Wednesday, November 19, 2003
I was too pissed to talk about it yesterday, but I also got Project Gotham Racing 2 direct from Microsoft. Despite the name, it's the third in the series of city-based racers from Bizarre Creations, old friends of mine (and the first developer I ever visited -- aww). The first was Metropolis: Street Racer on Dreamcast, which had a LOT of good ideas but just didn't do it for me. The two main innovations in the game were the Kudos system and the tracks. Kudos points are basically "style points"; ie, it's nice to drive the fastest, but you're also rewarded for driving with style. Powerslides, jumps, etc all contributed to your Kudos. And the tracks were essentially the main draw, because Bizarre were the first to accurately and completely model a city and use those real city locations for tracks. And they didn't just set one or two tracks in each city (San Francisco, Tokyo and London), but well over 30, from tiny stunt loops to huge endurance races. Unfortunately, it was punishingly hard and suffered from myriad other annoyances that despite the promise didn't do it for me.
Project Gotham Racing, a cleaned-up version of M:SR with New York tracks thrown in, did. It fixed everything I ever disliked about M:SR and was an incredible game to play. So when they announced Project Gotham Racing 2... and announced that it'd be fully playable online... and said that among the 10 cities was HONG KONG (something I had personally been lobbying the folks at Bizarre to include since the days of M:SR, though I doubt that factored into their mind when picking it!)... well, I was happy. And now that I have it, I'm ecstatic. It's amazing.
Aside from the tight control and super-cool tracks (set around the Convention Centre, Wan Chai and Admiralty), I love the integration with the Xbox's online service, Xbox Live. It's making the game really enjoyable, and not just in multiplayer racing... because I haven't actually raced anyone online yet. Xbox Live is all over the SINGLE player game, too. Whenever you finish a single player race, it immediately shows you the worldwide ranking board for the track you just finished and where your Kudos total places on it. I went to the Time Trial mode to check out a few Hong Kong tracks and noticed that you could download the "ghosts" of the top times on the board. "Ghosts" are basically recordings of someone else's lap; basically, you see a translucent version of their car re-tracing their exact route during their record-setting lap. It is SO MUCH EASIER to try and beat a top time when you can see it in front of you (you don't have to "visualise" a gap of .013 seconds -- you can see it). So I set to work trying to break into the top times on the Hong Kong tracks because, well, Hong Kong is my town. I have to master my own city. And after placing in the top 10 in two tracks, I finally broke through and my time is the #1 time on the Hennessey Road track. Yeah, it's early days and will likely be crushed by other, more skilled racers, but there is something incredibly cool about knowing that right now, I am the King of Hennessey Road. And that somewhere, people are downloading my own "ghost" to try and beat me. There is nobody on the planet better than me at this track.
Mind you, there are 92 tracks...
Posted at 11:48 PM
