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MIDTOWN MADNESS 2 PREVIEW

Midtown Madness 2 Game Information
	PUBLISHER: Microsoft
	DEVELOPER: Angel Studios
	ORIGIN: United States
	NET SUPPORT: Yes
	ACCELERATED: Yes
	FORCE FEEDBACK: Yes
	RELEASED: 25 October 2000

Hands-On Preview

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Midtown Madness was much more than a great success. Even before Driver was released MM offered gamers high speed racing through the streets of a realistic city. Midtown Madness 2 offers more of the same, but now only better and more thrilling. Carmageddon was the first game where gamers were not limited by invisble walls. Unfortunaly the cities in Carmageddon 1 looked a little sad. Nobody cared because you were to busy with splatting pedestrians. Midtown Madness was the first game who gave us a good looking Chicago and drove through it with 160 km/h.

The madcap driving and racing excitement continues later this fall with Midtown Madness 2, developer Angel Studios choosed to use London and San Francisco as their victims. Eich city has been featured in other racing title but never with this much detail. Gamers who live in one of the two cities will see the detail on the landsmarks and the cities. San Franciso is great for jumping and looks very good too. The highway does have rounded exits, it will take you approximately 2,5 minutes with the Audi TT to drive from to the other side. And London is big fun, the crowd and the small streets makes it complete.

Crash Course
I started Midtown Madness 2 and right at the start it is looking good. The loading screen says: "No pedestrians were injured on the making of this game." Then I created a new driver and started the new mode, Crash Course. In SF Stunt Driving you need to do three missions, if you pass them you need to pass your midterm 1. There are three midterms and then the final. This mode is so much fun! Maybe a little to easy at amateur mode. After one day I only needed to do my final exam. Or you can choose to play as a London cab driver, which is a very challenging mode. The cab is hard to control and doesn't drive that fast.
The missions range from following a car too maintaining your speed through checkpoints. Or from destroying a car too jumping on boats.
Next to the Crash Course mode you have the good old Blitz, Checkpoint, Circuit and Cruise.

The cars and physics
You have 22 cars for your racing pleasure. From the Audi TT to the Firetruck. They all look really good, but the trafficcars are ugly. I expected more, the trafficcars still have one color, some have one color with a little texture on it and that's it. One cool thing is if you hit trafficcars good they can lose a wheel. Too bad this only works with parked trafficcars.
The physics are really, really good. A little bit arcadish but very good. Now you can make a powerslide which is really thrilling, make a 180 or a reverse 180. The reverse 180 is very difficult. In a crashcourse I had to make a reverse 180 and hit 2 checkpoints all in 20 seconds. I still can't make a reverse 180, so I drove the whole mission backwards and made it.

San Francisco
When Angel said you could drive on every rooftop they were damn right! Playing King of the Hill in San Franciso is no exception, you can go everywhere. The hills are huge, the air is gigantic. The city looks like real and on Civic Center you get a amazing overview of the city.

London
London is awesome, the crowded streets, the underground, Big Ben, everything is there! You can jump onto boats and from there jump on another one, use landmarks to make barrelrolls. When you play a long time San Franciso, they drive on the right side of the road, and then cruise through London, they drive on the wrong side of the road ;-), you are really confused.

Polished engine
An hour driving through San Francisco showed me that there's almost nothing changed. The usual polishing, the graphics have been improved, the two cities have more traffic and look really real. The cars shine more, the crashes are better. The cars have breakable parts now, spoilers, mirrors and bumpers are flying everywhere. Though I wasn't disappointed, after an hour you just love it to cruise free as a bird through the city and leave chaos behind you.
I experienced only one problem. I have a Pentium II 350, 128 mb RAM and a Voodoo 3 2000 AGP. After a while the framerate dropped down to 5 per second. In the readme they say you have to reboot then. This is very odd because the minimum specs are Pentium II 266, 32 mb RAM and 8 mb video card.

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