Midtown Madness II :TeenzSpot.com Score
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Difficulty:
Hard
Learning Curve:
From 0 to 15 Minutes
Stability:
Stable
Version:
Retail
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Publisher: Microsoft
Requirements: Pentium-200 or equivalent, 16 MB RAM, 2X CD-ROM, SVGA,
300 MB disk space, mouse, sound card, DirectX v6.0.
REVIEWER'S MACHINE: PIII 667, 256MB RAM, Xentor 32 Ultra, Win98
Similar To: Midtown Madness
Genre: Driving
ESRB: All
 Driving
games remain a mostly unexplored frontier. Flight simulators give
you the whole countryside, spaceflight simulators give you the galaxy,
but most driving games give you about six tracks. With few exceptions,
in driving games you never really get the sense of freedom that
the motor vehicle, in that ideal world as portrayed in car commercials,
is supposed to provide. That's why Midtown Madness, because of its
ambitious scope, stands poised to redefine the genre's standards:
The game doesn't contain traditional tracks, so much as the entire
city of Chicago mapped out by the block, complete with all its famous
landmarks from the Sears Tower to Wrigley Field. The city lives
and breathes rather like the real thing, with variable traffic and
weather conditions, pedestrians, traffic lights, cops, and freeways.
And you get to drive wherever you want within the windy city, and
however you want. Although its driving mechanics aren't terribly
sophisticated, it can be a lot of fun because it affords you that
very freedom that all driving games should but rarely deliver.
You get to drive a wide assortment of real-world vehicles, from
the frightfully popular Volkswagen New Beetle to the luxurious 1999
Cadillac El Dorado. You can also unlock a bevy of unusual machines,
from a city bus to a souped-up Ford Mustang police car. All these
cars handle and sound different from one another (you even hear
warning beeps when the bus goes in reverse), and although the game
plays best from a third-person view, you can switch to a unique
first-person dashboard view, complete with steering wheel and tachometer
but no rearview mirrors. There's also a great wide-screen view that
increases your field of vision as well as your frame rate, and there's
a real-time map of the city marked with all its landmarks. Though
you can drive around ten different vehicles total, it's too
bad there weren't even more real cars, like the hundreds available
in the popular PlayStation driving game Gran Turismo. It's also
a bit of a disappointment that all the cars you'll come across on
the city streets are generic hatchbacks and sedans and not the real
thing like what you're driving.
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