4/5 ★ – Dhonerus64's review of Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition Remix.

I played this game in my childhood the way that the main menu theme is genuinely part of my brain in some form. I never knew how a car worked, so I had no clue how to actually play this correctly. After years of being told that Midnight Club 3 is one of the best racing games out there, and big favorite of a lot of my peers, I decided to try it once again this March, gave up for a bit, and came back in October, when the game finally clicked with me and I played most of the campaign, finally finishing it in November 2023. This game is so... Awful at times. I can understand the reasons people love it (speed feels very real, tuning is very good for the time, the racing feels better than its competitor Need for Speed titles in a lot of ways, etc.) but this game's physics and rubberbanding expect things out of you that I do not think a good game should ever. MC3 is difficult, but never in ways I enjoy. Everything feels too chaotic and unfair, and there's entire classes of vehicles and a whole mechanic (the nitrous, mostly) that I feel the game is better if you avoid the most you can. Some of it is just that I'm a scrub, sure, but if you've seen my racing game history or even just watched me play you can't deny that I am more competent at games of this kind than most people I know, if not all of them. Midnight Club 3 is a game that never expects less than 100% of you but rarely gives you its own 100%. It will make you bend to its rules or break them entirely to succeed in a campaign that I made the mistake of assuming would be "pretty normal." Yet, I can't help but feel completely satisfied. Sure, the AI is awful most of the time and has no right to be so much faster than you should you do things even slightly unoptimally. Sure, the feeling that the faster you are, the harder the game is, never goes away. Sure, the physics make you lose grip and go flying at fucking anything, and combined with the bad AI, often at zero control of yours. Sure, unordered point races exist. Sure, the classic GTA V thing of spawning traffic cars going directly towards where your car is headed started in this series. Sure, every playthrough I looked up of this game was filled with people in pain over how much this game loves to fuck them over. Sure, the same button you use to tilt your motorcycle also makes you pop wheelies and crash. But I like it. I like it quite a bit. Midnight Club 3 made me so stressed, I got physically ill for two days. Sure, other factors were involved, but I'm positive this game actually induced such a strong headache in me that my body put every bit of power left in the tank to force me to stop playing. And isn't that kind of telling that I wanted to play it? I don't know. Midnight Club will never be my favorite racing series. It will never be my preferred game to drive around in city streets. But I will also never forget it. Also, if you're wondering, I used cars for most of the game, and finally switched from a McLaren F1 to a sports motorcycle, Ducati 999R, for the last 3 races in the main campaign. And they were much, much easier with it. Fucking hell.