Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition Preview

How much can you cram into a handheld console? Is it enough simply to port PS2 titles across and let the hardware do the work? Or, because handheld gaming is fundamentally different to playing a game in the comfort of your own home, do you need to do something different? Not simply port, but mould?

The PSP has been lauded, ridiculed and hacked to pieces since its Japanese launch last Christmas (I’m not going to go into European delays here). Claims and counter-claims abound. “It’s as good as the PS2!” “No it’s not, it’s only about PS1.5!” “You’re both wrong! It’s better than everything!” … and so on and so forth.

Not one to indulge in pre-pubescent flame wars, Pro-G seeks the truth. Not in a post-modern, Nietzsche kind of way mind you, merely in a ‘is this damn post right?’ kind of way. And then Rockstar come along and ask us to try out Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition for the PSP. With a carefree nod and a skip in our step, we oblige.

If ever there was a game that would push the PSP hard, it would be Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition (from now on MC3, since the truth can sometimes be condensed). Conversely, it would also test the boundaries of what a handheld game can be. What works on handheld, traditionally, are short blasts of simple gaming fun, fit for the twenty minute bus journey, ten minute tube ride, or hour lunch break. Hardcore gaming sessions, traditionally, do not. In MC3, a game Rockstar hope to release for the PSP’s launch on September 1st, we appear to have a hybrid.

First things first – the build we played was 85-90% complete, running on a PSP dev-kit. Why? You would be a wise person to ask, and, since great minds think alike, we asked too. (It’s that truth-seeking thing again). It’s a valid question too. MC3 PSP has been out for a couple of weeks now in the US and reviews have shown a number of hardware issues that affect gameplay. Specifically, US reviewers tell of scandalous loading times, frame rate reductions and slowdown. In short, evidence that simply porting a console game across to the PSP is pushing all that portable hardware just a little too hard.

So let’s apply some of that journalistic intuition that serves dedicated Pro-G readers so well. Why give us a build to play to play on a dev-kit when Rockstar could have shown us the retail US release? Because they’re tweaking it, or at least we hope they are. They’ve identified the problems with the game and are taking advantage of the delayed Euro PSP release to fix the hardware issues. It’s quite obvious. Whether that means a reduction in graphical quality, the stripping of features or reducing the frame-rate, we won’t know until closer to release. For now, it’s pretty safe to say the European MC3 won’t be the same as the US version.

With this in mind, we tentatively dive into the portable world of MC3. Players of the console version will have wiled away hours simply cruising around cities, spending sleepless nights customising their vehicles, turning them into pimped up bad-ass motors. This doesn’t necessarily translate particularly well to handheld gamers who need a quick fix. The modes available to us were limited. Cruising formed much of the play-test. There were no serious loading times to speak of while waiting for the track and the car to appear on the lovely PSP screen. We experienced no reduction in frame-rate or slowdown (although we were not exactly pushing the game hard). The game looked great, if ever so slightly not as great as its console cousins.

All three cities are available. You’ll begin in San Diego, but you’ll eventually be able to open up the cities of Atlanta and Detroit as well. In fact, the full single player options are available. Fully customisable cars, all the add-ons, tweaks and pimping options you could ever need. In the US version, it takes up to 70 seconds to load these huge free-roaming cities on the PSP. Let’s hope the tweaking Rockstar are quite obviously working on as we speak shortens that load considerably. For now, on the build we played at Rockstar’s offices in London, the map loaded in a blink of an eye.

All the back alleys, hidden shortcuts and special jumps that you took forever to discover in the PS2 or Xbox version are included. For those who played the game, you’ll perhaps be indifferent to these delights. For those new to the franchise, simply cruising around a city in an over-clocked hotrod discovering oddities and quirks provides a strangely calming game experience. One that’s as compelling for the daily rat-race as a cold breeze blowing in the height of summer.

The career mode returns, with the race for cash dynamic the genre seems to love. You begin with about 20 grand in your pocket and an introduction to a local garage owner, who sets you up with a ride of your choice and an “in” to the underground street-racing scene. The garage is the hub of MC3. Modifications, tweaks and pimping all take place here. Spray, mould, bend, grind – whatever you want. You could spend hours not racing at all, if this kind of thing takes your fancy, just as you could on the PS2 and Xbox.

But others may snort. After all, Midnight Club 3 is an arcade racer through and through. Realism is eschewed here for spectacular crashes, trail-blazing headlights and screeching tyres. On PSP, there is some evidence of less structural damage to vehicles, but it isn’t extensive enough to affect your enjoyment. The physics engine is chugging along at a fair old pace, cars flying into the air with aplomb, walls providing stubborn obstacles and headlamps buckling under the pressure of 50mph steel.

And so we come to an actual race, where the controls, map and processor will be fully tested with a number of AI controlled cars to contend with. On this build (have I said it was running on a dev-kit?), there was no slow-down or frame-rate reduction, which we provisionally put a tick against. Battling cars on PSP, with headphones providing atmospheric hard rock riffs married with the screeching of burning rubber is as involving as any racing experience on a handheld. After the obligatory ‘getting used to the analogue’ on the PSP, power sliding around corners is a mixture of Burnout’s forgiving speed action and Project Gotham Racing’s delicate cornering. Even veterans of the console version of MC3 will take ten minutes to adjust to the controls, the analogue and the smaller screen. Overall, it feels tighter and just a tad slower. For those who don’t want to spend their time preparing for it, racing will form the bulk of their time with MC3. So far, Rockstar appear to have ported the fundamentals across with little compromise.

But there are some fundamentally important questions that have been left unanswered by this preliminary play test. Answers to these questions will inevitably determine the game’s success when it is released, Rockstar hope, for the PSP’s European launch. On the one hand you have to give it to them for trying to push unfamiliar hardware as far as it will go. On the other, you might criticise them for trying to do too much. Will the hardware issues be sorted in time for release?

Also not playable on the build we tested was the interesting looking wi-fi capabilities. Rockstar have told us full online play isn’t supported, but wi-fi multiplayer is (although, as with all handheld games that have wi-fi capabilities, we question the importance of the feature, since the odds of sitting on a bus with someone who’s playing the same game as you are slim to none). But this won’t stop friends who get together to play. Rockstar also think this feature will potentially evolve into some kind of motoring catwalk, where gamers get together to show off their accessorised and pimped up vehicles in-game, in one of the cities. A bit like MMO players admiring a human warrior who’s showing off an epic weapon he just nabbed from some gruesome dungeon. We’ll have to wait a few months to see if that takes off.

But we seem to have digressed. As we asked at the beginning of this preview: can you port a PS2 game straight over to PSP without any reduction in quality? The truth? Perhaps we European gamers can’t handle the truth just yet. Come September 1st though (fingers crossed), we’ll get an answer whether we’re ready or not.