Midnight Race Club

Midnight Race Club II (I really don't know why that name is even in the game's title), the sequel to the brilliant 'Test Drive: Renegade' (yes, I know what you're thinking) is still hitting stores today. This is a racing game that, while not the most exciting title in the genre, has been hailed as a true masterpiece by critics and gamers alike. Take a look at our most anticipated racing title (Which Game is better? Let's take a look...about... it?) to get a sense of why the game was so impressive in the end, and find out what it's really like to drive a car on the loose in a race.

On the graphics front, Midnight Race Club II has an interesting new look that's helped distinguish it from its predecessors. It's pretty clear what's going on in the game, with enormous crowds of spectators all over the place, along with bigger and more realistic tracks, as you see fit. And it looks pretty good. You'll notice the game's slick physics engine in places, and everything from the wind up in the environment to the sun's glare and shadows make it all look really impressive.

Racing games continue to be a significant part of the Nintendo DS's online marketplace, with quite a few titles now embracing the system's online capability. And considering the popularity of arcade-style games in Europe and Japan, and the fact that people in other parts of the world are still holding hands in a small room, Midnight Race Club II may well be one of the first online games to do so.

We had the opportunity to play one of the single-player levels of the game for a brief test-drive, which was a race on a track suspended in midair. The interesting part is that the race was controlled through the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection, so you don't need to be connected to the Internet to play the game. While playing, you can try to beat your friends on the same system, and the race even looked like it was going to be an interesting test for how much you really want to spend on the game.

Next up was an impressive battle scene against a wide variety of cars and lots of rubber, which quickly got a bit serious.

Midnight Race suffers from one major problem with its frame rate: The character models were pretty smooth. Each car had a particular style of animation that helped make them stand out, but the computer-generated character models weren't very detailed, and the sound effects were pretty lackluster. Midnight Race is certainly not a racing game for the Nintendo 64, but it's certainly a cool racing game for the N64.

The final game on the list of many racing games is 1080 Snowboarding, a realistic snowboarding game that features a wide variety of tracks, rails, and pretty much all the manner of licensed music and characters you could want. While the action wasn't exactly a ton of fun to watch, the game does offer a nice dose of thrills for the action. The track design is pretty insane, as you can see from the cinematic in the first trailer. The snowboarding sections consist of twisting and turning rails and bottomless grinds, which adds a nice little extra layer of difficulty to the action. The character models are also quite detailed, which helps keep the gameplay and look pretty solid. The sound effects are very good, though they get a little repetitive as you try to take your boarder from the boarder to the boarding heap.

The GameCube is likely to be the system to go for when playing the first few N64 games, especially if you have a friend willing to trade it in to play the game. The online play is robust and will be playable with a single game.

The game looks fairly run-of-the-mill, with a great visual presentation that moves smoothly and sounds pretty darn solid. The control is pretty solid, and it should be easy for the player to jump into online matches, and the online play is pretty good. The game will have two levels, as well as the ability to create and download ghost laps. In terms of content, the game is fairly simple, and it includes all the modes you would expect to see in a game based on the N64 game. In addition, it features tons of bonus stuff, including four minigames (Manual, Hide-and-Seek, and Blind Time), four ghost laps, a card game, and an online map. It even has a museum mode to view and show off the special goodies that you can earn on the map.

So how much will it cost you? It's $49.99. Look for the game to ship in North America on November 21.

In development for the GameCube, Mario Kart: Double Dash!! (the sequel to the N64 game Mario Kart 64) is being developed by Nintendo and Monolith Soft, who have handled Mario Kart titles on the GameCube before.