Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition (PSP) review "I’ll tell you about Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition just as soon as it finishes loading. It’ll probably finish in a few seconds...or minutes. In the meantime, uh, how are you? What have you been doing? Working a lot? Oh wait, I think it’s done. Wait, nope, it’s still loading. It’ll be just a little bit more. I apologize. The longer it loads, the better it must be, right?! "

I’ll tell you about Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition just as soon as it finishes loading. It’ll probably finish in a few seconds...or minutes. In the meantime, uh, how are you? What have you been doing? Working a lot? Oh wait, I think it’s done. Wait, nope, it’s still loading. It’ll be just a little bit more. I apologize. The longer it loads, the better it must be, right?!

…awkward silence…

…

Hey, it’s done loading! You want to give it a shot now? No? You’re tired? I can’t blame you really, if I had to wait that long to do something, I’d be pretty tired too.

I guess I’ll play it then…

The worst part about Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition on the PSP is, obviously, that it takes forever to load. Seriously, the load times are obnoxious. I can’t stress this enough. It’s the worst part about the game. The racing is superb, there’s an obscene amount of customization options for every ride, and the graphics are some of the best on the PSP.

It’s just too bad it takes three minutes to see any of it.

Even with this loading problem, Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition is a great game that you should add to your collection. From the moment you start it up, the game feels familiar and comfortable. The PSP in your hands melts away and you’re transformed into the drivers’ seat of whatever ride you choose. You’ll spend a lot of your time in the in-depth career mode where you’ll find yourself (not surprisingly) racing to become one of the top street racers. Along the way, you’re going to make friends, make enemies, and make a whole lot of cash.

It’s just going to take you awhile to do any of this because of the loading.

The game opens up with you being the new guy going into a shop looking for a ride. You have your choice of a set of different stock Japanese race cars that we’ve all become accustomed to in these types of games. I chose the Mitsubishi Eclipse, but there are cars from nearly every manufacturer in this game, including Chevrolet, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, and Chrysler. There are even other vehicles, including trucks and motorcycles that you can customize the crap out of.

Of course, to customize the crap out of things, you have to earn money and, not to patronize you, dear reader, but you earn money through racing. Initially, the only city you can race in is San Diego, but within no time at all you’ll find yourself racing through the streets of Detroit and Atlanta. Racing is where this game really shines. There’s just an incredible sense of speed here. You really feel like you’re speeding along. I don’t think I ever even needed to look at the speedometer to tell how fast I was going because I could pretty accurately gauge it just by the motions on the screen. Couple this sense of speed with really, really tight control that allows you to make very precise movements through traffic (even with the PSP’s notoriously nearly universally hated analog nub) and you’ll find yourself addicted to racing in no time.

Finding a race is a snap too. There are dozens and dozens of different races you can complete in each city. Some give you access to new cars and some give you piles of cash, but all of them are a challenge. At first, I was winning a lot of races by five seconds, but in later races I was lucky if I was winning by more than a half a second, even when driving without fault. This is a game that you’re going to be spending quite a bit of time with. It even looks really good too. Sure, there are some framerate issues at times, but you’ll forgive that because you can race through three massive cities. Even if you can’t forgive them, the reflections of the cars will likely distract you, so you won’t even notice. About six million (okay, so maybe 100) or so different songs from the likes of The Game, Jimmy Eat World, Ash, Fat Joe, Queens of the Stone Age and many more ensure that you won’t hear the same tune twice either (at least, not for a while anyway). And if you somehow manage to finish the career mode, there are six different multiplayer modes to play against your friends.

Of course, to play any mode means you’ll have to suffer through those load times. The load times are so depressing because this really is a great racing game. It could have stood toe-to-toe against Ridge Racer if the load times had been a bit better. Still, I encourage you to pick Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition up and give your dusty PSP something to play, even with the load time issue. Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition might not be the most technically sound PSP game available, but it is deserving of your attention, even with its faults.

Community review by asherdeus (June 28, 2006) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.