| Here's what I like: You're careening down the streets of Washington, D.C., driving past the White House in a garbage truck, and some little VW Bug won't get off the line at the next stoplight. You plow into his back bumper at 50 mph, flipping him up in the air, and he gets stuck under your massive grill and sparks fly for several blocks until you can shake him off.
I was hooked by this game after the first stint of open touring in a heavy rig. I had hours of fun driving an assortment of vehicles, sometimes just out for a spin. I liked the timed missions, delivering pizza to mobsters. I liked it all.
There's a lot to like -- 30 different vehicles, including the new H2 Hummer; 14 different driving careers and 50 total missions for the single-player setting; and three different single-layer modes. You can race to Checkpoints, Blitz to a final area, or simply Cruise to your heart's content in either Paris or Washington, D.C. The cities are laid out in detail and to scale.
MM3 isn't the most dazzling of Xbox games. The graphics are good, not great, and the depiction of the cities is worth sneaking a peak at side views every once in awhile, just to see the Eiffel tower streak by. But for every line of light poles you bust off at ground level just for the fun of it, there's an occasional tree or pedestrian you seem to knife through like magic butter. Not that I need to see pedestrians flying off the bumper, but the tree thing was disconcerting.
What's great is that the average graphics never distracted from the gameplay. What the team at DICE seems to understand is that eye-candy does not a great game make. Visual appeal lasts about a nanosecond -- it's the gameplay that counts. And MM3 has it.
For example, the attention to details is very solid, like collision detection physics. Gliding around a tight right angle city corner is of course impossible at 90 miles an hour; we all know that. But in MM3, at least during the first few races, you can bounce off the brick buildings and end up back in a lane. Maybe not the right lane, but at least off the sidewalk. And over time, you can get your thumb warmed up and really peel off some slick moves.
A strict game that tried to emulate reality wouldn't let you do that. But a fun game that wants you to succeed will encourage romps through the park grass and off of big ramps. MM3 gets it.
MM3 marks the first time the series has landed on a console -- it was strictly a PC game for the first two editions. Angel Studios has given way to Digital Illusions, but there's no letdown in the quality or the depth.
Once you tire of the single-player destruction, the pace picks up when MM3 is played via Xbox Live. Like other Xbox titles, MM3 lets you download tracks for the background music. Additional modes offered over the Live connection include Tag, Hunter, Capture the Gold and Stayaway. Tag and Stayaway are reversals -- in Tag you try to nail someone, while in Stayaway you try not be crunched. Capture the Gold is a series of gold stashes uncovered, and Hunter forces the player to tag everyone. More content is sure to come over the Live connection, although how much more can this genre offer? Heck, it's almost all here now.
To add even more depth, you can add or subtract policemen, pedestrians, set the season and weather, control day or night conditions and add snow.
The good news is that you aren't dropping the transmission and engine from a double-decker bus into a VW or any other silliness. It's not a game for gearheads, it is an arcade game for racing. And a darned good one. | 
