I know it's not exactly underrated, but I'm always happy to see these games mentioned because they were my jam back in the day. I'm not the kind of person who enjoys grinding in games but somehow I could play those campaign races over and over to the point I have the other racers' dialogue burned into my memory. Lately people in Japan have been uploading clips from an arcade game with a similar name (Midnight Coast) and I don't know if it's related but I want to get into that one.
I really liked the midnight club series. Specifically 2 and LA because they, unlike most other companies, kept adding great things each time, while refining what made the previous one so good. That started to get rare to find in games when a lot of them felt like more of the same around that time. It didn't matter if the other guy's game wasn't even in the genre, if they did something cool, and the game was popular, it had to be in every other game.
To stay relatively on topic, you'll notice that a ton of the elements in Midnight Club: LA got absorbed into GTA:V The ability to slow down time became Franklin's driving special move. The transitional map move thing that would begin races became the loading screen for GTA:V when you switched characters or began playing the game.
I know it's not exactly underrated, but I'm always happy to see these games mentioned because they were my jam back in the day. I'm not the kind of person who enjoys grinding in games but somehow I could play those campaign races over and over to the point I have the other racers' dialogue burned into my memory. Lately people in Japan have been uploading clips from an arcade game with a similar name (Midnight Coast) and I don't know if it's related but I want to get into that one.
I really liked the midnight club series. Specifically 2 and LA because they, unlike most other companies, kept adding great things each time, while refining what made the previous one so good. That started to get rare to find in games when a lot of them felt like more of the same around that time. It didn't matter if the other guy's game wasn't even in the genre, if they did something cool, and the game was popular, it had to be in every other game.
To stay relatively on topic, you'll notice that a ton of the elements in Midnight Club: LA got absorbed into GTA:V The ability to slow down time became Franklin's driving special move. The transitional map move thing that would begin races became the loading screen for GTA:V when you switched characters or began playing the game.