This or Need for Speed
This holiday season the choices for games on the PSP are very limited, and only two street racing games came out for the PSP. Midnight Club LA Remix is one of those games asking for your money.
To start, this is not Midnight Club 3. For those who did not play that, it was a port of the PS2 version. Now the PSP showed it was capable of playing that game. The problem is the game wasn't too optimized for the PSP. The game had massive load times. You turn the game on and it takes a couple of minutes. Kinda normal. Then it takes a minute after starting a game to load the city. Then you are driving in a open world city looking for your opponent. You start the race, one minute load. Win or lose, you were then treated to a one minute load.
It wasn't the most portable game. It was a PS2 game put onto a UMD.
Midnight Club LA Remix however, is a PSP game. It is not a straight port of Midnight Club Los Angeles.
Which is a good thing in my opinon.
They didn't force the console game onto the PSP this time and it shows. The load times in comparison are alot shorter. The graphics are also really good, but you can tell they were pushing the system. While the game runs at a consistant framerate, the game also sports a blur effect covering up its imperfections.
The racing is fun but like the console version can become unforgiving. Smacking into traffic will pretty much end the race for you, and the AI will never make that mistake. Plus the AI knows the shortcuts in the city. Some shortcuts it doesn't use until you've used them.
The city is really good, but it is not the same LA from the console game. Its abridged to fit on the PSP. However, at one point in the game you unlock another city. Tokyo.
So technically LA Remix has another city, but the content between the two is probaly not leaning towards the PSP. A second city or a much larger single city. The single city is probaly bigger then both combined.
As for the story. Well if you need a story to play a racing game, then just stop. You don't want a racing game.
Midnight Club LA Remix is the first truly portable version of the series. If your a fan of the series and have a PSP pick it up. And if your looking for a racing game in general, pick it up too.
5 out of 5.
