'Madness' behind the wheel

By Peter Eley

Midtown Madness

****

Microsoft

PC

Forget the title - this is Flight Simulator on wheels rather than a Monster Truck Madness clone.

Midtown Madness puts you in charge of a car - VW's new Beetle is the default - in downtown Chicago and you get to, well, drive around.

There's more to it than that, of course. You can race if you feel the need to burn rubber or even play cops and robbers on-line.

But Midtown Madness differs from the present traffic jam of car games in the fact that it simulates urban driving in an actual city.

That's the real fun. It's quite a buzz to drive along the Lake Michigan waterfront or past world-famous landmarks like the Sears Tower and Daly Plaza.

The racing option seems almost unnecessary and Midtown Madness could be any one of a dozen or more games in this mode.

Cruising downtown is a different story. The downtown area has about 65km of roads and you can take any route you like.

It's just like real driving, with lanes, one-way streets, traffic lights and a police force to contend with - and don't forget that Americans drive on the right.

The Beetle seemed suited to urban cruising.

It's small by American standards although its two-litre, 115kw engine lets you lay down rubber at traffic lights - quite unlike the original Beetle.

And there are other cars to drive including a souped-up police car, a luxury Cadillac and, perhaps the most challenging, a city bus.

A full-scale simulation of Chicago would be a huge undertaking in terms of 3D modelling and the resources required to run it.

Microsoft has cheated a bit by just cutting and pasting many buildings, which give parts of this computerised Chicago a rather monotonous feel.

It still puts a real strain on the system - the animation was slightly jerky on a Pentium 11 266 with a 4Mb video card and 64Mb Ram although Microsoft says it will run on a Pentium 166 with 16Mb of Ram.


* * *


Last week's column made the point that you can get a console system and plenty of extras for the price of a PC 3Dfx accelerator, which is becoming increasingly important to run many games at their best.

A couple of correspondents point out that since Voodoo 3 cards were introduced, Voodoo 2 cards have come down to around $150.

The cheaper cards tend to have 12Mb Ram rather than 16Mb but they will still give games a significant performance boost.

Voodoo 3, of course, is awesome but the price tag starts at around $500.

* Send your comments e-mail to peter_eley@herald.co.nz