Midtown Madness Download
Midtown Madness 1 Free Download PC Game For Windows. It is a racing game with Different weathers like rain, snowfall and bright sunshine.
Midtown Madness 1 Overview
Midtown Madness 1 is a racing game that has been developed by Angel Studios which is now known as Rockstar San Diego and is published by Microsoft. The game has been set in the city of Chicago and the main objective of this game is to race and win and after winning you will get an access on the steering wheel of new vehicles. For more thrilling racing experience you can also download Need for Speed Shift 2 Unleashed PC Game.
Game Play
You know, one of my favorite videogame genres is the racing game. And one of my favorite things to happento the genre is the addition of the open world. So today I'd like to take a look at oneof the earliest games that I remember to add those two things together. Microsoft Midtown Madness: Chicago Edition, developed by Angel Studios and published by Microsoft in 1999 for Windows PCs. Of course, this wasn't the first openworld racing game by any means. You had games like Spectrum HoloByte's Vette! doing similar things back in 1989, for instance. But this was the first game ofits type I'd seen at the time and it was nothing short of mind-blowing to me. "Say Goodbye To Gridlock." "Run every stop sign," "drive the wrong way." "Now that's racin' Chicago style!" And having actually driven aroundChicagoland on several occasions, I can say that's not just racing Chicago style, but driving Chicago style, in general. Inside the box, you get the game on a very blue CD-ROM, and a jewel case booklet, which contains some basic information about the game, though the meat of the info isincluded on-disc as a help file. It also has a small map of thecity in the center of the booklet, but the in-game map is far more useful, so if you're referring to this duringgameplay, you're doing it wrong. Typically, I'd start off by showing thegame's startup sequence at this point. But I've just gotta mention theinstallation here, because it's awesome. Instead of a typical status bar, you get to see a Panoz Roadster being painted while other vehicles of the gamedrive by in the foreground.
Seriously, whatever happened to creative installers? I could do a whole video on these. Maybe I will, but for now, Midtown Madness begins withsome logos and a splash screen. followed by the main menu, and one of several awesomeand funky tunes in the game. [funk music] From here, you can choose from three modes: Quick Race, Single Player and Multiplayer, as well as change the optionsand view any saved race records. The options are pretty standard, but I like going back and looking at the graphics options and remember how much ofa bragging right it used to be to be able to turn up everything to the max and still have this game run well. Mmm... AGP textures, reflections and clip distance sliders. Oh, yeaaahhh... Choosing Quick Race does what you'd expect. It drops you into a race as quickly as possible, only letting you select a car and its settings. But if you want to get the full experience, go to Single Player straightaway. Here you create a driver profileand choose your difficulty, then select from four different race types: Cruise, Blitz Race, Checkpoint Race and Circuit Race. It's a good idea to start off withCruise to get your bearings first, and all modes take place on the same map of Chicago. Though with the game being subtitled "Chicago Edition," and there being a button for race locales, you'd think there would be more places to drive, like through an expansion or something. But unfortunately there were no such packs or downloads officially releasedfor the game that added any. Anyway, you still have Chicago and you have the option to changefive parameters in races that support it: time of day, weather, and the densitiesof traffic vehicles, pedestrians and cops. On the next page, you're given the optionto choose from the game's ten vehicles, and these vary from city buses to muscle cars to the Panoz GTR-1 racecar and then-new Volkswagen Beetle. Each of them have their expectedstrengths and weaknesses, as shown by their status bars, and only a handful of them are unlocked at first. You gotta play more races to get more stuff. You can even look at showcases for each car, just in case you want moreinformation on things that don't matter as far as gameplay goes. And you can also adjust the physics realism, which is insanely useful, as you'll see shortly. NARRATOR:Get ready to take a cruise t'rough da Windy City! See all the sights o' da beautiful city o' Chicago... LGR:Ah, yes, the game has a narrator that chimes in every so often voiced by Marty Lennartz, a DJ for Chicago's 93.1 WXRT rock radio station. But for the most part, it's just you,the car and the Chicago Loop. And, yes, the game takes place primarilyin the city's central business district, as well as a few surrounding areason both sides of the Chicago River.
From a basic approximation of I-90/I-94 to the west, to a basic approximation ofLake Shore Drive to the east. You've got several notable landmarks to explore, like Navy Pier, the Field Museum, Wrigley Field, Soldier Field, [LGR, distant]Daaaa Bears... the Sears Tower, and on and on. If you're pretty familiar with the city, though, you'll note that the map isn't exactly to scale and is missing quite a few streets. Another thing is that the Loop looks a lot brighter and... well, less cluttered than the real deal, though that's just to be expecteddue to late-'90s hardware restrictions. And finally, some things arejust changed around completely. For example, the Picasso sculptureis nowhere to be found in Daley Plaza on West Washington Street. Instead, you have Calder's Flamingo there, which in real life is found a fewblocks south on West Adams. So it takes some creative libertieswith the layout of the Loop, presumably for the purposes of gameplay,performance optimization and artistic license. And being from 1999,you have some timepieces to explore, like the lack of Millennium Park within Grant Park, and the existence of the now-demolishedMeigs Field Airport south of Adler Planetarium. That's the aesthetics and whatnot.As for the gameplay itself? Well, let's just say having the word"madness" in the title was no accident.
Of all the Microsoft games to carry the Madness suffix, this is easily the most deservingdue to the sheer chaos you can cause. Smash into cars, run from the cops, destroy all sorts of public property, jump the drawbridges while they're up, play chicken with airplanes on the runway, crash through glass windows, and try your best to run over pedestrians, even though you can't and that always annoyed me. Some other maniacal aspects of the game are the physics and car handling, and, yeah, these aren't exactly positive. Remember that Physics Realism slider from earlier? In theory, it represents the range ofphysics from arcade to simulation, but that's just not the case. In cruise mode, it's not such a big deal, but in the actual races whereyou're trying to unlock new cars, it's a real pain sometimes. Each of the vehicles have their own physics models, so the slider affects them differently and it's not always good. I mean, seriously, what the heck is this? Other times it affects them TOO much and you end up with either mad oversteer or mad understeer.
It's made especially worse by playing with a keyboard, since the game simulates turningthe wheel all the way around the longer you hold a direction. Maybe that's why the game actuallydefaults to the mouse or a joystick, since you NEED an analogcontroller to get the most from it, preferably a racing wheel. That's not to say it sucks, though, since I certainly got used to it back in the day and still have a lot of fun with it now. And although I spend most of my time in Cruise mode, the other race types provide all sorts of challenges for when that inevitably gets boring. Blitz Race is a straight-uppoint-to-point dash across town with several checkpoints along the way and a very stingy time limit. Checkpoint Races are interesting inthat you don't have any set route to take. You're given a number of checkpoints to pass through and a bunch of opponents to race against, but it's a total free-for-all,as far as reaching them, and whoever gets them all first wins. And Circuit Races are your straightforwardraces around a pre-determined circuit, laid out in various places around Chicago with barriers blocking off the track. One thing to keep in mind throughout all this is that there's a damage modelwhich varies for each car, so it's entirely possible to damage out of a race and either lose by defaultor get hit with a time penalty.
Combine that with the silliness of the physics and the chaotic nature of the AI, and you've got a racing gamethat is just as UNpredictable as the Cubs' World Series potential IS predictable. This extended to the multiplayer as well, and you can play via all the mainconnection options of the day. The big draw here was that you couldalso play Cops & Robbers mode, in addition to the regular race types. Play as either a cop or a robberwith a car filled with gold and try to get away while theother tries to take you down. And while I thought all of this was great in 1999, I must admit it hasn't aged very well in many ways. Unlike some genres, racing games have come a long wayin their replayability and their options, and this feels pretty simplistic in comparison. That said, it was insanely special to me back in the day, not only because of the gameplayand the open world aspect, but because Chicago. There's just something about the place,and there always has been for me. being able to explore it virtually beforevisiting it in real life was just awesome. I spent countless hours memorizingthe streets and landmarks in this game just because I was enthralled with the city. And, yes, also because I could tear throughit in a sports car at 150 miles an hour, but largely because it was just a special place to me. And finally, I'd be remiss not to mention some of the other things that made the game special, like cheat codes.
'Cause, man, I just miss silly cheat codes and Midtown Madness has plenty. Nothing like going around in a utility van or an airliner with low gravity, almost no friction, giant pedestrians, shooting mailboxes at everythingand UFOs flying through the air. And as if the game wasn't ridiculouslyfilled with ridiculousness enough, you could also mod the game. Very easily. There were countless mods for it, allowing you to add new vehicles, new features, and even new locations to the game by simply dropping a few filesinto the base installation directory. You could go as realistic or asfantastical as you could dream up, with things as inappropriate as amonster truck roaming throughout the city, to something as fictional yet appropriate as the Blues Brothers' Dodge Monaco.
Oh, yeah, a game where you cancrash through the mall in that thing is only the best thing ever, as far as I'm concerned. ELWOOD [on megaphone]:"The fabulous... Blues Brothers!" "Rhythm and blues revue!" And that's pretty much it for Midtown Madness. It was a gorgeous game back in 1999, it played pretty well, it had a huge map for the time, it had a great modding community, and due to its real-world setting,it stood out from the crowd. While it may not hold a candle toopen world racing games of today, for its time it was an absolute blast to play. It was quite the success as well, earning two sequels, and also allowing Angel Studios to go on and develop the Midnight Club racing game series, eventually leading to thembecoming Rockstar San Diego. There's a good reason this game is fondly remembered by many PC gamers nowadays, and good reason why I still goback to play it every so often.
It's just freakin' fun. And with the exception of a few other games like Driver, it really existed in a league of its own. It's a shame it's so difficult to getrunning properly on modern hardware, especially if you want to use 3D acceleration. But I'd still highly recommendgrabbing a copy if you run across it, as it's worth a look, even if it'skind of a pain to get working. Now, if you'll excuse me, [Chicago accent]there's some fantastic Polishsausages with my name on 'em. If you enjoyed this video and would like to see some more videos on things like this, and not quite like this at all, why not click some of thesethings to see some of them? And check me out on Twitter and Facebook, and support me on Patreon if you want to, and a bunch of that cool stuff,too, 'cause it's all there.
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