Motor City Online (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 7.6 (3.5 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Stephen Poole
• Reviewed on: 11/21/2001
• Updated on: 05/17/2006
• Released on: 10/29/2001
• Originally published on GameSpot: Motor City Online (PC) Review

When Electronic Arts first announced plans for Need for Speed: Motor City two years ago, it sounded like a racing buff's dream--and for good reason. Imagine a persistent-world gameworld such as Ultima Online or EverQuest, blended with the high-powered action of the Need for Speed series and soaked in the atmosphere invoked by movies like American Graffiti and Two Lane Blacktop, and it's easy to see why the news of its development caused such a stir. The game would offer players the chance to buy, sell, and trade cars and parts to build their own fast, flashy rides from the golden age of automobiles, then hang out talking trash in joints like Roxy's Diner and the Roadkill Cafe as they waited to blow the next challenger off the line or hook up a new member for their car club. It sounds tantalizing, and in many respects Motor City Online (or MCO for short--EA Games switched titles shortly after news of the game's development) delivers on its potential, but it's most definitely not for casual online gamers or those whose patience is easily taxed.

One of the first issues many will have with MCO will come at the checkout counter: The game carries a $40 sticker price, and for your money you get a flashy box, a jewel case, a CD, and a month's free play--but no manual. All the documentation is accessed online either from the MCO software or the MCO Web site, and the process of getting answers to specific questions can be tedious even for those with broadband access. It's nice that EA Games is offering all of the documentation online, especially since the service will have new features and rules as it evolves. But there should have been some help to turn to offline, especially for the less mechanically inclined who find themselves struggling to turn their initial junker into a car that can make it around the street courses at decent speeds without constantly spinning out of control. Also, some info from the MCO "knowledge base" is already outdated. For instance, it says you can have up to three personas per server, when you actually can have only one.

After you first log on, you get to choose a persona to represent you online. There's a pretty good variety--guys can choose from models like townie, mohawk punker, runty rebel, beefcake greaser, and many more, while the ladies can opt to be play as a rocker chick, go-go gal, mademoiselle oo la la, and halter topper bopper, to name just a few. As you pick a name and change your clothes colors, a radio blasts out guitar-soaked instrumentals--everything from twangy surf tunes and gritty blues numbers to some "wacka-wacka" funk.

From there it's on to buy your first car, and it's then you run into the game's first anomaly: Why are you given only three pathetic choices--a Bel-Air, a Fairlane, and a Ranchero (all '57s)--for your first vehicle? Because you can actually race and earn money without owning a car (more on that later), the wise person might try to save the $8,000-plus these death traps cost and sock it away toward a real car, but no dice: You must buy one.

To be fair, MCO wouldn't be much of a game if all the great cars were available right off the bat (even in stock form), because the whole point is to encourage a thriving online economy, and the best way to do that is to leave users with no choice but to lay it on the line and race for cash. But there are two problems: The first is that EA Games should have figured a way to provide a few more choices from the get-go, and the second is that it seems hardly anyone earns money and the points needed for level advancement (which leads to higher weekly paychecks and eventually unlocked tracks) by actually racing the car they bought.

Here's how it works. There are four major classes of races: street, circuit, time trials, and drag races. In any of them you can choose an open race where you drive your own car, a sponsored race where you choose from a predetermined selection of common vehicles, or a club race against another team (both of you drive your own cars). Theoretically, the fastest way to build a bankroll is to run open races because the purses can be larger, but hardly anyone is willing to do it. One reason is the classifications aren't narrow enough--you can limit horsepower to under 300, for instance, but there can be a lot of variance in that class, and it's quite easy to find out you don't stand a chance against a more souped-up car. Another is that any damage you incur must be repaired out of pocket, but the expenses are so small that shouldn't stop anyone from giving it a go.

Time after time we tried to start an open street race, but no one would join and no one would create one. So we headed over to the circuits and finally got one person to join in--but when we changed the number of participants to two to reflect the smaller field, the game automatically added two computer-controlled racers who thrashed both of us. It's a double whammy: A computer opponent wins human players' cash, and the computer opponent didn't have to pay an entry fee! When we asked tech support about this, we were simply told that computer opponents would be added whenever there weren't enough humans, and that was that. That's no problem in the sponsored races because the cars are all equal, the physics are more forgiving, and the computer's artificial intelligence can be more easily beaten (especially on circuits). But until you get a really good personal car, it's just not worth the risk. Anyone who's searched for an open circuit or street race in Motor City Online will soon realize that they're very few and far between.

So what happens is that many players tend to run sponsored circuit races (sponsored street races only yield experience points) or, even better, sponsored time trials. These are an easy way to rack up cash quickly--no waiting on humans to join and select cars, and you can easily pick up between $150 and $200 every two or three minutes with a decent showing (more on harder tracks). But here again, you won't even think about running the open time trials because the game doesn't take into account what class your car is in when computing your run. If you enter the open time trial in the Bel Air Grand Prix, for instance, you're going up against cars that could have superb handling and 200hp more than you do, and you have no hope of finishing high enough to make it worthwhile. Instead, to gain cash more quickly, the vast majority of beginning players will run sponsored time trials--again, in common cars with more forgiving physics, which makes it even harder to get acclimated to the more realistic handling of personal cars when you finally make enough money to get a better car you feel comfortable racing.

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