How Good Is Midtown Madness 2's London?

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: https://www.bollardsoflondon.uk/
If you just want the London Eye in Midtown Madness 2: https://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.