Midtown Madness 2 Preview

When Microsoft published Midtown Madness some two years ago that rounded up neatly the "madness" games trilogy after the Monster Truck Madness and Motocross Madness. The game gave us a taste of the well known Hollywood car chases through crowded streets with dense traffic, it's just that you had to drive around Chicago in stead of LA. Anyway, the feeling of flying into a crossway with red lights was much the same...

The first information I heard (several dozen times) was that we're getting two cities instead of one: San Francisco and London (San Francisco being made a bit bigger however ridiculous that may sound). The engine has also been changed, so that now it's capable of rendering multi-planar terrains, and the graphics will be much more detailed (they say you can hardly find two similar façades, but I wasn't too enthusiastic about what I have seen)... Apart from that it should support DirectX 7 and hardware T&L as well as new methods for texture compression in order to save memory.

The programmers say they've tweaked all segments of the game up. I, personally look forward to car physics improvements. The first part tried to present cars realistically, but remained far from it. The controls should be more flexible, and you should be able to perform power-slides, two-wheel driving, and flying over rooftops with no trouble at all. The first time I saw the screenshots I wondered if you could drive through the streets at all.

Both cities will have more than twenty-five landmarks, so you can expect a chase through Hyde Park, streets around the Buckingham palace, Coit Tower, or Fisherman's Warf, London Bridge, and Golden Gate... And expect an utterly different feeling when driving the broad American Frisco streets, or narrow London streets full of parked cars and Bobbies. The authors did not try to make the cities 100% realistic, they tried to make a compromise between verisimilitude and playability, so they adjusted the maps slightly to their needs.

Six commentators, typical for the city, will follow each drive, i.e. a Scottish UK sportscaster, or a Shakesperian actor will announce London races. Good driving will open new cars, new tracks and some Easter eggs...