I first found Midnight Club: Street Racing while browsing the GBA bins for deals. $10 it cried to me. A driving game for $10, come on! In an age when Need for Speed Underground and Mario Kart were $30, $10 looked mighty good. So I snatched it up, threw down my bucks, and eagerly ran home to play. The opening screens looked nice and I was feeling good about the game as I navigated through the menus. The game takes place in NYC and London, and sports both an arcade and a career mode. The arcade mode has three race types: Cruise, Head to Head, and Waypoint. The first problem I noticed was lack of unlocked content. When you are first starting out, Head to Head is locked, only NYC is available, and only one TAXI is in the garage. So your initial options are quite limited. And once you start the actual game-play, it only goes downhill. The top down driving is terrible. If you can manage to get any speed up you will be stopped by the traffic which comes out of nowhere. The backgrounds are extremely repetitive, consisting of a bland city with an occasional grassy spot (which doesn't affect the handling at all.) Waypoint mode is you against 5 other cars who follow preset checkpoints to a checkered flag. The only way to win is to play the course, and then just remember where you went last time and play it again ignoring the other cars. And that's the best arcade mode has to offer. Then I tried out career mode, which ended up making arcade mode look stellar. The goal here is to follow another driver around, staying close enough to him to make his flag turn green. Oh yeah, if forgot to mention, you'll know your opponent by the rotating flag on the top of his car. So once you've followed him in a circle for long enough he'll take off to another location and you'll have to follow him there. Really lame game play all around. The colors are the only attractive thing in the game, but it ends up looking like a sharper version of the ATARI 2600 racing games. The cars are all nondescript and rather ugly. Even using the cheat codes to unlock the other cars doesn't enhance the experience much. In the end the game really has nothing to boast about. It is thoroughly disappointing and sub-mediocre, even with the $10 price tag. I would recommend saving up for NFSU2 or Mario Kart, or better yet, waiting for a really good GBA racer to come along.
Other Helpful Reviews for Midnight Club: Street Racing
This thing is horrible. One minute your winning, then boom blindsided by a truck you couldnt see because of the camera angle. It is from a top down view wich makes it very hard to steer. just about the only good thing... Read Full Review
The game seems to have a good concept, however it just doesn't match to newer Midnight Club games. You could say that a "okay" game such as this lead into the great series. None the less the game isn't half bad. When I f... Read Full Review
