You've read gripes that this or that is underpowered, and that we're already seeing the highest heights that the system will hit with the launch games because bottlenecks clip its wings. Oh, but tire tracks don't stay long in the PSP version -- a true bummer when you feel like spinning some donuts.

It doesn't help that the sound effects are really milky on PSP, and provide little punch in the crashes or stunt effects. This site makes no claim to Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition, its characters, screenshots, artwork, music, or any intellectual property contained within. Like previous installments in the series, the game is an arcade-style racer and focuses on wild, high-speed racing, rather than realistic physics and driving. Players race through open world recreations of San Diego, Atlanta, and Detroit listening to 98 (124 in the Remix version) licensed music tracks that include hip hop, rock, and other genres. If you tried holding your breath for as long as it took to load up a race in this game, you might keel over.After defeating all racers and tournaments in San Diego, the player is introduced to Vince ( Kiff VandenHeuvel), a mechanic from Detroit.

If Rockstar's Leeds studio could have gotten this game to run entirely inside the PSP's racing engine (to be fair, the Xbox/PS2 games also required loading in between races .The racing is superb, there’s an obscene amount of customization options for every ride, and the graphics are some of the best on the PSP. And all that cool car mod work that driving aficionados love Midnight Club for, it's weighed down by loading as well. Neons are not as prominent as they are in EA's game (but they're also not as silly in their exaggerated glow effect), and rims spin into a blur instead of slowly ramping up and then spinning backwards stroboscopicly, but the parts and effects are all there, Even logos are incredibly sharp (I never expected the Dodge Ram to look like a ram in a tiny rear window sticker, but there it was), and if you get up close enough to a car, you can see some of the finer polygonal detail (such as the taillight lamps being modeled lights and not just textures) at work. And while I'm no tech expert, a few experiments with the game engine show that a much better game could have been plenty possible, if only the game had been given more time and a more focused approach to the port. Assuming that in-between time isn't counted in that figure, and figuring an average of 15 minutes between reloads (saying that sometimes you have to spend a good deal of time racing one opponent in one race, but other times, you blow by the competition in two or three minutes), that means that those minute-long loads added up to an entire hour this weekend of just waiting to play this game.

Hydraulics are still available for bouncing, and the more useful weight shifting is also on the layout. They should be playable anytime you're on the road, and the portable experience of playing when you have a free moment is one of the main attractions of having games to go.A minute-long wait would have been irritating, but if everything else played right there in the game without loading, it'd be a great bus-trip game.