Since the gameplay is identical to the PS2 version, I’ll spare you the full overview and instead suggest you take a look at our PS2 review. But I will give you a quick run down to get you started and give you a reason to check out the PS2 review.

Midnight Club II (MC2) is based upon Rockstar’s previous street racing outing, Midnight Club, which debuted on the PS2 in 2001. Like the original, MC2 puts you in the driver’s seat of some of the most tricked-out street racers around. While the vehicles are unlicensed fantasy cars, they are widely varied, with distinct designs and physics. Also, where most racers limit you to cars, MC2 lets you saddle up on some of the baddest motorbikes around. The bikes are great fun, but just like the rest of the vehicles in the game, they enjoy very realistic physics, which can make for some dangerous driving when you’re doing 120 mph in the rain and need to cut a sharp turn.

The physics in MC2 are what make it one of the best racers you'll find on the Xbox. Whereas other racers are slip-sliding arcade action titles, Rockstar took a realistic physics engine and wrapped an arcade-style racer around it. Cars can jump through the air, ride on two wheels and blast away with NOS-powered turbo boosts, yet they are still bound to the laws of physics. A car can go on two wheels to squeeze through a tight space, but it can only do so for a very brief time. If you’re driving a light vehicle, you’ll pop up onto two wheels quickly, but the two-wheeling fun can end equally quickly in a rollover. A heavy car, on the other hand, takes a bit longer to tilt, yet will hold the position far longer.

Because MC2 has a heavy arcade racing bent, there are some ridiculous jumps sprinkled throughout the levels (the aqueducts in L.A. are a prime example), which also force you to take into account the weight of your car, its current velocity and just how high the takeoff ramp is. If you’re like me, and you enjoy a good handbrake-induced powerslide, you’ll be overjoyed to know that each car handles powerslides differently according to their curb weight and overall mass, and a rain slickened street will send the unskilled power-slider careening into buildings and other cars.

The gameplay is simple to pick up and impossible to put down. In MC2, you’ll race through L.A., Tokyo and Paris, challenging the local yokels and the best drivers each city has to offer. When you start out, you’re forced to drive around a city looking for competition. Once you find an AI driver, you flash your lights and the race is on. The AI in Midnight Club II is outstanding, with the opposing drivers behaving like real players, from the obvious rookie slamming into every wall to the uber-pro who’ll smoke you twice over and never even hit the NOS. For the easily frustrated, Rockstar was kind enough to throw in a cheat-code option, which lets you dumb down the AI so you can unlock more cars more quickly, a necessary evil if you hope to play online.

Unlike the recently released Midtown Madness 3 from Microsoft, which unlocks all vehicles the minute you go online, MC2 forces you to race through all the levels to unlock various skills (i.e. two-wheel driving) and vehicles. It can get frustrating to go online and find everyone is racing with the supercars while you’re still piddling around with early vehicles from L.A. So, I must admit, I’ve cheated a few times with the AI to unlock a few cars. But hey, I earned the right, since I finished the PS2 version on the standard difficulty! If you’re a glutton for punishment, you can also increase the AI’s skill, which makes the game completely insane to play as the AI uses everything at its disposal to dust you off.

The greatest advantage of MC2 over most other Xbox racers is the addition of Live support. The online races have no noticeable lag, and the only real problem is the lobby system, which was directly ported from the PS2 version. Instead of a simple lobby interface, you have to use the D-pad to perform some finger-twisting moves to get through all the online menus, and you’ll often be reduced to screaming fits as you dig through the menus in hopes of finding your Friends list.

On a standard TV MC2 looks just like it does on Sony’s console, minus the PS2’s trademark "jaggies." Other than that, you really won’t notice much of a difference between the graphics on both platforms. Cars are smooth and reflective, the streets vary in detail from cobblestone to pavement, and the environments look nice but still scream "PS2 port." If, however, you’ve got a 480p-capable television, you’ll be treated to a significant boost in graphical quality. On high-end TV’s, MC2 is drool-worthy.

The vehicle motion is fluid, with no slowdown or stutter. The graphics engine does a fantastic job of giving you a real sense of speed, which is what this game is all about. There are plenty of particle effects and textures, which serve to kick the graphics up a notch over most other racers.

You’d better like hip-hop and techno, because that’s 99.9 percent of what you’re going to hear in MC2. While the score starts out pretty well, it contains so few tracks that you’ll kill the soundtrack volume after just a few rounds of racing. The fact that you can’t use your custom Xbox soundtracks really torques me, thus reducing my sound score for the game by a half point. In my opinion, all racing titles should allow you to use the music you ripped to the Xbox hard drive. Not delivering that option to gamers is just plain unacceptable.

The game sounds for MC2 are a nice mix of screaming engines, screeching tires, turbo boosts and plenty of crashes and crunches. All are done well, though nothing is really outstanding about them. The voice acting, while also very capable, suffers from some generic scripts that will compel you to mute the volume after an hour or two. While they try to give the voices some ethnic flair, the slang used by the racers sounds more clueless than cool.

Assuming you don’t use the cheat codes, the single-player mode should keep you busy for about 20 hours or more. Those racers are tough, and the tracks are unforgiving, which means you’ll be racing again and again hoping to beat the international crew of racing champs. And once you’ve finished the game, you can always up the AI’s skill and play again. The cruise mode allows you to zoom around the cities and see the sights, while the race editor lets you design tracks to play in multiplayer both online and off.

Xbox Live support means you’ll be able to enjoy MC2 with players from all over North America, though you will find that many players have all the cars unlocked, so you won’t be able to race them until you do likewise. While the Live menu can be frustrating to navigate, once you get the hang of it, you’ll be zipping around Paris playing a round of Capture the Flag with your buddies in no time. Speaking of Capture the Flag, the implementation of online gameplay modes is very well done, and you’ll be surprised at how enjoyable some matches can be in a street racer.

As I said when I reviewed the PS2 version of MC2, racing fans can’t go wrong with this game. If you want to play a game with a fantastic sense of speed that provides a challenge for all skill levels of players, MC2 is a definite buy.