Xbox 360: Midnight Club Los Angeles

I'm new to the xbox 360 game console as of this Christmas when my wife and I purchased it as a gift to the family. So anything that I write about right now may have been covered by someone somewhere but I just have to share my impressions about one of the games I was given with our system last year. Since I love racing games I looked up and listed a number of different ones I'd like to have and Midnight Club Los Angeles had great reviews and is a street racer like I have enjoyed in the past with the NFS series on PS2. I had not played any of the MC games up to this point so didn't know what to expect. Well in a nutshell, I'll admit that in most ways my first impressions are that I could love this game, but there's a hitch. Police chases. That, for me, keeps it from being a favorite, in fact, it may be a game that ends up being traded for another in the very near future.

Ok so I know there will probably be comments here saying to me that I'm a wimp for not liking this aspect of the game or someone will comment on why you can't hve a great street racing game without the cops. I anticipate that. Here's my take before anyone states those obvious opinions similar to the above. First, although I play very regularly, I'm no overly hard-core gamer or pro/expert player by any stretch of the imagination. I play to relax, I play to escape from stress, not create it. I bet you know where I'm going with this.. I'm also content with playing a lower difficulty if a game is nearly impossible for me to get through it, so that I can experience the storyline if its that type of game. Anyway.. So being chased by cops isn't fun to me, first of all. I get a thrill out of pretending I'm driving faster than I should and I do it on my xbox 360 because there I don't have the consequences of real life "driving too fast through the city" type of behavior. My question is, "why would I want to recreate that?" I mean for me, this is a stress-inducing scenario, not one of release or relaxation. So long story short, I don't like the cop chases and I can't turn it off because its apparently integrated deeply in the game.

Its too bad too, since the game play other than that factor is pretty darn good, if you ask me. Before the cop chases I was looking forward to playing the game for awhile but apparently thats not going to be the case :( So anyway that's my rant for today.