Midnight Club 3 - Train Jump Race in snow w/Ghost Rider

UPDATE: A few viewers have requested info on how to get the "Ghost Rider." Here's what you do:

From main menu, select Options, then select Cheats, then input these codes:

getheadn = skull head
trythisathome = flaming head

Combine them with a biker who wears a leather jacket and a chopper to make your rider look kind of like Ghost Rider. You can find more codes like these at GameFaqs.com.

Please watch High Quality version! Playing one of my favorite Detroit races with the flame-headed Ghost Rider. Great use of "Zone" technique at 1:17 and 2:06.

I designed and refined the layout of this race in about a day at the request of my Producer who was looking for 3 or 4 really tight, fun races to debut at E3 that year. I wanted something not too lengthy because it would (hopefully) be played over & over again at E3. I also wanted it to give the player a good sense of speed without too many technical turns, but also provide a couple of good opportunities for them to utilize the new "zone" ability. And of course I wanted it to have at least one big "wow" moment, so that's where the Train Jump came from.

I set up an accident scene where the ambulances have laid out road flares which actually serve to guide the player towards the longbed tow truck, which actually serves as the ramp for the jump. Then I set it up so the player should always see the train passing by underneath them for even more dramatic effect. It's like a "Dukes of Hazzard" moment where the player is like, "Wow. I just launched over a speeding train!"

The race remained largely unchanged, except that the train jump actually used to take place right before the end of the race. I moved it to the middle because the pacing feels better that way and also because we finished a huge portion of our races in MC2 with jumps at the end and it was just starting to get a little cliche. Another reason is that jumps can be tricky sometimes and if the player screws it up in the middle of the race, they still have time to recover and win before the end.

With the jump in the middle, the race now feels like a nice haul at the beginning, leading up to the jump which (hopefully) makes you go "wow," and then a nice little sprint to the finish.

As a side note, a lot of people on the development team liked this race so much that they actually started a competition to see who could get the best time on it. We tracked our best times & vehicles on a whiteboard for months and it was amazing to see how many ways people could find to keep trimming seconds off of their time.

Another bit of trivia is that the visual effects programmer and I are big Ghost Rider fans, so we created a way for players to combine a couple of cheat codes to allow themselves to create a bike rider similar to the Ghost Rider. Of course, it works best when you use a chopper and one of the riders with the leather jacket outfit, but I didn't have either of those in the saved game file I used to create this video. =)

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• MC3
• Midnight
• Club
• DUB
• remix
• Rockstar
• PS2
• xbox
• illegal
• street
• racing
• driving
• game
• ghost
• rider
• tuner
• exotic
• chopper