A Beautifully Done Street Racer

Racing games are huge on consoles. Aficionados have long heralded the PC as the ultimate driving platform, but the console's quick start nature makes running a brief race rather attractive. And as racing games have proliferated on consoles, they've become a rather important genre. The XBox launch needed its flagship racing game, and Project Gotham Racing is just that.

If I had to stereotype this title, I'd say it fits somewhere between the arcade style fun of Ridge Racer and the serious almost simulator style of Gran Turismo 3. Luckily, Bizarre Creations has created this mix by taking the best of those play styles.

Kudos

This game certainly has lots of real world physics and car control, but that could have lead to a boring title. No actual race car driver tries to powerslide through a corner. It's going to slow them down, so they would instead use the tried and true: Slow in, Fast out. This game is no exception. However, they found a great way to reward your mishandling of the car by awarding you Kudos. These style points can unlock cars and other extras, and they're actually the goal of the Arcade Race type.

If you're more interested in serious racing, you can try the Quick Race type. This is a traditional race that rewards you for finishing ahead of your opponents. You can still earn Kudos during those races too.

And not to wear out the Kudo theme, but there's a third race type, the Kudos Challenge. This type is basically a series of events with races such as: timed run, hot lap-average, style challenge, top speed challenge, and street race. Before you start the races in these series, you can set your target. By raising the difficulty of that goal, you raise the bonus Kudos that they give you for that round. The bonus Kudos added with the Kudos that you earn in that round determine what medal you get.

The final race type is the Time Attack. You simply try to set best lap records on the various courses. If you do, you can save your ghost for later challenges. It's a pretty nice touch, but you can't earn Kudos, so I really wasn't too interested.

Race Around the World

Well not really. There are four locales: New York, London, San Francisco, and Tokyo. And much like Ridge Racer, there are numerous courses in those locales, so the races always feel fresh. That is unless you've been playing the same course for two hours trying to beat it.

Ouch That's Hard

The challenges in this game are pretty simple, but they very quickly ramp up into a spirit crushing test of will power. This game is hard...real hard. But it's totally fun, so you really don't notice that much. I think the most difficult part is actually continually driving out of control for Kudos. It goes against every instinct I've ever learned from Gran Turismo 3 and other games. But since the physics are so accurate, it's actually quite challenging to do things like controlled slides or catch big air. You try to pick a car that's squirrelly to rack up the Kudos, but they're really difficult to handle when you're over the edge.

So What Can I Drive?

Project Gotham thankfully uses real world cars. If you're in to cars or racing at all, then it's always appreciated when they pay the licensing fees for using real cars (Unless Ford paid to have the Focus in there). The cars range from the typical like MINI Cooper S and SLK 320 up to exotics like the Ferrari F50. The choice is no where near as complete as Gran Turismo 3, but its satisfactory. Unfortunately you can't make modifications to your cars either. But that's alright, because it gives you more time to concentrate on your Kudos.

Looks

This is one sexy street racer. The locales, their courses, and the cars look amazing. It competes head to head with Gran Turismo 3 on the visual realism. I actually think the replays might look better. They have the most accurate reflections that I've ever seen. You can see scenery and cars reflected perfectly. Even animated scenery is reflected perfectly.

The approach they seemed to take with this game is pure horsepower. There weren't any effects that really floored me like the heat on the cars in Gran Turismo 3. I do think they might do some FSAA (Full Screen Anti-Aliasing) to remove the jaggies, but they might just carefully craft their textures instead.

One nice aspect of this game is the damage modeling. It's a nice visual touch, but I don't think that damaging your car actually affected performance. One nice touch was the damage of your ghost in Time Attack. I had a translucent view of myself chasing me in my rear view mirror, and it only had one head light.

Control

And you'll certainly take on damage in this game. All of the courses are street courses with barriers. So expect to smack the wall a lot. There really is no great speed penalty for hitting a wall, but you won't get any Kudos if you keep hitting the wall and you may spin out.

I've mentioned that these cars can be hard to handle because you're pushing the envelope of control for Kudos. Luckily he XBox controllers handle the task pretty well. You use the left analog stick for steering, but the real gem are the two analog triggers. Use the right trigger for gas, and the left for the brake/reverse. This is key because this game is all about throttle control, and you need good analog input to get it done. The press sensitive buttons on the PS2 controllers wouldn't have been enough.

Is it good for parties?

The head to head racing is pretty fun in this game, but it's nothing revolutionary. You play split screen up to four players. I only played two players, but the frame rates were high. I never realized how different the multiplayer experience could be until I played Super Street Car Challenge. It was virtually unplayable as multiplayer. The cars actually handled differently and there was no sense of speed. I'm happy to report that nothing like that happened with Project Gotham.

And the Best for Last

This is the first XBox title that I've played that utilizes the Soundtrack feature. So this game is going to get my praise by default. What a great idea! Soundtracks are vitally important to racing games and action games alike. But it doesn't matter how much music you pack on the disc, the player will get bored and eventually turn it off. Even thought this title has a ton of "CD Tracks" and "Radio Stations", I got bored after awhile. Although it is important to note that the radio stations are actually prerecorded from actually radio stations and their DJs. How cool is that?

Well this dilemma is easily solved by ripping your own CD Tracks to MP3 using the XBox system menus. You can organize them into various soundtracks. Then once you're in the game you just add those songs to your playlist. Classic. I just hope games like Tony Hawk utilize this.