Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition (Xbox)

Paint: There are a large number of checkpoints scattered about the track at the start of the race, all in a neutral colour. The objective is to race to any of these and tag them with your team’s colour. Previously tagged checkpoints can be stolen by repainting them and the first to colour a predetermined percent of the checkpoints wins.

Cruise: Explore the cities as you want with no hassles and no rules.

Frenzy: You have a timer that starts ticking down the moment the race starts, and you have to hit a never-ending series of checkpoints, if you hit other vehicles you slow down and that slim timer could run out. There’s a couple of catches: your vehicles special abilities and brakes are disabled – you can use the handbrake however – a further complication adds the biggest dose of fun, your nitrous fires the moment you start and then every 15 seconds after that – don’t let the timer run out and score as high as possible.

Ordered: An ordered race is a typical checkpoint, after checkpoint, ordered romp through the city: plain and simple.

Circuit: Just like an ordered race except you’re going around and around in a circuit, the choice for the traditional racer.

Tag: Another fun race type, giving you a checkpoint at the start of the race, burn to it as fast as you can because if you’re the last to the check, you’re IT. Other cars can score points by being in the zone around the IT car, for a certain time. If you hit another car, they become IT.

Unordered: There’s a load of checkpoints, no order, hit them all to win!

To make Arcade mode even more insane Rockstar have added Powerups to the game, which can be turned on or off at the race option screen, these little pickups can add a level of tactics and insanity to the game that would be lacking otherwise.

A couple of my favourites include:

Go: When hit by this discharge, the target’s brakes are disabled and they are given a top-speed boost, bye bye, uncontrollable car tearing off down the track, good for a few laughs.

Stop: Both brakes kick in, car grinds to a halt.

There are quite a few more to discover and experimenting on your friends/enemies is the best way to find out how effective they are.

Networking has been enabled, go online and play with friends or make enemies by using the game lobbies – couldn’t be simpler.