It’s Tuesday, and Tuesdays are for streaming over at twitch.tv/jalopnikdotcom, where the writers and editors that make Jalopnik emit that increasingly disconcerting clanking noise gather with you to hang out and chat over a typically forgotten racing game. Today’s subject: Midnight Club: Los Angeles, the last pure racer developed by Rockstar, the company that’s been rereleasing Grand Theft Auto V on every platform for the last decade.
Midnight Club was an exciting series in its heyday, taking a more improvisational approach to open-world street racing. Rather than connecting checkpoints in a linear path all racers were required to follow, it situated waypoints that you could reach however you liked, rewarding knowledge of the fastest route through the city. Some races even operated with unordered waypoints, leaving you to figure out the best strategy for hitting them all before the other drivers.
The series also had a keen eye for customization, and though it’s hard to put a finger on, these games just always felt more mature, hardcore and just plain cooler than their peers. Midnight Club was a convincing and attractive interpretation of street racing culture for the aughts, with a booming soundtrack that, sadly, you assuredly will not hear because of Twitch’s rules about that sort of thing. Be sure to fire up the Justice remix of MGMT’s ‘Electric Feel’ and Bloc Party’s ‘Mercury’ on your own for the full experience.
It’ll be a fun time, as our streams always are. So join myself, Steve Da Silva, Andy Kalmowitz, José Rodríguez Jr. and maybe even other unexpected guests at 4 p.m. ET at the Jalopnikdotcom Twitch. Be sure to pop in early, too, because once Steve and Andy start, they cannot stop themselves.