Rockstar is another company busy producing games for PS2. The first of their games for the system will be Midnight Club: Street Racing. The idea of the game is pretty cool. Different clubs compete against each other by buying and racing souped up cars around the city streets. This is all illegal of course. Its sort of like an underground thing these clubs got going and you are one of the thugs behind the wheel.

What were going to get here is a super fast paced arcade style racing engine where players must race through city streets at night while avoiding oncoming traffic and of course, passing slow moving rust buckets. There will be all sorts of secret shortcuts to find as well so some exploration is required. To win youll not only have to beat your rival drivers but youll have to beat it through all the traffic and pedestrians strewn all over the place. Afterall, you are racing in a city, so perfecting your driving skills will be essential. The better you do, the more cars youll win, up to a total of 17. The cars will have many customizable features but not much information has been given on that part of the game. There will be a number of cities to race in but only New York has been shown so far.

The environments in which players will race in are true to real life models of the actual city streets. From the screenshots Ive seen so far, the environments are very well detailed with signs, lights and familiar landmarks. The graphics so far look quite crisp and the textures appear to be very realistic as well with a good shiny effect on the vehicles. The smoke effect on tires however, seems a bit exaggerated and overused thus far. Hopefully more variety of effects will be used in the final game like sparks and car damage. Even though Midnight Club has great potential to be an impressive looking racer, the textures at this point are a bit on the sloppy side and you can see creases where two separate ones come together. These flaws will have to be worked out first before the game starts to look really impressive.

A multiplayer mode is planned but there is no info on it yet. It would be nice to see Angel Studios really harness the power of the PS2 and pile loads of cars onto those city streets because it would greatly enhance the feeling of being in that kind of environment. But it is a necessity that they keep frame rates high because this game is designed to play at breakneck speeds with powerslides and big jumps so if they can handle this then we should be looking at a real fun racer by this Fall.