Midnight Club II

Midnight Club II is a street racing game for Windows. The game takes place in three different cities: Paris, Tokyo, and Los Angeles.

It was released in 2003, and it could be considered old already, but it really is a game that was different from all others, at least for me. I remember being hooked by it. It really didn't add many new things to the genre, but it was a fun game to play. The career mode is perhaps the most fun part of the game, where you have to earn your street reputation by winning races against the best drivers in the world. As you get better, you get to drive better cars in the three locations of the game.

The gameplay was very good back when the game was released. But if you look at it today, you will feel that driving your car with the up, down, left, right arrows is not the best way to do it. The car overturns a lot and there is really no way to accurately control it. But that was the way you had to do it back then. Racing consists mostly of arriving at checkpoints before your opponent does. For every race, you will have to cross a series of checkpoints, which are columns of light placed on the street. You can take any path that you want between checkpoints. There are jumps and shortcuts all over the game. There is also a multiplayer mode which I couldn't try back then because of bandwidth limitations, but I heard that capture the flag was very fun to play.

All in all, Midnight Club II is not a game you would buy because you want top-of-the-line graphics and gameplay (not these days anyway). However, it is a value game that anyone can pick up a play.