How Good Is Midtown Madness 2's London?

Ойындар

Look it's just me walking around London finding places a video game sort of looks like.
Yes, it's time to visit London, in both its real-life 2022 incarnation and its low-polygon year 2000 equivalent from Midtown Madness 2. Why do games about places he's been fascinate Timberwolf so much? How well does Midtown Madness 2 manage to both feel like London, and capture the geographical layout of London? Is it possible for someone to genuinely be fascinated by bollards?
And of course we couldn't possibly get through 20 minutes of this without a little explanation of how Midtown Madness and its sequel manage to compress entire cities into hardware that was barely up to a moderately-sized village.
This Train Is Delayed Due To Track Defects At:
0:00 I stand on a bridge!
0:44 The idea of locality
2:25 Please SCS, it would make my entire YEAR.
2:48 The Lower Thames Street Experience
3:36 Generic London is best London
4:36 It's all bollards
5:08 Far too much irrelevant detail about the Tube
6:40 Maybe they should have set it in outer London
7:09 Let us compare things!
7:58 Isn't this supposed to be about games?
8:25 I talk a little bit about mods
8:44 Life advice: don't go west of Holborn
9:50 Wait, 200MHz isn't powerful?
12:06 How a bit of it works
15:30 The Other City
15:54 The Conclusion Begins
16:31 How I played World Racing instead
17:04 The existential uncertainty of Midtown Madness
17:53 Undesirable action
18:26 Supercar cabs
19:25 The Conclusion Continues
20:00 The Conclusion Concludes (that I should give up on gaming videos)
Oh hey, the games featured list isn't a nightmare this time:
Midtown Madness 2
Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020)
Train Simulator
Forza Horizon 4
Euro Truck Simulator 2
Midtown Madness
MM2 City Toolkit
Descent
Mercedes-Benz World Racing
If you genuinely liked the Tube bit: / @jagohazzard
If you genuinely liked the bollards bit: www.bollardsoflondon.uk/
If you just want the London Eye in Midtown Madness 2: www.mm2x.com/ (MM2 Revisited mod)
Comments are pre-reviewed to avoid spam. I aim to publish all comments, including dissent, but overly pedantic or negative ones may be moderated. Hearing about different experiences and what things were like in other countries adds a lot to the video! Please try to do so in a positive way while remembering that if I had to explain every minor international difference the video would be 2 hours long and boring, rather than 20 minutes long and boring. Failing that, at least make me laugh.
Bonus fact: visiting all of the major Midtown Madness landmarks shown in this video (and a couple of others!) is a rather pleasant walk: start from Tower Bridge, walk through the City then down to the river at Blackfriars, carry along the Victoria Embankment to the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey, up Horse Guards Parade and then along the Mall/Constitution Hill to Hyde Park corner at which point you basically walk across the park collecting landmarks.
For me it ended up being about 10 miles, although part of that was delays on the District Line (yes, really!) meaning I had to start at Liverpool Street, and also a lot of wandering around the alleyways of the City trying to find somewhere that was quiet enough to film bollards in. Oh, and my determination to film a thing which isn't even in the game. Although you do walk past the BFI IMAX to get there, a suprisingly recent thing to include in a 2000 game with it only having opened in May 1999.

Пікірлер: 53

  • @NuStiuFrate
    @NuStiuFrate Жыл бұрын

    Jesus the map is so simple and empty looking at it now but it felt so real to me back then. I loved both the difficult missions and just roaming around the map for hours.

  • @sixstringbestfriend
    @sixstringbestfriend Жыл бұрын

    For me personally, there's nothing like real world locales in video games. MM, Driver series, True Crime LA/NYC, Midnight Club, and so on. So many game worlds, so little time. I'm barely into the video but I absolutely love the effort you put into physically going to the city, explaining the philosophy behind real world maps, the appeal and the methods needed to creating them. Limitations are also really good to know because it helps other amateur modders like myself an idea how we could better represent real cities.

  • @flippedoutkyrii
    @flippedoutkyriiАй бұрын

    I was obsessed with London due to this game. Must have spent hundreds of hours expanding every nook and cranny yet looking back it's amazing something so barren and simple could captivate me so, guess my young age had something to do with it lol

  • @TreesandStuff69
    @TreesandStuff69 Жыл бұрын

    Some little bits on the technical part. Internally "Blocks" are actually called "Rooms", "Blocks" were what the community initially called them and was the term used by the community for a while. There are some additional helper functions when drawing the city. When drawing intersections (the pavement part specifically), and building roofs, the game checks if the camera position is below this, and skips drawing. Iirc it also checks if building quads are facing the camera as well. To get uselessly technical, most things (collidable objects, vehicles, 3D building facades) are "entities", and each entity belongs to a room. Upon drawing each room, it checks entity visibility before drawing. Overall a very enjoyable video as a long time player and modder who knows way too much about the engine :D

  • @TimberwolfK

    @TimberwolfK

    Жыл бұрын

    Thanks! That makes a lot of sense given they're using a technique which grew up around indoor-based games where the rooms would be, well... rooms. I find it fascinating when you look at this older stuff the lengths developers would go to *not* to transform and draw polygons, and then you get to today's situation where the graphics cards are such floating point and fill rate monsters you're better off leaving the geometry the same between frames, giving anything you want to animate a vertex shader and letting the card sort it out.

  • @ZanaGBYT

    @ZanaGBYT

    2 ай бұрын

    Are all of the development and moding tools in use these days open-sourced and available on a website? or is still all of that knowledge locked away into some discord, waiting to be destroyed and losing more knowledge than when MM2X, MM2BR and HQTM closed shop together nearly 16 years ago?

  • @Lee01Mr
    @Lee01Mr Жыл бұрын

    This is so relaxing to watch and being informed on games I have played till death. Keep them getting posted!

  • @foxdancemedia
    @foxdancemediaАй бұрын

    this video deserves way more views for the quality of it

  • @shadowinthevoid
    @shadowinthevoid Жыл бұрын

    Next video idea: A 90minuite deep dive into Stymie Bold Italic and any tenues links to racing games. I joke but I would still watch it.

  • @user-kn6nv1km9x
    @user-kn6nv1km9x2 ай бұрын

    I remember when I visited London back in 2017, it was impossible for me not to draw comparisons with MM2 in-game London and was so fascinated to finally see all those landmarks in real fife. It was a priceless nostalgic feeling

  • @tehblizz
    @tehblizz Жыл бұрын

    Never been to London but I feel like I know it a little bit thanks to MM2. I remember my first visit to SF, I spent most of the time going to see the different landmarks that I had driven past in the game 😄

  • @TimberwolfK

    @TimberwolfK

    Жыл бұрын

    It's quite a surprise how much of the city they manage to represent with so many technical constraints. Obviously there's no hope of using the game as a map, but you can still get an idea where things are relative to each other.

  • @RoundenBrown

    @RoundenBrown

    Жыл бұрын

    The Getaway for PS2, I got to know London through that one.

  • @wingsofzero5732
    @wingsofzero573210 ай бұрын

    When I was able to travel to London at Easter 2022, I was comparing it in my head to what I knew in MM2 and it was absolutely mindblowing how much I recognised despite the simplicity of it. I was able to navigate myself fairly easily just from memory (and some help from Google Maps).

  • @TimberwolfK

    @TimberwolfK

    10 ай бұрын

    While simple, it's very good at establishing the relative location of things - something visitors to London often struggle with as the Tube heavily distorts your picture of what's happening on the surface (not just the map, but that different lines travel at quite different speeds - London feels a lot smaller when you're on the Victoria line!)

  • @dummiesboy
    @dummiesboy Жыл бұрын

    Very nicely made video for an old favorite game of mine! Glad to see you mentioned/used Revisited in some parts, old project of mine. Even learned something from this video, about the City of London trash cans. In Revisited v6, I have already replaced some bollards in that area with an unused variant of the prop, decorated in the City of London style that you show in this video. May look into changing the trash cans outside of that area of the city too, as a little detail to fix...

  • @adiplier
    @adiplier Жыл бұрын

    Amazing video essay! Honestly learnt quite a few things about London and Midtown.

  • @Paul_9320
    @Paul_9320 Жыл бұрын

    oh man, I've just found your channel through the openttd tutorial and am now bingewatching all the videos. I love your style! Especially the technical explanations

  • @TimberwolfK

    @TimberwolfK

    Жыл бұрын

    Thanks, it's something I got into by accident and discovered I liked picking apart how these old games worked. Although it does mean it takes a fair old time to research what ends up being 2 minutes of video and a couple of hastily-drawn diagrams!

  • @MenkoDany
    @MenkoDany6 ай бұрын

    19:47 indeed, a few professionals in the modern game industry had their start modding MM/MM2 :) not nearly as many as started off modding the FPSes of the time, but a few

  • @lpil
    @lpil22 күн бұрын

    Can’t wait for the next bollard video!!

  • @raztaz826
    @raztaz826 Жыл бұрын

    I had a great time with MM1 and MM2. I drove around for hours getting the police to chase, and then weaving through heavy traffic to watch them crash in the rear view mirror because they couldn't follow. I still haven't seen any games that let you have as much traffic as MM2 on max traffic density.

  • @AllieThePrettyGator
    @AllieThePrettyGator3 ай бұрын

    I love the london buses and Cabs

  • @WhatHoSnorkers
    @WhatHoSnorkers Жыл бұрын

    Marvellous stuff. I have a London A-Z from 1998 (as I realised on a trip to London on Saturday) so that would have come in handy. That font though. Lovely work, and really well explained how the game did the graphics!

  • @TimberwolfK

    @TimberwolfK

    Жыл бұрын

    Midtown isn't too bad for that because it only goes in for the "unlikely to be demolished any time soon" landmarks. (Although I was surprised to find the BFI IMAX, that was very new when the game came out!) The Getaway on the other hand... that definitely would benefit from a vintage A-Z, amongst other things it features Mondial House and a very pre-development Shoreditch.

  • @Bazzemboi
    @Bazzemboi Жыл бұрын

    Thanks a lot for this video! I always wanted to know how accurate it was cos it felt pretty good

  • @NinaFelwitch
    @NinaFelwitch26 күн бұрын

    I played soo much Midtown Madness 2 as a child. I loved driving around London and San Francisco. It looked so real to 12 year old me. I love games that take you to real places.

  • @SuperScheel
    @SuperScheel6 ай бұрын

    Nice video, used to play MM a lot when I was 6-8, moved to London this month hahaha

  • @Matschaak
    @Matschaak7 ай бұрын

    Thanks for making this, childhood game

  • @BloggosPow
    @BloggosPow Жыл бұрын

    I love this sort of thing, especially visiting places I know in real life. Watchdogs Legion is interesting.. some of it is mapped really well some bits are missing but being set in the near future under a totalitarian regime I'm sure the government death castle instead of a large chunk of Oxford Street can be explained via the plot. Also nice Beautiful South reference!

  • @bigsigui4614
    @bigsigui4614 Жыл бұрын

    Cool stuff

  • @BlackIronMotorJudas
    @BlackIronMotorJudas4 ай бұрын

    Hello, I absolutely loved this video! MM is my favourite game series, have you ever played my personal favourite of the series Midtown Madness 3? I still play both 2 and 3 to this day, and to a lesser extent 1, reckon you would ever do a video about MM3?

  • @TimberwolfK

    @TimberwolfK

    4 ай бұрын

    Only very briefly, and I'm not sure I even remember where! (I think maybe the Cambridge Centre for Computing History have an original XBox somewhere, can't think where else I played it)

  • @2talltyler152
    @2talltyler152 Жыл бұрын

    I'm also guilty of buying games for a familiar setting (particularly now that I live far from home and get homesick). I find train sims terribly boring but got Train Sim World 2 on sale just for the Boston map. Unfortunately the feeling of "being there" falls apart pretty quickly with the constrained area to explore and the awful passenger AI. I'm currently "playing" Watch Dogs 1 without driving cars or fighting anybody: just walking or taking the train through the impressively-detailed Chicago. I credit the "being there" feeling to the gameplay focus on invading pedestrians' digital lives, spurring a development focus on pedestrians with diverse behaviors and scenes like stopping to tie their shoe or vomiting into a trash can. One of my perpetual OpenTTD goals is playing in real-world geography. Someday I'll get serious about developing a patch to import real map data, but until then I'm enjoying my scenarios built from real heightmaps and city locations.

  • @TimberwolfK

    @TimberwolfK

    Жыл бұрын

    It's a weird synchronicity that Watch Dogs has done the cities from Midtown Madness 1 and 2, in that order... if they announce another one set in Paris, then we'll know they're up to something! I love real-world OpenTTD maps but I always struggle to get the scale right... I want to have a London with the distinct areas so there are dedicated stations for Wimbledon, Bromley, Southwark etc. but then that means having a map where a trip to Glasgow takes several years! One thing which might be interesting is a distorted map where areas of high population density take up disproportionately more space, although that definitely needs some kind of automated preprocessing.

  • @NoisyMichael
    @NoisyMichael Жыл бұрын

    Nice job on this video, I've always loved midtown madness as a kid.

  • @red_samus
    @red_samus Жыл бұрын

    Top video sir, have you had the opportunity to play the first midnight club game? I remember it was made by the same studio that made the first two midtown madness games, and featured london, albeit a darker themed london, but it was made to run exclusively on the almighty playstation 2, perhaps the map is more fidel to the real city than the one in this game. It has been a long time since i played midnight club street racing, but if you get a chance you can check it out

  • @TimberwolfK

    @TimberwolfK

    Жыл бұрын

    A couple people mentioned it, I never played it but did check out some videos. Looks very like the Midtown map in places, although I think they extended it further east to give a bit of Canary Wharf and the area around there.

  • @LostieTrekieTechie
    @LostieTrekieTechie Жыл бұрын

    This is a really cool video. What tool do you use to display the whole city at 12:18?

  • @TimberwolfK

    @TimberwolfK

    Жыл бұрын

    If I remember correctly it's MM2 City Toolkit.

  • @pastlife13137
    @pastlife131376 ай бұрын

    nice

  • @Yesterzine
    @Yesterzine Жыл бұрын

    There are many things Watch Dogs Legion does wrong but it again combines both sense of place and landmarks in a similar way but also not because it's having to pretend to be a bit "in the future" in some kind of far right governed hell hole (imagine that). It's a really good London. I don't know SF but I'm pretty certain I believe WD2 as well.

  • @TimberwolfK

    @TimberwolfK

    Жыл бұрын

    It's one of those games where I don't have a huge amount of interest in playing the game but I'm still tempted to get it just to see what they did with the city. It's definitely the reason behind the one Assassin's Creed game I own. (Which after they did an update now has an annoying launcher and keeps crashing, thus in turn providing the reason I don't own WD:L)

  • @Yesterzine

    @Yesterzine

    Жыл бұрын

    @@TimberwolfK WD2 is on game pass if that helps, so presumably WDL will eventually be.

  • @maxheadroom22and26
    @maxheadroom22and2621 күн бұрын

    Nice and interesting video! Maybe you could make a ranking video of games that portray real cities with your two categories? I'm also fascinated by games that take me to real places. If you are reading a script, could you find a better position for the teleprompter? It's irritating that you look next to the camera the whole time. And also one can see your eyes following the text very much. If there is no better way to do it then maybe it would be better to do it with voice over images/video?

  • @TimberwolfK

    @TimberwolfK

    21 күн бұрын

    This is quite old and I switched to using a proper Pepper's Ghost teleprompter some time in... probably mid-2023? I tend to leave the old stuff up apart from a few bad ideas and anything with catastrophically poor production quality as there is still hopefully some entertainment value to be derived from it, and perhaps as proof that it's possible to slowly learn this stuff by trial and (mostly) error.

  • @theycallmebox1998
    @theycallmebox1998 Жыл бұрын

    How did you rip the map to show us on 12:12?

  • @TimberwolfK

    @TimberwolfK

    Жыл бұрын

    It's a program called MM2 City Toolkit - should be available on MM2 eXtreme.

  • @Geforce2187
    @Geforce2187 Жыл бұрын

    How does the London in Midnight Club compare? It was made by the same developers at the same time using the same engine but I think it's slightly different.

  • @TimberwolfK

    @TimberwolfK

    Жыл бұрын

    I never really got into the Midnight Club games, bits of that map do look very familiar from MM2 although it expands further east and has things like the A40 Westway on the other side of the map. From what little I can see on videos they do appear to have merged the Limehouse Link into the Rotherhithe Tunnel...

  • @Mahoromatic

    @Mahoromatic

    Жыл бұрын

    @@TimberwolfK What about the London in Italian Job? That game is very good for a PS1 title.

  • @TJ-hl9kx
    @TJ-hl9kx4 ай бұрын

    M25 Racer!!

  • @latbat58
    @latbat58 Жыл бұрын

    Cozy

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