Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition - Xbox

Rockstar don’t only make Grand Theft Auto Games, you know. The first Midnight Club street racing game put you in the shoes of a bored cabbie who gets drawn into the exciting world of a club that races highly-tuned cars across moonlit cityscapes. The rules were quite simple: win and you win your opponent’s car. Of course at the beginning of the game, your taxi-cab wasn’t going to win against anything in a straight race, so it was important to use cunning if you wanted to get ahead. Petrolheads on both sides of the Atlantic were kept happy, with parts of Manhattan and London featuring in-game. The second game in the series saw players cruising round any one of three cities, flashing their lights at other drivers to challenge them to races.

Now the third instalment comes to consoles, in the form of Midnight Club 3: Dub Edition, so called because it is produced in association with DUB magazine. Once again you can race through three American cities, and the game features licensed cars in a number of different categories: from bling heavy SUVs like Escalades, to tuned sedans, to motorbikes including Harley choppers, and the obligatory Japanese RICE cars, featuring motors created by the legendary Nissan Motor Company amongst other, less celebrated stables.

In their partnership with celebrated hip-hop cultural leaders DUB, developers Rockstar San Diego have kept pace with recent developments in the growing genre of car-tuning, street-racing games. Tuning and customisation plays a bigger part than ever before, and the online feature which made the second game successful is back, offering support for up to eight players online. Naturally, this being a Rockstar title, the soundtrack will have been given careful consideration, and with DUB’s influence, you can be sure there’ll be some pretty heavy beats booming out of your ride as you pick your route through tuning hotspots Atlanta, San Diego and Detroit. more