Fat Ninja

Since their debut on the Sega Dreamcast with Metropolis Street Racer, I’ve watched as the team at Bizarre Creations has driven their vision of console racing hard and fast to the forefront of the column. From their foundling days on the Dreamcast, to the rebirth of the franchise as Project Gotham Racing under Microsoft Game Studios, Bizarre Creations has labored intensely. Amidst some stiff competition where it’s often easier to simply draft behind the guy in front of you, they’ve truly broken away from the pack, striking a comfortable balance between arcade-style and simulation-style racing. The result is a racer that handles well enough to be challenging, but never feels so frustrating or unforgiving that you want to make a B-line for the nearest embankment. Their latest effort, Project Gotham Racing 3 (PGR3), for the Xbox 360 continues to build on this successful formula, while upping the ante on several fronts.

A Beautiful Day For a Drive

The biggest overhaul in the game, not surprisingly, is on the visual front. I feel confident in saying that at the time of writing this, you will not find a better looking racer on the market. Cars are modelled beautifully and curvaciously, right down to the yellow brake shoes on the Nissan Skyline. Featuring 80 of the world’s most coveted performance automobiles, each one is a carefully crafted work of art.

Complimenting the meticulously rendered car models are environments that accurately recreate some of the world’s most famous cities within two meters of their real-life counterparts. From London, to New York, to Tokyo, PGR3 turns them all into any speed-freak’s wet dream. Working in conjunction with the vehicle models, you’ll also find that these beautiful surroundings are reflected in realtime off of every applicable surface of your car. Add to this a very real sense of blistering speeds, dynamic lighting, cheering crowds, and camera flash-bulbs racing along side you as you hurtle through downtown Tokyo, and what you have is an incredibly engrossing racing experience.

First-Person Racer?Amplifying the immersion factor is the fact that Bizaare Creations went to the trouble of carefully mapping the interiors of every car in the game in order to deliver the first, fully functional first-person racing experience. Allowing you to get behind the wheel, you can use your right analog stick to check your side mirrors. This coupled with the rest of the realism that PGR3 delivers on a visual level not only pushes the envelope, but actually sets a standard that other developers should be measured against.

Style is Everything

Now, PGR3 isn’t all show. It’s got a lot under the hood in terms of gameplay. Winning the race has never been enough in the PGR series. Instead, it’s always emphasized winning with style. This means E-braking around sharp corners, catching air, and maximizing drafting technique to overtake opponents (to name a few). As the founding philosophy behind the franchise, this emphasis on finesse and style influences every aspect of the game and players are rewarded for it through a points system referred to as Kudos. The offline career pits you against AI-governed opponents and challenges range from simple street races in which you have to place, for instance, 3rd or better to Kudos challenges in which you need to score a certain number of Kudos in a given timeframe. The more challenges you complete, the more credits and esteem you gain, allowing you to obtain new ranks and purchase new cars. The online career mode, on the other hand, allows you to apply what you’ve learned in the offline mode as you face off against your peers in a battle to be amongst the best, though I’ve not delved into it very deeply just yet.

Final Thoughts

In closing, I’ll just say that PGR3 has renewed what was a waning interest in the racing genre. From a visual standpoint, there’s nothing else out there that comes close to creating this level of realism. And while the gameplay isn’t necessarily on par with the realism of the game’s graphics, the sacrifice is well worth it, in my opinion. Offering a pick-up-and-play experience, PGR3 manages to find a stable enough balance to engage the more casual racer fan while offering more than enough depth and challenge to satiate the more hardcore fans.

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