and red lighting on the sides of the cars is because the images were emulated , this was not a thing. in the base game, although as much as I like the game, I think it might have been slightly hampered by the newly created engine because, as far as I know, this is the most buggy console.

Notable bugs in Midnight Club include that the map often has very severe textures that appear with a player having to drive for seconds or, in some cases, a full minute before the level of detail in the textures would resolve itself. . Another somewhat common mistake was that sometimes when entering the garage or staging areas, your car would shine brightly. suns and the online mode have basically always been full of hackers and cheaters, although as of now the only version of the game with working multiplayer is the Xbox 360 version and its subsequent port to Xbox One and the series Despite its relatively minor shortcomings on a purely mechanical level, it holds up surprisingly well on almost every other front.

The graphics, as mentioned above, were quite good, only surpassed by the immaculate atmosphere of the game. I know I've mentioned a lot of things in this video, but I really want to reiterate how good these are. Midnight Club 3 in La creates a vibe that is almost unmatched 15 years later, this Vibe is also assisted by the soundtrack, which will probably receive some criticism for this. Personally I think it's better than Midnight Club 3, there are so many great ones. artists here like kid cudy ASAP rock Nas 9-in Nails Beck MGMT Justice Tech 9 the brothers chemico Snoop Dogg Wolf Gang Gartner and many others here are some of my favorite lanes Lan laning Lan Lanes catch I make good friends who do I say I really want being in Los Angeles, actually getting his chains back in the morning, not before Nightfall, could be it.

I wonder why everyone here rapping about killing. In fact, I first heard the guinea pig Tech 9 MGMT and Justice while playing this game for the first time, another area in which this game excels, which is often very poorly done in other racing games, often at comic or ironically comic levels, is the story. Now I'm sure it's not Homer's enemy, it's not the Sopranos, it's not bad, but especially compared to the overacted and undercooked series. The Need for Speed ​​stories we got this time around are surprisingly good and with no disrespect to those games, just if you don't have the nostalgia for them like me, it seems to feel good in terms of base gameplay.

There were also some major changes between this and three, the physics changed drastically so now the cars feel a little less jittery compared to three, but that also means they can feel a little slow and difficult to drive in some corners, especially in the heavier ones. and older cars, speaking of difficulty, I'd probably describe this as the easiest of the four entries, but with two big caveats, one of them being that at launch, this game was much harder, apparently so much so that Rockstar even patched the game to do it. a little easier and because I got the LA equivalent to the remix edition of three, this time it was called the full edition, that patch was already applied when I started playing and two, this is the Midnight Club I have the most time with , so this is the one I like the most.

I used to in terms of physics and mechanics, although I also remember struggling a bit with that as a kid, they also change the abilities, so now instead of having the useless one, the useless one that looks cool and Zone now you have a new EMP ability. which basically sends an energy surge to all the cars near you and now you can apply any skill to any car instead of them being specific to the car type, although many still say the area is the best in Los Angeles and probably be it. I think EMP can work depending on your driving style basically it's thebest defensive skill, while EMP is the best offensive skill.

They also overhauled the customization system, although not all of the changes they made were positive, they got rid of most of the body customization options and replaced them with ones that were more unique, but they also gave you a paint and livery editor. Much better, they allowed you to apply a wide body kit to most cars and even allowed you to fully customize your interior, which is still very impressive today and you can show off those new body designs and modifications with one. of the new Rate My Ride multiplayer modes, which allowed the player to view designs and cars created by other players, as well as rate them and purchase a replica of them, this led to some interesting designs, if you can call it that, but overall it was an interesting experience. feature to add to the series speaking of multiplayer, this is actually the only game in the series that I have played in multiplayer.

I would show you how I play it, but the only footage I have is from October 2016 and it looks like I like this, so I guess I'll just show others footage online. Multiplayer as a whole improved a bit between this and three, but since I'm less familiar with all three, I can't fully comment on it. What I can say is that I had some really good runs with some of the players I came across at the time and I even got to try out some of the strange PowerUp events which to me looked less like the midnight club and more like a scam and many of these rooms were full of nasty, abrasive hackers who would usually just shoot at you and teleport to the finish line instead of running, but that could also be due to the fact that I was playing this game almost 8 years after its release because at that point it was pretty evident that Rockstar had basically

abandoned

Midnight Club for the most part, although at that point everything still seemed fine for the first two years.

After the release of Midnight Club LA immediately after the console launch, we got another PSP game, this time called Midnight Club LA Remix, which is the best one. way to play Midnight Club on PSP and is also the only game in the series that not only features Tokyo, but also features the Midnight Club Street Racers that give the game its name and allows you to compete against them to be the best in Tokyo and also like Midnight Club 3 La got its own expanded version, this time called THE Complete Edition, which came with the aforementioned AFF difficulty patch, as well as the first in the series, a downloadable DLC, in this case a map expansion and story called South Central, which also included a solid handful of new cars, two types of new cars, and another soundtrack expansion, but this is where the series' problems begin.

In early January 2010, a large number of wives of Rockstar San Diego employees under the pseudonym Rockstar Spouse were posted to the gamma Sutra blogs alleging that the company's working conditions had declined dramatically over the past year. This also coincided with when the studio's main projects were Midnight Club's South Central expansion and the upcoming release of Red Dead Redemption. It wasn't covered much at the time, but this is strongly linked to some of the more established studies. The talent left at that time, many of whom were instrumental in the development of Midnight Club LA and were in the process of developing Midnight Club 5, but at that time.

Very few people thought that anything was an IR in the company and assumed that the new Midnight Club was only a few years away, as it had always been after the last one, but in the years that followed, different factors led to the development of Midnight Club 5 stopped. indefinitely, the biggest being the absolutely insane success of GTA 5. If you look at Rockstar's release schedule up to GTA 5, you'll see that they started ramping up production as they acquired more studios in the early 2000s and then slowed down very much. slowly production in the face of In 2010, when games became bigger and more difficult to develop on fifth generation consoles, GTA 5 came out and they haven't made one more for release since they didn't include ports with the exception of Red Dead Redemption 2 and it seems like they did it for There is no reason why GTA 5 was and continues to be one of the most profitable games ever made, becoming the second best-selling game of all time only behind Minecraft, but I don't even know If Minecraft is as profitable as GTA 5 because with modern monetization practices. what's in that game, I could see the argument that GTA is the most profitable and those monetization practices are half the reason I'm not sure A Midnight Club 5 would be any good even if we got the other one.

Half of it is Rockstar's reputation in recent years, especially when it comes to how they treat their most beloved older titles. Just look at Red Dead 1 on Switch or the GTA Remastered Trilogy as examples when I asked whether or not they were thinking of a new Midnight. The Club game would never happen. I received a resounding no. Looking at the state of Rockstar and, to some extent, racing games in general, I'm almost convinced that we'll never see a new Midnight Club, which is a bit unfortunate, but I can. I'm not saying it's an entirely bad thing because a series like The Midnight Club is one of those whose basic premise works best when combined with the trends of the day and as we've seen from its surviving competitors, they attempt exactly that even if they don't execute it. .

Racing game fans in general weren't the most receptive, so I think if we built a new Midnight Club like the old ones, there wouldn't be as much of a market for it unless it was that much. I like the originals, which is based on a GTA San Andreas and takes place a decade and a half before the game's release, but personally I'm fine with having the great games we have because they still have a lot to offer today and to those who have . I didn't play them you have to try these games because we may never see them again yeah and you say City sh City sh City coming home again are you thinking about me now and yeah are you thinking about me now because I'm coming back to home?

Again I met this girl when she was 3 years old and what I love most was that she had so much Soul, she said, excuse me little friend, I know you don't know me, but my name is Wendy and I like to blow trees and from that point on. I never rule it out, I come from out of town. I like to show it off. They like to act tough. She likes to take them off and make them fix their hat because she knows they are soft. And when I grew up, she showed me that she had to go. downtown at night my face lit up and I told her and my heart is with her, she always will be, she never messes with artists because they always leave, she said it felt like they were walking and driving over me, I knew He was affiliated with a gang.

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