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It's all about Linkin Park and the Lancer Evo VII:
When Gotham first showed up at E3 way back when, everyone
started asking the same thing, “Is this a Gran Turismo
killer?” I’ll attempt to uncover the answer to
this in my review, but please, take heed. To compare these
two games would be like comparing apples and oranges. Yes,
they are both fruits, but one makes delicious chips when baked
and the other has enough oomph in its juice to be used as
an ingredient in household cleaners. These are both admirable
qualities to be sure, but hardly in the same category.
While GT3 is a highly technical, realistic, and infinitely
deep racing simulator that can take you on a roller coaster
ride of elation and frustration that can make you bite your
Logitech steering wheel (I’m guilty of that), Gotham
is more slanted toward fun. Some of you highbrow racing fans
out there may turn your nose up at the idea of a racing game
that demands you pop the handbrake at every other turn, but
you’d be screwing yourself out of a wonderful game if
you passed Gotham over simply because it’s not ultra-realistic.
In Gotham you do not have hundreds of cars to pick from, you
do not buy cars, you do not upgrade cars, and you do not race
for money. Instead, you have a handful of lovingly detailed
real-world cars (including Ferraris) that you earn by performing
well in the various types of races found in the game. When
you race, you race for Kudos which are awarded based on your
time, where you place in a race, precision driving, and style.
Kudos add up and eventually, when you have enough of them,
you are awarded with new cars.
If you see a pattern here, it’s because there is one.
Project Gotham Racing is all about unlocking new stuff. You
have to place in all the races in a beginner league before
you can unlock the next difficulty level. You have to get
all gold in a particular level of a particular type of race
to unlock a certain car. You have to play for a total of one
hour to unlock a new helmet style. The list of stuff to unlock
goes on and on and on… and on! The good news is, you
are told in most cases exactly what you need to do to get
your just reward. This is wonderful for anyone who’s
ever been frustrated by games that leave it up to trial and
error (or internet cheat sites) to tell you how to unlock
all the features of a game. I say that you paid good money
for the damned game, so they should at least tell you what
you have to do to get the full experience. I still have no
frickin’ clue how the hell I ended up unlocking Jiggly
Puff in Super Smash Brothers on the N64, but damned if I didn’t
manage to do it. I prefer Gotham’s “mission”
system of unlocking new features. Tell me what you want me
to do and let me do it. Simple.
The different kinds of races are also a great deal of the
Gotham charm. You have the simple race with a field of six
cars, the Kudos Challenge where winning is not enough if you
don’t have enough Kudos at the end of the race, and
the Arcade Race. This is perhaps one of the most fun in my
opinion, because it’s all about precision. You drive
as fast as possible through a course that is set up with various
pylons and try to not hit them or the wall. Pass between green
pylons for a point bonus and blue pylons for a bonus that
is directly based on your speed when you pass through them.
Chain together pylon points with points for sliding, going
on two wheels, and/or completing a section of track without
hitting anything and you get a combo bonus. It’s simple,
it’s fun, it’s addictive, and it’ll take
you weeks to get gold on every level. There’s also a
time attack race where you can strive to best your own personal
times and recorded ghost cars of your best laps. This can
also be a great deal of fun, even if it’s not quite
so integral to the unlocking of badass cars like the Lancer
Evolution VII. There’s even multiplayer mode thrown
in for good measure, but it’s limited to a two to four
player split screen race. It would have been nice to see a
game of H.O.R.S.E. or something similar with that Arcade Race,
but then again if I had everything I wanted then Bill Gates
himself would deliver Halo 2 to my door tomorrow morning and
challenge me to a death match for ownership of Microsoft.
Sadly, I think we all know the odds of that happening.
Graphically speaking, Gotham is highly impressive if not
as stunning as Gran Turismo 3 A-spec. Even so, it’s
a very close call. Both games have amazingly detailed cars,
but GT3 has more of them. Gotham has car damage where GT3
does not, yet it never has any affect on the car’s performance
so it’s purely cosmetic. The difference between the
games kicks into high gear (sorry for the car pun) when you
start looking at the tracks themselves. The tracks in Gotham
are real-life roads in major cities (hence the title) around
the world, and that’s damned impressive. They’re
even complete with landmarks. However, the buildings are nothing
more than simple, flat surfaced structures with highly detailed
textures mapped over them. This still looks awesome, but it
doesn’t compare to some of the outdoorsy and often times
equally real-world tracks of GT3. Don’t get me wrong
though. I am only comparing the two games because I know that’s
what the Sparkys of the world want. I again stress that when
taken as the sum of all their parts, they are very different
games and one should not be forsaken for the other based on
graphics alone.
Taken outside of the ominous shadow of GT3, Gotham is a gorgeous
game. Your in-car avatar even shifts gears when you do and
reaches for the emergency break when you hit the button. I’ve
yet to see him freak out in the San Francisco levels though,
which is a little inaccurate since I know most people would
be pissing their pants if their New Bug RSi was catching a
good fifteen feet of air. Yes, that’s right, your cars
can catch some serious air in this game. It’s not really
that unrealistic either. The unrealistic part is that these
cars’ axils don’t explosively disintegrate upon
landing.
Wrecking is also something that’s pretty impressive
in Gotham. It’s much easier to spinout an opponent,
and vise versa, than in GT3. That being said, it should also
be noted that the other cars can be damned aggressive. I’ve
been spun out before in a race and upon viewing the replay
I have no other option but to believe that the opposing driver
did it on purpose. The AI cars will even wreck each other
when you’re nowhere near them. Wrecks also bring out
some of the little details in the graphics engine as well.
Tires smoke, sparks fly, tail lights shatter and stop working,
metal crumples, and side mirrors snap and flop pathetically,
still attacked by their wiring. Yes, Gotham is not as real
as GT3 in many ways, but it’s still a graphical tore
de force. Hell, even those flopping side mirrors accurately
reflect the world around them.
One place where Gotham has GT3 nailed the wall, however,
is in the soundtrack department. Not sound mind you…
soundtrack. GT3’s soundtrack was a blasphemous, laughable
affair with such retched tripe as a GT3 exclusive song by
Snoop Dog. Snoop, my homey, word and all that most people
don’t like gettin’ down with their fly ass white
selves on the track to the sounds of a slow rap. I don’t
know who put together the soundtrack for GT3, but I think
they failed to notice that very very few European racecar
drivers are fans of Rap and R&B and therefore that shouldn’t
be included in the game. Even the technoesque sounds of the
Japanese soundtrack would have been far better than the crap
they put in the American version.
Now, I can’t attest to the quality of the Gotham soundtrack
that came with the game. That’s because I have never
listened to it. Gotham, gods bless it, supports the Xbox’s
most righteous ability to use your own music CDs to construct
in-game soundtracks. All my racing time has been spent tearing
up the pavement to the sounds of Shirley Manson and Linkin
Park and I have never looked back. I have a tremendous axe
to grind with Polyphony Digital for not putting any Garbage
songs into the GT3 soundtrack this time around. Could you
tell? My personal taste in music aside, you could listen to
the latest in putrid, depressing Christian music if you wanted
to, though I would advise only driving the VW Bug and imagining
a giant peace symbol painted on the hood. Maybe it’s
just me, but I don’t think I could push someone into
a guardrail at eighty miles per hour while listening to Christian
rock. Wait a moment… that may actually be fun….
<makes a mental note to try it sometime>
So, does Gotham top GT3? Again, because they’re so
different, it depends on what you want. If you want to be
able to buy a piece of shit Honda Civic and turn it into a
creaming racer with unholy amounts of upgrades, then you’d
better stick with GT3. If you want a lot of fun that demands
less real-world skill and more arcade style skill and zero
money management, go with Gotham Of course, if you’re
like me and you love games for who they are and not what they
are, then you should really get them both. So in short, the
answer is… “Move out of your mom’s basement,
get a real job, and buy them both.”
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s wrap this
up with how Project Gotham Racing stands on its own four tires.
-K'Tok
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