The second game I’ve completed this year is another of the games I grabbed in the first month of owning my xbox back in 2006: Project Gotham Racing 3. PGR3 is an event based racing game from Bizarre Creations that was a launch title for the 360 and so is really a snapshot in history for a genre of games where the similarities between titles and franchises are greater than the differences. That’s a polite and overly complicated way of saying it’s a racing game from 2006 and things have moved on, but all racing games are 95% the same anyway.
The game features 21 tournaments that unlock as you progress through the list; each tournament completed gives you a medal and events are unlocked by having a certain number of these medals, for instance the final tournament requires you to have completed (at any difficulty) all 20 preceding tournaments. For most of the time you have more than one unlocked so if you’re stuck on one you can try something else in the meantime. Each tournament has a number of events that range from normal races to exercises in car control such as driving through cones or passing a speed camera at a certain speed. It falls down with the age old scaling issue that most racing games have, and before long you can afford a really fast car that blows the competition away for most of the events, but things like the cone challenges do manage to start to bring the challenge back in by requiring you to be able to control the car instead of just use a surplus of power in the straights to make up for lack of ability.
While racing you earn Kudos, which is a score based on your driving style. It rewards things like drafting, drifting and overtaking and crazy late breaking with a chain of points that build up as you race. This chain is broken by hitting the barriers, at which point those points are lost and you have to start a new chain. If you go for a little while without gaining any extra kudos then that chain ends and those points are added to your score. It’s an interesting system, but it was hard to shake the feeling that it was rewarding me for not driving smoothly. Even on events like the cone challenges where you have to beat a score by passing cleanly through cones I found that it was much easier to just power slide around the corners carefully and grab the majority of my points from that instead of paying any attention to the cones beyond avoiding hitting them.
The car selection is pretty focused, or limited depending on your point of view, as every car bar one or two DLC cars can reach 170mph. This means that there are a lot of cars from Ferrari and the like and you’re not going to be racing a Toyota Yaris in any of the races. Despite how that sounds, and despite the fact that the performance of the cars was chosen specifically to be fast, I found that it meant that the game lacked variety after a while compared to something like Gran Turismo. There just aren’t any oddball races that make you smile, or technically hard races with non-racing cars. Overall you can’t really hold this against the game beyond noting that it’s focused with it’s car choice.
When you start each race you choose which difficulty you want to race on, and are awarded only the medal for that difficulty. The lower difficulties have correspondingly easier conditions, such as only having to come 3rd in a race or getting a lower kudos score but this feels a bit odd as if you complete an event with a better result than you need to you don’t automatically get a higher medal so I found myself running events multiple times before I found my level. After a while I stopped doing this and just ran it all just below the point where I would have found it challenging just to complete the game, which isn’t exactly a good sign. It was just too frustrating to constantly run events again after I completed them, but I could see people going back and working on the higher levels over time if there now weren’t a lot of better driving games to play.
While there are only five locations in the game, four cities and the Nurburgring, the game gives you a really nice mixture of tracks. Each track has a range of options and layouts that actually give you a really large number of individual tracks in five locations. The least variations are of course at Nurburgring, the real track, although it does feature both the modern circuit and the classic incredibly long track that seems to be legally required to be in nearly every racing game ever made. For some events you start on one and end up on the other, which is really nice and I can’t think of another game where that happens although it does happen in real life racing. The city locations are interesting as there are a lot of variations that the game allows within each city. In fact there is also a track editor that lets you define a race by selecting points in the cities and the game automatically adds barriers to create that route. This is a really nice feature and actually feels more useful than something like the track editor in Gran Turismo 5.
In my initial play through back in 2006 I didn’t get very far through the game and seem to have gotten bogged down on a cone challenge that I managed to pass with no problems this week so I’ve obviously improved as a gamer quite a lot. It helps that driving game skills are transferable between titles and once you understand the basics of cornering, breaking intelligently and actually using controller you end up with a solid set of skills for all driving games.
Back in 2006 this was a pretty cutting edge game and graphically a large leap over the generation before it, but unfortunately launch title graphics doesn’t compare to the graphics of games from half a decade later so it does look very dated. On some sections the slightly jagged graphics caused the grey of the road to merge with the barriers and make looking into the distance, which is where you tend to focus in racing games, slightly difficult. It still plays OK, but the fact that there is a sequel that was released a couple of years after it makes it pretty hard to recommend to anybody, even on price. Some of the offline features are also now defunct although I believe if you could find somebody you wanted to play with then you could still play online.
The hidden gem in the game is in the garages in which you store your cars. There is a mode to wonder around your garage and look at the cars, but there are also a couple of arcade games machines sitting in the garage. These contain Geometry Wars, a game that was later released as two Xbox Live Arcade games and is a very good twin-stick shooter. Of course you are better off getting the stand alone games but at the time it was a really nice touch having very playable games inside of the game.
Nowadays with the uncertainty surrounding Bizarre Creations and their future it was nice to go back and remember where they came from back when PGR was the other racing series of choice on the 360.
Recent Comments