Pure Unadulterated Fun
If, when playing the game, you feel like you're being punished for some unknown sin, then its probably not the game for you.
To me playing Gran Turismo is like I've been given lines in school, you just seem to do the same thing over and over again and any fun that was there at the start rapidly vanishes into the ether.
The Project Gotham series, on the other hand, is a lot of fun.
Like GT is has some amazing looking graphics, although GT fans only seem willing to show off the replay graphics as opposed to in game visuals, it has a wide variety of tracks and cars to drive on them, you can only customise the paint work but anything more than that is getting way too detailed for my liking and the level of fun drops.
It doesn't make you repeat races over and over again to get a few extra credits, the AI cars actually have some idea of how to race rather than follow a pre-determined route, and even though its limited to a few broken windows and scratches, there is damage modelling on the cars.
Did I mention is also fun?
I did, okay then, just making sure.
Unlike the Need For Speed series the in game music is more than passable, I'd already pre loaded a few albums onto my hard drive to use as a custom soundtrack, but I've yet to play any of them, a few of the tracks are even already included in the game.
There's variety in the game modes as well, straightforward races and time trials make up a big portion of the career mode, but there are also One on One races, the Cone Sprints as seen in previous instalments, as well as Super Cone Sprints which do the same thing but much more intensely, Kudos v Time challenges where you are given an inadequate amount of time to finish the race but can stop the clock counting down by performing all the usual drifts, power slides and jumps that build up your Kudos.
Only once have I encountered any slow down, and that was in one particular race, at one particular corner in one particular mode… not exactly a common fault.
Bizarre have yet to produce a bad racing game, and with the latest version of Geometry Wars thrown in for good measure you can't really go wrong with this.