YMMV / Midnight Club

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Most players would think of the Zender brand in the first game as yet another fictional brand made up for that game, but it actually existed in real life back in the 90s. The Alpha and Beta vehicles are almost an exact replica of the Zender Fact 4.
• Awesome Music: It has its own page here.
• Best Level Ever: Midnight Club 3's "Big Air" in Atlanta. A fast paced track that still takes you across a good portion of the city thanks to, as the title suggests, two massive jumps that throw you over rooftops. Add in some space for drifting and you have a highly memorable track.
• Breather Boss: The second act of LA Remix has Yamagata acting as one, considering that both cities in the game had races that were based on difficulty. But despite this, Yamagata is so easy to beat on anyone's first try.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The police. In earlier games, they merely rammed you around and impeded your race progress, but in LA they can actually bring you to a stop and take you out of the race by placing the Player Character under arrest. They're also incredibly persistent, potentially able to track you even when you're so far away from them you can't see them on the minimap.
  • In DUB Edition REMIX, certain cars driven by the AI, such as the Gemballa GT 750 (if you drive slower cars) and the Lamborghini Diablo VT (if you drive a fully upgraded C Class car like the Supra) would ruin your day, as they'll easily get past you, no matter how well you drive.
• Fridge Brilliance: The first two games take the Brand X route for vehicle names. In the first game, the Jones J-series pickups are based on the Ford F-series pickup. This is a stealth Shout-Out as this isn't the first time a Ford has "played" a Jones.
• Game-Breaker: The Kawasaki ZX-14 is unlocked when you reach Champion rank. Fully modified, it will blow the doors off many A-class exotics for between half and one-tenth of the price, depending on your choice of comparison. It can make short work of the difficult AI (see Nintendo Hard below). The South Central Pack (which is included in the Complete Edition) also has the Ducati 1098, which is slightly cheaper and even faster stock. Combine either of those with Level 3 Agro and they're almost unstoppable.
  • The Roar ability in Dub Edition. Not only does it cause traffic to move out of the way, but it also causes the rival cars to swerve and fishtail like crazy. Using this when the rival is about to make a sharp turn, is going off of a jump, or is about to go down a narrow passageway can quickly turn the tide of the race in your favor.
  • The first game has the London Police Car. Maxed out speed, great acceleration and handling, and very durable means races are very easy. The only caveat is that it's only available in the arcade mode, and has to be unlocked in a difficult race.
    • Before that was the Ascent 470ds. It, too, has great stats though not as great as the London Police Car. It proved to be very handy against the remaining London competitors and the World Champion.
• Goddamned Traffic: There is nothing more aggravating than having a clear shot at the finish line only to have your run rudely interrupted by a hapless AI computer. Which is why Rockstar made Aggro and Roar.
• Good Bad Bugs: The ability to "Fish tail" in Midnight Club 2 can allow the player to reach ridiculous speed and being a very useful ability when beating bosses like Savo. Sadly, this got fixed in Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition and Los Angeles, in order to prevent the players from "cheating".
• Memetic Mutation: Midnight Club still cancelled soz. ^Explanation Originating from one of the videos by YouTuber Theo "BlackPanthaa" Thomas, this quote has turned into a recurring meme among the fanbase while serving as a potshot directed at Rockstar Games for permanently shelving the series while focusing on Grand Theft Auto V and Online. (Ironically, it would also be used on BlackPanthaa himself after he started a Midnight Club LA playthrough series only to abandon it.
• Nightmare Fuel: The sounds when certain powerups are in use, such as the Disruptor in Los Angeles, and Roar in L.A Remix (less so in DUB Edition). However, despite this, the Disruptor powerup sounds like it could be in a horror movie.
• Nintendo Hard: To say that these games are tough is putting it nicely.
  • Midnight Club II, good gravy, Midnight Club II. The game spares no expense in giving you a challenge not even an hour after you start the game. And it shows no signs of easing up on you once you get to Paris after beating Dice, either.
  • Midnight Club: Los Angeles is considered second only to F-Zero GX in the Nintendo Hard racing game pantheon. The combination of (allegedly) unstoppable AI opponents, impossible-to-shake police chases, heavy, hard-to-dodge traffic, and the where-the-hell-am-I-going nature of the open-world races is enough to frustrate most gamers, even with a well-timed EMP or Roar attack to knock out the competition. Kotaku actually went so far as to call it "a Ninja Gaiden caliber challenge". Rockstar later patched the game to soften the difficulty curve in the early parts of the game. This patch is also integrated into the Complete Edition along with the South Central expansion and associated DLC.
  • Also, despite being called Midnight Club, the game works on a 24 hour-like clock, which means that means half of the time, you will be racing during the day. Hilariously, it is impossible to see traffic coming at you during the day (as half the cars blend into the road itself), but quite easy to see them at night (when their headlights and taillights are among the few things you can see on the road). Furthermore, LA slows down time to show your car spinning out of control as the AI races past you. Therefore, only race at night, stay close to the center of the map, and use the zone skill to keep your speed on turns, and you might just beat the game while only pressing the restart button 1500 times.
  • If "Rubberband AI" was in the dictionary, this game would be a listed example. Winning by milliseconds is the norm. After you cross the finish line, the others racers jump across it like they were waiting just off screen. If you screw up anywhere, you will go from first place to last before you can blink and be left in the dust for the rest of the race.
  • In the first game, many people found chasing down the drivers to get the option of doing the race harder than the actual race.
  • To give another example of how Nintendo Hard effects players, if you search this game you'll see references to people preferring to play the game in Race Editor mode where the game just lets you drive around and not actually compete.
  • Complaints over the game's difficulty led to Rockstar taking the unprecedented step of issuing a patch to make the game (allegedly) easier.
  • Even those used to the game remark on the sometimes-impossible (as in actually physically impossible as in "even driving with nitro on all the time there isn't enough time to cross the map") nature of the car-delivery side missions.
    • However at the same time the game actually averts the trope because, reportedly, if the player loses enough races, missions, etc. the game actually scales down the difficulty somewhat. As a result, if you (intentionally or not) lose enough races, but still at least complete the races - as opposed to restarting a race every time you wipe out and the enemy AI gets an insurmountable lead - the game is, in theory, supposed to actually become easier.
• Porting Disaster: The Game Boy Advance version of the first game is an absolute trainwreck compared to the original PlayStation 2 release. The licensed soundtrack by Surgeon and Dom & Roland were swapped out with awful, ear-bleedingly loud chiptune renditions, the HUD is painfully minimalistic which makes it difficult to reach a nearby checkpoint if you don't know where to go and difficulty spike is so frustrating that it can give Mario Kart's Rubberband AI a run for its money.
  • Downplayed with the PlayStation Portable port of 3: DUB Edition. While it misses a handful of features such as Race Editor and suffering a bit from framerate issues, it remains faithful to the PS2 and Xbox version while retaining almost every single content (and adds some exclusive licensed music which isn't present in other versions including the Updated Re-release DUB Edition Remix). Overall, it's impressive by handheld standards compared to other games that were released on the PSP, for example, Need for Speed: Most Wanted.
  • Los Angeles Remix for PSP is a bit more of an example compared to the former mainly due to Rockstar London struggling to include as much content as possible despite the UMD (and hardware) limitations. Though the majority of content from the base game is still present, it recycles the Los Angeles map from Midnight Club 2 (though with some reworks added such as additional shortcuts) and the career has been truncated to the point where it can be beaten in a few hours. The worst part is that the cutscenes were entirely omitted, making the plot much weaker than in the original and a chunk of cars cannot be used depending on which map you're playing. As compensation, Tokyo (returning from DUB Edition Remix) was added in addition to an exclusive career (and new rivals to race) and the Audi R8 (which was Rockstar Social Club-exclusive and can no longer be obtained through normal means of gameplay in the original) is given for free of charge after beating Booke.
• Retroactive Recognition: Would you have known Thomas Bangalter was one half of Daft Punk before his contribution in II's soundtrack?
• That One Level: A couple of races in the series can qualify as such, and even Midnight Club 3 is known for being the hardest game of the series, thanks to its cheating AI. Other examples of this include a few of the unordered races in II, especially Haley's first race and Savo's third race.
  • Unordered Races in general can be a right pain in the ass if you don't know the map like the back of your hand and/or have a terrible sense of direction (i.e., you can't stop looking at the map). Pair that with the overall brutal difficulty, and you'll stop counting the number of restarts made well after you surpassed double digits.
  • As for a particular city, Paris in II is often singled out as the hardest city in that game to race in. On account of all the congested routes, abundance of jumps that can make or break you in the most difficult of races, and its sheer amount of traffic that makes even Los Angeles blush.
• Unexpected Character: The Remix version of 3 features the 1966 Cadillac Coupe De Ville and 1967 Cadillac Eldorado in the muscle car category. While both cars are highly regarded by classic car enthusiasts, neither of them are usually considered muscle cars.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • Released in October of 2000, New York includes the World Trade Center. You can drive at the base of the towers and around The Sphere sculpture. Less than one year later that area of the game would be a relic of a time gone by.
  • The third game subscribes heavily to the Rice Burner culture that emerged thanks to the success of The Fast and the Furious, and the customisation options have aged poorly as a result. The customisation in Los Angeles is generally far more tasteful as a result of the culture's decline.

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