AlexMax
11-21-2003, 07:44 PM
Yeah...
It's never been a better time to be an Xbox owner. First Rainbow Six 3, and now this beauty of a game. I'm so happy...
Anyway, what is Project Gotham Racing 2 anyway? It's a 'realistic' racing game, with real world cars and locations, though in terms of actual control, its a great deal more arcady than something like Sega GT 2002 or Gran Turismo 3. Which is fine, if you like arcady racers.
The thing that has always been unique about Project Gotham (And Metropolis Street Racer on the Dreamcast, the forerunner to the Project Gotham series) was the fact that you earned points...called Kudos...durring the race for 'stylish' driving. In PGR2, you're rewarded for powersliding, following a good line through a turn, going up on two wheels (either front two, rear two, or sideways), catching air, and a number of other things. How much Kudos factor in depends on what kind of racie you're racing, but they can either be 'bonus points' as is the case in street races, or be an intergal part of trying to complete a level, as is the case with 'cone challenges'.
You can do any number of things in the main game. The meat of the game is the Kudos Challenge. In Kudos Challenge, you progress through the car classes and beat all of the levels in that car class. The levels might ask you to score a certain amount of kudos, speed up to a certian speed, race against a pack of cars or against one other car, or set a fast lap by yourself. You can choose the skill level of each individual level, and the harder the skill is, the more kuros you get for completing the race with the specified conditions. You can retry a kudos challenge level as many times as you want, and if you score higher on a challenge than you did before, the difference is added to your kudos total. Once you accumulate a certain amount of Kudos overall, you get kudo tokens, which you can exchange for cars. There is also an arcade and time trial section, which has loads of options unto itself, that quite frankly, I havn't scratched the surface of yet...(Kudos Challenge takes up most of my time)
Of course, the most intergal thing to any realisticlooking racer are its cars. And man oh man, does PGR2 have cars. And cars.. And cars. While it can't hope to approach the number of cars in a game like Gran Turismo, it features a very large selection of cars from many major...and not so major...car manufacturers. And it has the coveted Ferrari licence, which it makes liberal use of.
Now this is where it gets neat There is a section of the game called the Showroom, where you can walk around from room to room and see every car in the game, even the one's you havn't unlocked yet. Plus, you can take almost all of them out for a test drive on a circuit track, even if you havn't unlocked them. A neat feature to be sure. Not only that, but five empty showrooms are reserved for Xbox Live cars, which have yet yo be released.
This is all fun and everything, but the absolute best part about PGR2 is how it handles online play. There are eight player races over Xbox Live, with either normal racing or Kudos racing. You even have a seporate Kudos count for Xbox Live, and you can even earn kudos tokens and cars this way (though it takes much longer). But thats only scratching rhe surface. There are online scoreboards EVERYWHERE and for EVERYTHING, online and offline, so you can see yourself ranked against other people around the world. Whats more, you can download ghosts of the top players and race against them, to see if you really have the stuff to take them on.
So yeah.....this game owns absolutely. If you have an Xbox, its a no brainer. If you like racing, it just might be worth purchasing a box and Live over.
It's never been a better time to be an Xbox owner. First Rainbow Six 3, and now this beauty of a game. I'm so happy...
Anyway, what is Project Gotham Racing 2 anyway? It's a 'realistic' racing game, with real world cars and locations, though in terms of actual control, its a great deal more arcady than something like Sega GT 2002 or Gran Turismo 3. Which is fine, if you like arcady racers.
The thing that has always been unique about Project Gotham (And Metropolis Street Racer on the Dreamcast, the forerunner to the Project Gotham series) was the fact that you earned points...called Kudos...durring the race for 'stylish' driving. In PGR2, you're rewarded for powersliding, following a good line through a turn, going up on two wheels (either front two, rear two, or sideways), catching air, and a number of other things. How much Kudos factor in depends on what kind of racie you're racing, but they can either be 'bonus points' as is the case in street races, or be an intergal part of trying to complete a level, as is the case with 'cone challenges'.
You can do any number of things in the main game. The meat of the game is the Kudos Challenge. In Kudos Challenge, you progress through the car classes and beat all of the levels in that car class. The levels might ask you to score a certain amount of kudos, speed up to a certian speed, race against a pack of cars or against one other car, or set a fast lap by yourself. You can choose the skill level of each individual level, and the harder the skill is, the more kuros you get for completing the race with the specified conditions. You can retry a kudos challenge level as many times as you want, and if you score higher on a challenge than you did before, the difference is added to your kudos total. Once you accumulate a certain amount of Kudos overall, you get kudo tokens, which you can exchange for cars. There is also an arcade and time trial section, which has loads of options unto itself, that quite frankly, I havn't scratched the surface of yet...(Kudos Challenge takes up most of my time)
Of course, the most intergal thing to any realisticlooking racer are its cars. And man oh man, does PGR2 have cars. And cars.. And cars. While it can't hope to approach the number of cars in a game like Gran Turismo, it features a very large selection of cars from many major...and not so major...car manufacturers. And it has the coveted Ferrari licence, which it makes liberal use of.
Now this is where it gets neat There is a section of the game called the Showroom, where you can walk around from room to room and see every car in the game, even the one's you havn't unlocked yet. Plus, you can take almost all of them out for a test drive on a circuit track, even if you havn't unlocked them. A neat feature to be sure. Not only that, but five empty showrooms are reserved for Xbox Live cars, which have yet yo be released.
This is all fun and everything, but the absolute best part about PGR2 is how it handles online play. There are eight player races over Xbox Live, with either normal racing or Kudos racing. You even have a seporate Kudos count for Xbox Live, and you can even earn kudos tokens and cars this way (though it takes much longer). But thats only scratching rhe surface. There are online scoreboards EVERYWHERE and for EVERYTHING, online and offline, so you can see yourself ranked against other people around the world. Whats more, you can download ghosts of the top players and race against them, to see if you really have the stuff to take them on.
So yeah.....this game owns absolutely. If you have an Xbox, its a no brainer. If you like racing, it just might be worth purchasing a box and Live over.