Review maeday 3/5 · Aug 20, 2022
Midnight Club 2: A Friendship Forged In Fast Cars
Midnight Club 2 is one of those weird outlier games I only ever played at a friends house and never owned outright myself. Hell, for the longest time I was unsure there even was a Midnight Club 1, for that matter. And I'm certainly not one for racing games really - outside of perhaps Cel Damage and the occasional Mario …
Midnight Club 2 is one of those weird outlier games I only ever played at a friends house and never owned outright myself. Hell, for the longest time I was unsure there even was a Midnight Club 1, for that matter. And I'm certainly not one for racing games really - outside of perhaps Cel Damage and the occasional Mario Kart - but the thing is, when I played Midnight Club 2, it was never about the racing.
Much like my time spent with Turok Evolution - which I've linked here for those who may not have read that write up - my time spent with Midnight Club 2 was never about the game and moreso about the person. This time, however, it was my friend Colton. And unlike my write up of our time spent playing Kung-Fu-Chaos and the weird way that related to our friendship in a negative way, this is different. This write up isn't sad, believe it or not. I know, what a change of pace!
Colton and I had one of those friendships where you could spend an entire weekend together and rarely speak. You just appreciated one anothers company. We'd watch marathons of cartoons in the living room, we'd surf the internet until the break of dawn and then sleep all day (or not at all, ah to be young) and, of course, we'd game nonstop. But the thing is, Midnight Club 2 was different from every other gaming excursion that we had, in so that we didn't play it correctly. See, instead of simply racing one another, we'd do our best to just play tag. We'd load up a map, load up our cars and then we'd chase one another around the city until we inevitably found one another and crashed into one another. Sometimes we'd dare eachother to do some sort of stunt jump, in places that didn't have stunt jumps, but otherwise it was nothing more than a tag crash and burn fest.
And there's no deeper meaning to this. There's no pseudo analysis stating "our friendship was combative and it manifested itself in strange ways", which, sure, could be true, but not in this case. Or at the very least, I'm ignoring it if it is, because this is just a good memory, and sometimes I'd like to have those.
I can remember really late nights in the summer, with the fans blasting on high, as we zipped around the city just trying to outchase and crash into one another. The aesthetic of this game, actually, is extremely pleasing. Brightly lit, very neon at times, and the soundtrack was pretty excellent too. We'd just talk about random stuff for hours, cracking joke after joke, as we zoomed around, trying to outdo one another. It is, perhaps, one of the only games I've ever played where I don't know what the actual plot is, and didn't even play the multiplayer correctly. And ya know what...I'm fine with that.
Colton and I played a lot of odd games together, ranging from the previously mentioned Kung-Fu-Chaos to the odd Xbox adaptation of Spy Vs Spy (more fun than you'd think, actually!), but Midnight Club 2 wasn't weird. It's actually about as straight forward and standard as they come. The weirdness came from our input into playing it wrong, or at least, how others would see it as wrong, but we saw it as right for us.
And really, that's how most of my life has been anyway. Doing everything the wrong way because it was what was right and worked for me. Friendships, career, whatever, you name it and I've done it all ass backwards because doing it the "right" way doesn't make sense to me.
I still don't play racing games really, nor do I have any interest to (again, outside the occasional Mario Kart), and Colton and I haven't talked in earnest in probably over a decade. He's married and has a daughter now. He has a real job. Today I woke up at 3pm and applauded my cat for killing a mouse. Despite our similarities in youth, we did not shape into the same kind of adults. I'm still doing everything the wrong way, despite being 33. But it's alright, because I have that one memory, that one nice memory of sitting in his bedroom late at night in the summer chasing after one another in Midnight Club 2.
I may be a car wreck in real life, but at least for one brief moment, I enjoyed it virtually.
My name is Maggie. I write & make art for a living. If you like this review, you might also like my newest novel here, reading my media blog here and you can tip me for my work at Ko-Fi.