Midnight Club: Retirement Village

Oops, I mean Midnight Club: Los Angeles. But seriously, this is one of the most frustrating and ungodly-difficult games I have ever played and will have you driving like a senior in no time. Police feature in this game, and they are the most ridiculous police in the world. Oh, you want to drive through a mall carpark? Sorry, that's reckless driving. Oh, you pulled over and parked to accept your ticket because they saw you speeding? Nope, sorry, apparently you're running away and they have to give chase and come at you with guns and fine you well into quad-digits. The retarded addition of the police to the Midnight series will have you so paranoid of getting arrested and being fined into owing them cash that you'll be driving leagues under the speed limit - but you'd probably get arrested for that as well.

But that's just the half of it. Missions are ordered into 4 difficulties - green, yellow, orange and red (not hard to guess which are harder). So, despite starting with rubbish cars, you blitz through green missions. The going is slow, but through desperate saving and upping ranks you can finally afford non-crap cars. You buy the fastest/best handling car you can, gear up for a yellow mission (the next difficulty up) and upon beginning the race are left in a wake of smoke as your opponent ploughs ahead of you through the traffic, past cop cars, leaving you to plod along after them. At this point, I thought the game was impossible.

So, being the lazy man I am I proceeded to download a saved file, with everything unlocked, off the internet. I copied it to my PS3 and I was off. I bought one of the best, most expensive cars in the game and upgraded it as far as possible. Now, truly geared up for a yellow mission, I sought out my nearest one. Now, geared up with not only one of the fastest, but also one of the best-handling cars in the game, I truly felt prepared. The race began, and I was left in a wake of smoke as my opponent ploughed ahead of me through the traffic, past cop cars, leaving me to plod along after them. My girlfriend, who is a bit of a Midnight Club pro, even admitted that I was certainly not going slow: I only stopped accelerating for brief milliseconds at a time to aid with turning into corners. My suspicions were confirmed.

Okay, so for the non-experienced driver, this game is a TOTAL nightmare. But I never said it wasn't fun. I've never had as much of an adrenaline rush in a game as I had evading police through winding hill roads in a crappy Datsun z-car. The customisation possibilities in this game are incredible, and really allow your car to be your very own. So, if you are patient and can deal with any frustrating situations games can throw at you, this is well worth checking out. Personally, I'm just not going to bother with playing the game properly and continue to exploit the saved file I downloaded.