Project Gotham Racing 2 Preview
We spend some quality time with Microsoft and Bizarre Creations' upcoming Xbox racer.
Project Gotham Racing 2 is arguably one of the most anticipated games for the Xbox this fall. The game is a follow-up to the still-impressive Xbox launch title Project Gotham Racing from UK-based Bizarre Creations, a veteran developer whose devotion to and skill at crafting gorgeous and technical racers began with Metropolis Street Racer on the Dreamcast in 2001. For the first Project Gotham game, Bizarre cooked up an impressive title that married an evolution of the technical racing style it experimented with in Metropolis Street Racer with stunning visuals. Bizarre's commitment to keep the burgeoning Gotham franchise evolving toward perfection continues in a big way in Project Gotham Racing 2--the latest installment in the series refines the gameplay of its predecessor, adds more content, refines its presentation, and, most significantly, takes the action online via Xbox Live. We had the chance to sit down with a preview version of the game, and we have come away suitably impressed by Bizarre's ambitious sequel. Project Gotham Racing 2 improves on nearly every aspect of its predecessor and should please racing fans greatly.
The first thing that will jump out at you when you fire up the game is the revamped presentation, which is considerably more polished, thanks to a slick interface. As before, you'll need to create a profile for yourself before hopping into the game. You'll be honing your skills in several game modes. As you go through the game, your performance in the various modes will be logged into your profile so you can track the ebb and flow of your racing ability through the game. The single-player game will feature four modes: kudos world series, arcade racing, time attack, and leaderboard challenge. Kudos world series is a series of races set around the world. The mode is broken up into 14 individual car series, each of which corresponds to a specific car class. Each series is made up of individual kudos events. As you complete each event, you'll unlock more in that series. Once you've completed all of them, you'll unlock the next series. You'll earn medals as you complete the various challenges. Arcade racing will offer three types of races: street racing against AI opponents; timed runs, which require you to beat the best times on a track; and cone challenges, which will send you speeding through a gauntlet of diabolically arranged cones. Time attack forces you to set and beat times on various tracks.
The game's difficulty will now run from novice to expert, and you can play through the game on any of the difficulty levels. The addition of a new ranking system that scales according to the difficulty you're playing on makes the game more accessible to players of varying skill. Along the same lines, Bizarre has tweaked the game's kudos system, which rewards players for skillful driving during a race. This time out, the game will be more forgiving about docking points when you don't race well. For example, whereas as in the first Project Gotham Racing you would be deprived of points if you bumped a wall, in PGR2 you will be docked only a percentage of points based on the nature of the impact. So slightly scraping a wall will cost you only a few points as opposed to all of them. However, if you smack into a wall hard, you can kiss your points good-bye. The kinder, gentler kudos system will also provide you with ample opportunities to earn points, and you'll be provided with a breakdown of where you earned them at the end of each race. The game features 12 categories in which you can earn points.
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- Microsoft Game Studios
- Bizarre Creations
- GT / Street Racing
- Release: Nov 17, 2003 »
- ESRB: Everyone
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