Official Website

http://www.rockstargames.com/midnightclubLA/

The soundtrack of MC Los Angeles Trailer

Digitalism - Idealistic
Digitalism myspace http://www.myspace.com/digitalism

Cars I have noticed in the trailer

- Ford Mustang 69
- Saleen S7 Twin Turbo
- Ducati ‘04 Monster SR4

Press Release about Midnight Club Los Angles
http://ir.take2games.com/ReleaseDetail.cfm?ReleaseID=244021

Rockstar Games Announces Midnight Club: Los Angeles for PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system and Xbox 360™
Fourth Installment of the Blockbuster Racing Franchise Unveiled

New York, NY – May 16, 2007 – Rockstar Games is proud to announce the fourth installment of its critically-acclaimed and genre-defining Midnight Club franchise, Midnight Club: Los Angeles. Developed by series creator Rockstar San Diego, Midnight Club: Los Angeles will be available for the Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system from Microsoft and the PLAYSTATION 3 system in early 2008.

“Midnight Club’s addictive blend of freedom, style and sheer sense of speed sets it apart from its competition,” said Sam Houser, Founder and Executive Producer of Rockstar Games. “With Midnight Club: Los Angeles, Rockstar San Diego looks to once again push the boundaries and expectations of what a racing game can be. Rockstar San Diego has always been the technology leader in delivering the ultimate racing experience, and with this game, they are looking to re-define the idea of a completely immersive racing game experience, both offline and online.”

“On prior consoles, the Midnight Club franchise continually raised the bar for racing games, evolving from being the first ever street racing game to setting the defining standard for credibly integrating street racing culture with an intense racing experience,” said Jay Panek, Producer of the Midnight Club series. “With Midnight Club: Los Angeles, our goal is to evolve on all possible levels and stay true to the hardcore gaming experience the series is known for, while making it accessible to casual gamers and car enthusiasts.”

Consistently the most innovative, highest-rated street racing franchise, Midnight Club set the standard of what an open-world racing game can be. Midnight Club: Los Angeles will deliver a truly immersive next-generation racing experience that is second to none.

For more information about Midnight Club, please visit our website at http://www.rockstargames.com/

About Midnight Club Los Angeles at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Club:_Los_Angeles

Midnight Club: Los Angeles is the fourth video game in the Midnight Club racing series. It was officially announced on May 16, 2007 by Rockstar Games. The game is being developed by Rockstar San Diego, the same studio behind Rockstar’s first iteration into the seventh generation of video games, Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis. Because the revolutionary game engine, RAGE has been confirmed to be used in the highly anticipated GTA IV, many believe RAGE will also be utilized in this next installment. The map of Los Angeles is confirmed to be the size all three cities from the previous installment combined.[1] The game will be released on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 video game consoles in early 2008.

Official Trailer

On August 22, 2007, Rockstar launched their first teaser trailer and screenshots for the game on their official website. The trailer features the Ford Mustang Boss 302 and Mitsubishi 3000GT, and the song “Idealistic” from Digitalism, a German electro music duo.

Gameplay

The game will be set in the city of Los Angeles, again providing the option to free-roam on roadway quite larger than all the cities combined from Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition. A new addition is day-to-night cycle and weather effects, adding a realisitic aspect to the game. After races, if any damage is inflicted upon the vehicle, the player must not drive back to the garage for a full repair, but instead can choose the Quick Fix option shoddy and old parts will be added to the car. To get the nice look back, they must repair at a garage. The Los Angeles map is considered one of the most detailed and accurate versions of L.A. yet. With the RAGE system being used for this game, as with Grand Theft Auto IV, traffic level will vary upon time of day. Morning and afternoon times will have heaviest traffic, whilst nighttime will have less, as Rockstar is trying to imitate real-life rush hours. This encourages less experienced players to race at night and more experienced to race at day. Another great feature is the game camera. Now a camera is available from within the car, which indicates that Rockstar will be adding steering wheels, car seats, etc. as available parts of purchase. Also, during third-person view, the camera swings to the side when turning as if the camera cannot hold onto the speed. Motorcycles return, though no specific names have been released.

IGN: Midnight Club Los Angeles Preview
http://au.ps3.ign.com/articles/814/814933p1.html

GC 2007: Midnight Club: Los Angeles Preview
First details on Rockstar’s latest offering in its highly successful racing franchise.
by Chris Roper

US, August 23, 2007 - Rockstar’s Midnight Club series has quickly been gaining a huge fanbase around the world, and the last release, Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition, saw the sale of more than 5 million copies worldwide. Rockstar San Diego is currently hard at work on the fourth installment in the series for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and with it the studio aims to redefine what a racing title should be.

We got our first look at Midnight Club: Los Angeles earlier this week, and it looks like Rockstar San Diego may indeed be coming close to its goal. The game is sleeker, prettier, faster and more intense than any of its predecessors, and is overall fairly impressive at this point. We were given the common disclaimer that what we saw was early code and that all sorts of stuff needed to be polished, but it was already running and looking pretty damn slick.

Just getting to the starting line is a race.
One of Rockstar San Diego’s goals with the game is to have players racing as often as possible, and to keep them from sifting through menu screens as much as it can. This streamlined presentation looks to work really well at this point as most menu pop-ups aren’t separate screens but rather quick notifications that tell you what place you finished in and how much money you earned. You never leave your main view, and a single click of the button removes the menu and you’re right back racing.

Starting a dynamic race against an opponent is as simple as flashing your lights in his or her general direction, and then racing them to the starting line. Yep, you read that right. Even getting to the race is a race in Midnight Club: Los Angeles, proof that you’ll rarely find yourself just driving around without another car breathing down your tailpipe.

A new concept in Midnight Club: Los Angeles is the use of Reputation Points. You’ll earn these just for racing, though the better you place the more you’ll earn. Your Reputation Point total will dictate what cars you have at your disposal, which races you can partake in and so on. Whereas in past Midnight Club games it was possible to get stuck if you weren’t quite good enough to beat a race or two, the Reputation Point system will ensure that even if you suck behind the wheel you’ll be able to progress, albeit slowly. The harder the race you take on, the more you’ll earn, so winning one long race may earn you multiple times the Reputation for winning a short sprint, giving you plenty of incentive for taking on the longer and riskier races.

After a race, it’s likely that your ride will be all banged up, so you’ll want to get it fixed before the next run so that you don’t crash out. Instead of having to retreat to your garage to get repaired, a new Quick Fix option will allow you to get your ride integrity back up to 100%, though it won’t exactly look pristine. Shoddy paneling and so forth will be used to repair your car, so though you’ll be fully protected, you will have to head back to your garage in order to refit it with the right, snazzy-looking parts.

The hills of Hollywood will be a constant backdrop during your races.
Midnight Club’s version of Los Angeles isn’t a 100% accurate representation, but rather a “best of” version of the city. Being as the real city isn’t exactly designed for racing at 150+mph through downtown (not to mention the traffic), Rockstar San Diego has taken the liberty of tweaking the city’s layout to make it as fun as possible. You will, however, be able to deftly navigate the city if you know its actual layout pretty well as it’s fairly close to the real design, just not exact.

One rather impressive stat for you is that the size of Los Angeles in the newest game is equal to the size of all three cities in Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition put together. Indeed, it’s a large metropolis for racing, and we doubt you’ll quickly run out of new areas to explore.

This time around, you won’t have to race through the city streets only at night. Midnight Club: Los Angeles features a full day/night cycle replete with a dynamic weather system. Shadows and such will move and stretch as the sun sets, and the skyline will turn a nice, other-worldly orange to reflect LA’s clean air. Inclement weather like rain will randomly kick in, forcing you to take things a little more carefully.

Aside from the lighting, the time of day will actually reflect gameplay as traffic patterns will work based on realistic traffic congestion. In the mornings and evenings, traffic will be a little heavier as people travel to and from their Hollywood (read: food service) jobs. There won’t be stop-and-go traffic, as that would simply be bad for gameplay in a racing game, but you will need to dodge more vehicles during these hours. So plan on saving those long and hard races for the middle of the night or very early morning…

Detail on the cars is extremely fine.
To help you navigate the city, two different map options are available. The first is an in-game overlay that you can pop up on top of your racing screen, allowing you to drive while you keep track of where you’re going. You obviously don’t want to race like this, but it helps in getting from place to place.

The much cooler and more advanced map is seen through your GPS system. Bringing this up takes you to a full-screen 3D map that accurately displays lights and weather depending on the current situation (it’d be dark but lit with streetlights at night, and clouds will slightly obscure your view when the weather’s turned bad). From here, you can pick certain spots or even an individual car you want to race and it’ll be marked on your in-game map, and the standard arrow system will help you find said point or car. It’s an impressive system.

Perhaps our most favorite part of the demo has to do not with the cars themselves (which we’ll get to in a second), but rather the camera options. New to the series is an in-car view that accurately displays each vehicle’s dashboard, steering wheel, instrumentation and more. Your driver’s hands are in view, and you’ll actually see him shift when necessary.

Out of the car, the third-person camera has had a lot of work done to it, and the results are very, very cool. When you take a tight turn and skid around the corner, the camera pans in and to the side of your car, leaving your vehicle on the outer edge of the camera as it swings in towards the center of the screen. It gives the impression that it’s barely able to hold on at that speed, and very much looks like what you’d find in a Hollywood chase sequence. Other camera tweaks include a slight shake when you shift to infer the kick of the engine, and a close zoom when you use nitrous or are drafting. It’s all very cool stuff.

Motorcycles are back.
As for the cars themselves, we were only privy to seeing three vehicles, but all three looked fantastic. Demoed for us were a 2006 Mitsubishi 3000GT, a 1969 Mustang 302 Boss and a 2006 Lamborghini Gallardo Roadster. Each car is rendered with around 100,000 polygons (for both the interior and exterior combined), allowing for tons of detail on everything down to the wheel wells. The city too looks great, nicely utilizing Rockstar’s RAGE technology, the same engine being used in Grand Theft Auto IV.

As for other features, Rockstar told us that online play will indeed be present in the game, though it’s keeping mum for now on details behind that. Likewise, customization and motorcycles will both return from the last game, though again, Rockstar is keeping its proverbial lips sealed for the time being on those elements as well.

Midnight Club: Los Angeles is set to ship sometime in early 2008.

Midnight Club Los Angeles review by Gamespot
http://au.gamespot.com/ps3/driving/midnightclublosangeles/news.html?sid=6177223

GC ‘07: Midnight Club: Los Angeles First Look
Forget that LA traffic; we’ve got the first look at Rockstar’s new street racing game set in the City of Angels.
By Brian Ekberg, GameSpot
Posted Aug 23, 2007 12:54 am PT

LEIPZIG, Germany–If you’ve ever been stuck in Los Angeles traffic, you’ve no doubt daydreamed about what it would be like to rip through the streets of the City of Angels without a care for your fellow drivers or the letter of the law. And while there have been arcade racing games based in LA before, none have been quite as ambitious as Rockstar’s upcoming Midnight Club: Los Angeles. We got an early peek at the game here on the first day of the 2007 Leipzig Games Convention to see how this street racing game is coming together.

This is the fourth game in Rockstar’s Midnight Club series and, as in the past, the publisher’s San Diego studio is in charge of development duties this time around. It’s obvious the team is pushing the next-gen envelope when it comes to MC:LA. The game’s sprawling version of Los Angeles will provide an ample backdrop for open-world exploration and on-the-spot races by a variety of challengers. And while the version of LA in the game isn’t a street-by-street re-creation of the city, there’s little doubt that it’s authentic enough to please the locals with popular landmarks, such as the House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard, that are recognizable from the get-go. Also, the LA of Midnight Club is huge–producers told us the total drivable area in the game will add up to more than the three areas in Midnight Club: Dub Edition combined.

If you’re not familiar with LA’s layout, a handy minimap will be found in the lower left-hand corner of the screen, giving you the lay of your immediate surroundings, and any important information you need to know (such as the location of challenge opponents, in-race foes, and race checkpoints. If you want a larger look at the city, you can bring up a larger map, either in illustrated form or in a 3D render that looks like something straight out of Google Maps. It’s impressive technology, made all the more stunning by the game’s incredible lighting effects that really add a dose of realism to the game’s environments. Because the game will include day and night racing, that lighting will be put to good effect, especially at night, when the city’s streets are bright with street lamps and neon signs. The cars look nicely detailed as well; producers pointed out that the Mitsubishi 3000 GT that started out in the demo was composed of around 100,000 polygons.

So we’ve established that MC:LA looks good. But how does it play? Well, we’d love to be able to tell you firsthand, but unfortunately we weren’t able to get hands-on time with the game. Instead, we watched one of the producers play the game and, from what we could glean from the handful of races we watched, it looks like a heck of a lot of fun. The cars in the game–we saw the 3000 GT, a ‘69 Mustang, and a Lamborghini Gallardo in action–show off some serious speed and, at top speeds, that breakneck pace looks to make for some exciting times as you dodge traffic and try to smack down opponents. There’s some fun camera trickery going on here, too–when making drifting turns, for example, the camera will move slightly to show the side of the car as it burns through the turn; when using the turbo boost, the camera will zoom down low and tight to the car to further exaggerate that sense of speed.

An intense sense of speed and hot cars is fun but, sooner or later, it will all end in tears, namely in the form of a fender-folding accident. While there’s still more work to do with MC:LA’s damage model, we understand that damage will be mostly but not completely cosmetic in nature. While you won’t be able to kill your car completely through shoddy driving, your car’s performance will suffer if you make too many mistakes. After a race is over, you can choose to either take your car for more extensive repairs or use a quick-fix option, which will install unpainted replacement parts so you can get right back in the race. Sure, it might not look the part, but at least it will run fast.

We saw two race types during the demo of the game: a one-on-one street race and an arcade race that featured five competing cars on the road at the same time. Producers are aiming to cut down on load times and unnecessary HUD items, and it seems to be paying off in the demo version we watched; after the races were over, the game instantly sent the player back to free roam mode, where you can then pick up your next race event. Winning races will earn you cash and reputation points with which you can cash in for new parts, unlock new races, or buy new cars. Unlike in previous Midnight Club games, which required victories to progress through the game, you’ll be earning money and rep points no matter how you finish in the race–though the better you do, the more you’ll earn.

Though it’s certainly an arcade racing game at heart, Midnight Club has at least one touch that hardcore car fans will love: cockpit views for every car in the game. With that kind of detail, it seems Midnight Club: Los Angeles is on its way toward becoming a fast-paced, exciting racing game. We look forward to getting our hands on the game in the future and giving you more information as it becomes available.

Kotaku first impressions
http://kotaku.com/gaming/gc07/first-look-at-midnight-club-los-angeles-292993.php

Rockstar provided us with a hands-off preview at the Leipzig Games Convention of its PLAYSTATION 3 and Xbox 360 racer Midnight Club Los Angeles, chauffeuring us at high speeds around a digital Hollywood. The Rockstar San Diego production is expected soon after the New Year, so while much of it looked unfinished, it still impressed. Midnight Club may not have the investor sex appeal of its poorer driving big brother Grand Theft Auto, but with some 5 million copies of Midnight Club 3: DUB Edition in homes, it’s pretty clear the kids still love high speed, high stakes car racin’.

Set in a geographically fictionalized version of LA, the newest Midnight Club will further stray from its late night settings, giving players the option to pick fights with other speedsters during daylight. The sunnier, hazier daytime aesthetic doesn’t look as appealing as the game’s late night mode, but it will at least provide a nice change of pace to races lit only by street lamps.

Three cars were shown during our preview, a Ford Musting, Mitsubishi 3000GT and Lamborghini Gallardo. All were nicely modeled, some 100,000 polygons each, with custom car kits and paint jobs giving each that Midnight Club visual appeal. What wasn’t so pretty was the scuffed up, dented versions of each. Our presenter was noticeably liberal with car-to-everything contact, driving through fire hydrants, into bushes and righting his path against concrete barriers.

Fortunately, a one-button Quick Fix option has been added to repair your chassis after a dust up, as damage to your ride now affects your car’s driving performance. That Quick Fix will make your car drivable again, but not necessarily showroom floor pretty.

What was most visually impressive about Midnight Club LA was its zooming map feature. While you can orientate yourself via the Rockstar-standard mini-map in the bottom left corner, you can, at any time, fly above the city of LA Lite, giving you a city-wide view of everything. You’ll see traffic patterns, potential racers and locations giving players a quick—and by the way, gorgeous—overview of Los Angeles.

Zooming back to street level was also technically very, very impressive. Rockstar San Diego’s in-house RAGE engine—also tapped for Grand Theft Auto IV—is impressive during races, but you might find yourself zooming in and out of the environment, testing the developer’s claims that you’ll experience no load times flashing from birds eye view to behind the driver.

Speaking of, this marks the first Midnight Club we’ll actually see the driver. The one featured in our demo was a nondescript, clean cut Hollywood type. Character customization was hinted at, but not detailed, so we’re not sure what to expect from final driver appearances.

We were shown a handful of races, including one-on-one and a group race featuring five. Action was typically frantic, featuring plenty of burnouts and head-on wrecks. Nitro boosts moved the camera into Midnight Club’s equivalent of an over-the-shoulder camera, de-saturating the graphics for a tunnel vision perspective.

Unfortunately, the excellent soundtrack we heard was just placeholder, but we desperately hope that Rockstar San Diego can secure most of what we heard, including “California Uber Alles”—doubly appropriate for the Los Angeles-Leipzig vibe.

Midnight Club Los Angeles may be getting experiencing a bit of sequel senioritis with its fourth official entry, but with a next-gen coat of paint and some impressive new features, but I suspect anyone looking for a spring time fix of Rockstar quality racing will like what they see.

Trailer direct from the Rockstar Games Website

Trailer from Youtube

Videos from a convention in Germany

Pictures released by Rockstar Games