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Project Gotham Racing 2 - First Impressions Preview

Mark Simons

20/06/2003

We take a look at a sequel to one of the most impressive Xbox racers around...

Project Gotham still remains one of our favourite games on the Xbox; the Kudos system, refined from the system first demonstrated in Metropolis Street Racer on the Dreamcast is quite simply a stroke of genius. The quality of the first Gotham game is even more impressive when you consider that Liverpool based Bizarre Creations, who were also behind the very successful F1 and F1 '97 on the PlayStation, had only a few months to port the game from the Dreamcast to the Xbox, include a new city, and polish up a few things most notably removing the infamous bugs.

Thankfully the success of PGR has allowed Bizarre Creations the space to take their time over the sequel; fortunately it seems that we won't have to wait as long as we had to for MSR.

The basic template laid down in PGR is being expanded on; the Kudos system, which saw you get points for drifting, getting the car on two wheels, grabbing some air, 360s and overtaking now includes drafting (otherwise known as slipstreaming), and sticking to the racing line. As before the more kudos you have, the more you can unlock - cars, courses and paint jobs. With Xbox Live! kudos will be used as a criteria for ranking online, so you can see who is the slickest racer in the world!

Gotham had courses set in London, Tokyo, San Francisco and New York. Each city had three areas that contained a variety of differently sized courses. This time around you will be able to speed around Barcelona, Edinburgh, Moscow, Florence, Chicago and Hong Kong, in addition to the four original cities. Our biggest problem with Gotham was that the course detail couldnât compete with the stunning cars; it seems like we won't be able to make the same complaint twice with the sequel.

The textures for the roads in the cities are just ridiculously detailed; for instance the cracks on the cobbles on the London course, just look at them, they shouldn't be that crisp in a videogame, it's just crazy! It appears Bizarre are really going to town with the full catalogue of Xbox tricks; bump mapping and specular shading have been used to wonderful effect and truly create a believable experience - all of this at 60 frames per second, and no doubt in widescreen if you wish. The one thing weâre really hoping for is some sort of depth filtering or focusing effect for the replay mode â“ truly the icing on a particularly tasty cake.

Bizarre Creations are managing to get some spectacular results from the Xbox; the cars, as you can see from the screenshots, are simply jaw dropping. In motion they are even better, lighting and reflection effects being some of the best around. Polygon levels are stupidly high, cars are self-shadowing and whilst they may look perfect in the screenshots, once you get behind the wheel you will be able to cause some significant damage with an improved damage model.

The cars in PGR 2 are even nicer to look at because most of them are cars that you would love to own. Ferraris, Porsches, Lotuses, BMWs, Pontiacs are just the tip of the iceberg, the car list should be about double that of the first game, and even the early ones are likely to be drool inducing.

The general structure of the one-player game should stay roughly the same; dividing the game up into chapters each containing a number of challenges which you can stake kudos on. We would imagine that Bizarre Creations would be coming up with some fiendish things to do, as well as having fun crafting some excellent race courses around the real-life locations. We found the kudos challenges in the first game to be one of the best things, well, since NiGHTS on the Saturn... An odd analogy you may think, but it's all about the analogue shoulder buttons, comboâing points, showing off and learning the courses...

Perhaps the biggest change for the game is that it supports Xbox Live! We mentioned this earlier with regards to ranking your kudos, and other factors, but Bizarre will also including full online play. Given how good Xbox live is, and how good Project Gotham was, and how good we expect this sequel to be, well, let's just say that we are sort of excited about the prospect of going online with this one. It is all well and good racing beautifully with computer opponents, and unlike many other driving games both Gotham and MSR had some fiendish artificial intelligence that resulted in close fought races; however PGR2 will no doubt improve on this further, but, nothing compares to racing real live opponents, as we've been finding out with our first forays with Xbox Live!

It should be worth briefly mentioning the audio, fans of the previous games in this line will know what to expect but, it is worth noting that Microsoft are apparently spending mega-money on signing real-life DJs from each of the cities to voice the radio stations in the game. With over 150 licensed tracks and, we hope, the same system of three different radio stations in each city, and the DJs to top it off, PGR2 should sound as real as it looks. Expect the cars to sound wonderful, and decent surround sound seems to be the standard these days.