At First Blush... Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition, or "10 Gallons in a 5-Gallon Hat"

Rockstar San Diego outdid themselves with Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition. Just like the full-blown console version, you have complete street maps of San Diego, Atlanta, and Detroit to cruise through or race through. There is an incredible number of cars, trucks, and bikes to choose from, tune, and customize to your heart's content. The gameplay, graphics, and soundtrack is everything we've come to expect from Rockstar on the PlayStation2.

Last night I raced through the streets of San Diego in a suped up Dodge SRT4 (red, of course!). Running head-to-head with the GTO in traffic, I was forced to crash through a window and drive through a store before taking the street again. How cool is that! I had my Sony MDR-EX71 earbuds in and had Sean Paul thumping while I finally dusted the GTO and came in 2nd.

As Nix at IGN reports in his Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition Review:

Why am I talking tech here in this review before saying one word specifically about Midnight Club 3, the highly-anticipated PSP version of Rockstar's renown racing series? Because more than any game on the system so far, this game pushes and pulls at the system, bending it over and twisting it around to try to perfectly recreate the deep-as-a-thong-string gameplay of the console blazer by Rockstar San Diego (formerly Angel Studios). There may be a handful of other games we've seen in previews that are more technologically advanced game on PSP (though this certainly has plenty of aspects to boast about.) And as far as using the PSP to its max, this is not the penultimate example of how much power this system offers game makers (if anything, I'm sure Rockstar will be back to kick this game's ass.) But as far as ambition and total package, it's only got maybe one or two other handheld games in its league.

Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition is a game shoehorned into the PSP, ten gallons of game crammed into a five gallon bucket. And surprisingly, it almost all fits ... honestly, it should have all fit. If it weren't for some first-gen technical issues and a few really disappointing missed opportunities to tailor this into a PSP game, it would have been right up their with THUG 2 Remix in terms of offering the most bang for the buck you can get on a portable.

If you can get past the 70 seconds! load time between every race and every menu, you'll be well-rewarded with a few minutes of gameplay. Rockstar managed to shoehorn a huge console game into a little portable, and the game rewards you, but the loading punishes you. Rather than periodically hitting the UMD during play, they load the entire map, all the skins, and all the music! into memory before the race begins... Again, as Nix pointed out:

If you're thinking that it's all of that heavy data streaming needed to create this vast, console-quality racing world that's holding the game up, think again. The game's world is entirely stored in memory. You can turn off the music and pop the disc out, and the game will play. Figure that out, and you'll fly into a rage every time that minute-long load pops up every time you start a new race -- it's already all there! Sure, the game has to load the map points, but is that a minute of loading? Of course, the game has to load the car models of your opponents, but then why does the second and third race against the exact same opponents take exactly as long? Traffic patterns have to be reset, maybe some custom track details have to be put in for specific events (such as cop car placement or intersection timing), but it's a free-roaming game -- how much pre-planned mapping needs to be loaded when I'm making my own path to the finish line?

Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition is an incredible game. I'm sure it'll see many hours on PSP. The only question is, how many of those hours will be spent staring at a spinning wheel, two travelling yellow lines, and the word "Loading"?
Ken Foreman 7:01 AM