This article was first published in Edge Presents: The 100 Best Videogames in July 2007.
The racing line can be a difficult concept to come to terms with. It’s one thing to accept that there is a theoretically perfect route around every corner – an exact angle of approach, an optimum window for deceleration and acceleration – that dictates exactly how fast it’s possible to go around this bend in that car. But then comes the realisation that this immutable science of cornering goes against everything you associate with the glamour of speed: smoking tyres, squealing skids, tail-twitching brinkmanship. If it looks fast and daring, it probably slows you down. That contradiction has traditionally split racing games into serious simulations on one side and wish-fulfilling drift rides on the other. But one series has succeeded in finding a thrilling synthesis of the two: Bizarre Creations’ Project Gotham Racing.
Since its birth as Metropolis Street Racer on the Dreamcast, the series has often been perceived as drier than it is, thanks to its painstakingly recreated catalogues of cars and cities, and the need both Sega and Microsoft have felt to pitch it against Sony’s Gran Turismo. But though its head adheres rigidly to the principles of real racing, its heart has always belonged somewhere else entirely. The most obvious outward sign of this is the Kudos meter, the scoring system that rewards stylish manoeuvres and offers combo bonuses in a crescendo of escalating risk and reward that is pure arcade. In the Kudos-focused Cone Challenges, players dance their cars around the track in a tyre-smoking ballet that demands both precision and seat-of-the-pants flair.
Naturally, the showboating Kudos system is often at loggerheads with the more sober demands of pure speed in racing and (especially) time trials, a tension Bizarre has been happy to leave at the heart of its game. It’s better integrated in PGR2 than in other games in the series, thanks largely to the award of Kudos points for a ‘good line’ and the close tie between Kudos and game’s virtual currency. But mostly it remains a contradiction to savour, to use to play games with yourself and others: taunting your opponents and daring yourself with long, slow, Kudos-racking slides after building up a lead.
When you’re tired of tearing around tarmac, don’t forget that the original Geometry Wars is tucked away in Project Gotham Racing 2.
Gotham’s wild side never resided in the Kudos points alone, however. It’s the handling, above all else, that makes this a driving game with soul. Over the course of the first three games, Bizarre’s engineers refined an exquisitely supple model that toes the finest of lines between physical realism and absurdly, fabulously sustainable slides. Superb tactile feedback and fine calibration of the analogue triggers lets players take up almost permanent residence on the knife-edge – the moment at which traction breaks and the tyres begin to skim the surface of the road – but seldom punishes them by whipping away grip entirely. It takes liberties with the laws of physics that Gran Turismo wouldn’t dare, but without losing an ounce of credibility; the result is something that feels more real than the real thing, that feels like driving fast does in your imagination.
PGR3’s perfection of this model continued, but in the ostensibly rational decision to drop seldom-used slower cars from the roster, it lost something vital: context. The progressive depth of the handling model, and Bizarre’s romantic passion for the motor car, can only be fully appreciated across a broad spectrum of vehicles, and PGR2’s connoisseurish selection is by far the series’ best. The World Series classes of lightweight roadsters, lumbering SUVs and roaring classics are all just as memorable as the supercar climax, and the Car Challenge time trials – a set track and time to beat for every car in the game – is an irresistible and bottomless diversion, especially when competing for best times with friends. Even the elitist online racing community celebrated PGR2’s diversity by creating the game of cat and mouse, bringing the game’s iconic bookends – the Mini Cooper and Ferrari Enzo – together in a comically brilliant example of emergent, co-operative play.
However, the cars were never the only stars in Gotham. The city streets you race down always gave the series a huge advantage over its rivals in terms of eye candy and atmospherics, and here again PGR2 stands head and shoulders above its brothers. It may lack the big tourist hotspots, but it has far more variety and character across its 11 locations, far more opportunity for Bizarre’s designers to dig tests of skill and guts out of the street maps that no real track architect would consider. Edinburgh’s bone-rattling, stomach-churning cobbled twists; Moscow’s bewilderingly vast aprons of tarmac; Hong Kong’s terrifyingly narrow overpasses; Florence’s wide parabolas and tight right-angles: they all make PGR3’s tracks look pedestrian.
PGR2’s masterstroke, though – and one of the most widely copied moves in modern gaming – was the inclusion of Gotham’s first real racing track, the mighty Nordschleife Nürburging. This 14-mile ribbon of treacherous mountain road was not only an awe-inspiring challenge requiring a very different style of driving from most tarmac racers, it was also an expansive rural lounge where the game’s online community could catch a breath, chat, cruise the open road, invent its own diversions. It’s where this brilliant racing game finally came alive, became more than the sum of its parts; where PGR put the self-imposed restriction of its city-bound USP behind it and became probably the best all-round driving game there’s ever been.
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