Midnight Club L.A. box art
Among the bevy of Xbox 360 games I picked up shortly after landing here in Thailand is Midnight Club L.A., the latest entry in Rockstar Games’ action driving franchise. You might think of the Midnight Club series as analogous to EA’s Need For Speed series, because they have a lot in common: Arcade-style racing packed with visual realism; action driving with a “gangsta” street racing element; police chases; plenty of destruction; and a host of cars from the import tuner, American muscle and exotic categories.
“Ugh…gangsta street racing again?” I hear you moaning. “It probably has a thuggish rap soundtrack too, right?” (Yeah, but it’s also got genres like rock, electronica, techno and death metal, and you can turn off the crap you don’t want to hear.) Despite how this sort of game seems to have been done to death, particularly under the Need For Speed moniker, Rockstar manages to pull off something just a little different, whose flavor is just new enough that it entertains you in new ways. And if you’re like me, and can never get enough of a good action-oriented racer with some cool cars and lots of property destruction, Midnight Club L.A. becomes that much easier to love.
While I’ve kept up with the aforementioned Need For Speed series, it’s been a long time since I played a Midnight Club game. The last time, in fact, was Midnight Club 2 on the PC, probably back in 2003. That game was fun — I even blogged about it at the time, but the article was on my old domain so I don’t have it handy. However, it did seem more frustrating than Need For Speed, in the sense that you’d always find yourself dodging around a ridiculous amount of traffic while you’re racing, and the game even seemed to deliberately lead you into calamitous crashes that you could never possibly have avoided.
In Need For Speed, if you got into a crash like that, you could pretty much go ahead and restart the event. But Midnight Club is deceiving, because the AI is programmed to let you recover fairly easily from these kinds of mistakes, even making it possible to come back and win if you’ve beat your car to hell. For this reason, Midnight Club always starts off maddeningly frustrating on the surface, but once you realize that it’s okay to screw up, it takes a lot of the edge off and the game becomes more enjoyable. Because after all, who doesn’t like crashing and bashing their video game car all over the screen? The destruction effects may not be as good as other games in this genre, but high-speed wrecks are still plenty satisfying.
In Midnight Club L.A., Rockstar has followed this same formula, which is so recognizable that I was immediately reminded of my vintage adventures in Midnight Club 2. But it adds in a modern style “story” with cutscenes and the like, and unlike the pretentious, self-aggrandizing cutscenes in the Need For Speed games, Midnight Club’s unfolding story seems to almost lampoon itself. At one point, the Japanese girl you’re about to race taunts you by saying, “Good luck! …Actually, no. No luck for you!” To which your character responds in disbelief, “Um…wow, yeah, great trash talking, there.” There’s this current of self-deprecating humor about the whole thing that I found deliciously amusing.
When the game begins, you find yourself dropped into the virtual shoes of your player character: An un-named, vaguely ethnic dude with a buzz cut who’s just arrived in Los Angeles from somewhere out east. You want to get into L.A.’s street racing scene, and your first contact is an egomaniac named Booke who hooks you up with your first car. Hilariously, the cars you can choose from at the start are all beaters, with mismatched body panels and lousy paint. Booke talks all gangsta, and what’s funny is that your character reacts to him like he’s got to be some kind of clown, which is great because that’s the reaction I always have in real-life to these overblown racing game characters. It seems Rockstar is having a giggle at Need For Speed’s over-the-top “balla” personalities. It’s a giggle that’s richly deserved.
As the so-called “career mode” of the game rolls on, you run street races against the local L.A. hotshots, upgrade your car, buy new cars, and do it all over again. There’s a few different race types: ordered races, which are checkpoint-based sprints from one location to another along an ordered path; circuit races, which have you following a series of checkpoints for multiple laps; and landmark races, where the game gives you a start point and an end point, and you have to make your own way there. The sandbox-style game world is like that of Grand Theft Auto, in that you’re dropped into a living, breathing virtual city and are allowed to explore at will. The game world isn’t as vibrant or as humorous as GTA’s, but it’s still plenty real.
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They taste great, too. Normally guavas are much more expensive than this in the U.S., so I don’t know if it was an error or what, but if it was, we made out like bandits. We even paid more for guavas in Thailand, and they’re as common as apples over there!
Chief Oddball
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Apple
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Shadow Politics
By Chief Oddball on August 21st, 2009 at 3:55 pm
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I’m a regular reader of the Joystiq video game news blog, and this week my daily scanning of its pages revealed a lot of praise for a game I hadn’t heard of previously: Shadow Complex. This Xbox Live Arcade game by Chair and Epic Games is a 2D sidescroller built on the 3D Unreal engine, combining old-fashioned, Metroid-style gameplay with modern day graphics, effects and combat. The whole thing is set in a modern-day universe similar to that of Metal Gear Solid, and finds you stepping into the role of the reluctant son of an NSA officer who stumbles upon the underground base of a terrorist army that’s just hours away from taking over the city of San Francisco.
I downloaded the free demo available from Xbox Live and had such a great time with it that I purchased the full version about 30 minutes in. (It’ll set you back 1200 Microsoft Points, or about $15.) For your money, you’ll get what I believe to be a tremendous gaming value that easily surpasses some of the $60 retail games I’ve purchased over the years, and also comes with excellent replayability since it encourages exploration, doubling back and finding hidden items you missed on your first run-through. From an entertainment perspective, I can heartily recommend Shadow Complex as one of the best titles I’ve ever downloaded from XBLA.
But today I uncovered what many believe to be the “sinister underbelly” of Shadow Complex: Its affiliation with Orson Scott Card (author of Ender’s Game), whose creative universe its story is based upon. Specifically, the game’s story is set in the same continuum as Card’s Empire novel from 2006, which tells the tale of a second American Civil War (between right- and left-wing political ideologies) instigated by a radical leftist organization called The Progressive Restoration.
Why is this a problem? It’s a problem because Orson Scott Card is a very vocal opponent of gay marriage, and in fact has made a number of very vitriolic statements in the past on any number of right-wing causes that have ruffled a lot of feathers. Card is also a member of the board of directors of the National Organization for Marriage, a group that seeks to retain the definition of marriage exclusively as “a union between a man and a woman.”
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