Last week, I covered why NFS: Hot Pursuit 2 is worth revisiting and discussed the supercars that shaped my desires growing up. Now, it is time to indulge our inner Brian O’Connor and tackily modify the hell out of every car in Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition.
Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition is the ultimate definition of an arcade game, with stupidly unrealistic handling and traffic that you can blast through harmlessly. Developed by Rockstar, the studio well-known for the Grand Theft Auto series, the game takes place in three open-world cities with checkpoint-based races.
In an era when most auto racing games took place in closed-off courses with walls keeping you from deviating from the course, Midnight Club 3 offered completely open-world competition with races that went as far as to have a series of checkpoints with no order. To win, simply hit every checkpoint.
Having this amount of freedom in a purely racing-oriented game felt incredible for the early 2000s. After every race, you were free to roam the entire city–in the original game, San Diego, Detroit, and Atlanta were your options to cruise–to find random drivers to challenge, secret collectibles that unlocked visual upgrades, and hidden jumps.
Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition was an actual, official partnership with Dub Magazine, and featured an extensive car list that included classic Impalas with hydros, supercars with 250+ mph top speeds, and Ducatis. Of course, no partnership with Dub would have been complete without an absurd array of outlandish modifications to make to your car. The traditional post-Fast-and-Furious customizations were available, of course - paint, neons, tint, nitrous. But also available were 20-inch+ Lexanis, spinners, Dub badging, and Kaminari bodykits, all officially licensed. As a kid I, of course, created the most hideous monstrosities ever imagined and thought I was a baller. As an adult (ostensibly), I have done the exact same thing and had a blast doing it.
Check out some gameplay, and dust off those PS2s!