Midtown Madness Review

Graphics and Sound

Jeff's comments in BLACK

CalBear's comments in BLUE

Tweaker's delight

As a die-hard tweaker, Midtown Madness is a game after my very own heart. There are dozens of video and sound detail options, which provide a wide range of performance options for any computer. I even got this game running acceptably on my laptop with an anemic ATI Rage Pro video card. Whether you've got a fire-breathing monster gaming rig or something more modest, you'll be able to tweak a framerate and level of detail that satisfies you.

Up and over

Busing at night

Enough road for you?

The polygon counts are not particularly high, but the game makes up this up in quantity. The game models over 100 kilometers of "real" Chicago, massive chunks of which are visible at any given time. There are even rain and snow weather models, and races at dusk, night, and dawn, all with their own unique textures and effects. The sound shows a similar emphasis on quantity, with hundreds of unique sounds for every event in the game-- for example, the horn and engine sound of a passing bus are much different than a compact car.

You're the bus driver

Map view

Interactivity

Don't get me wrong. The game is quite impressive visually, especially with the texture and model detail set to maximum, though still a notch or two under the current eye candy leaders. But the name of the game here is realism. Instead of flashy effects, you get hundreds of cars that use their turn signals, stop at stop lights, change lanes, and try their best to avoid your erratic driving while yelling insults at you! I can't emphasize enough how cool this is. Almost every object in the game is breakable, including traffic lights, parking meters, dumpsters, newspaper stands, lampposts, traffic signs, traffic cones, mailboxes, and the occasional storefront window.. if you can see it, you can probably run over it. The only notable exceptions are the pedestrians, who have evidently been bitten by radioactive spiders and have an uncanny ability to evade your vehicle under any circumstances.

Behind the wheel

Pull right!

The reasoning behind this is that Microsoft didn't want to turn the game into Carmageddon, and I kinda agree with the sentiment. Being able to bludgeon pedestrians would make the game kind of psychotic. Not that psychotic games are bad, but running over people just don't fit the overall mood of Midtown Madness, which I consider to be merely "mischievious," not pathologically demented. With regard to the "breakableness" of everything, I spent literally hours just driving around and knocking over parking meters, newspaper dispensers, and trash cans. It's arguably the best part of the game!