Project Gotham Racing 4

It\'s raining. You\'re racing through a capital city at 120 miles per hour.

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You\'re in a Maserati 250F, a car that made legends of Stirling Moss and Juan Manuel Fangio (who in a single race, broke the Nurburgring lap record 10 times with one). You\'re powersliding like a bastard, and it\'s brilliant. You can only be playing Project Gotham Racing 4, a game that sings with its adroit refinement and howls with its exhaust notes. PGR2 may have made the legend and 3 took it into a new generation, but PGR4 cemented its reputation forever.In its time, PGR4 slipped by me at launch. I ended up getting it in the 2008 Christmas sales, and it made an amazing Christmas week game.

But it felt so small. Almost meek, even though it had committed spectacular crimes against racing and added a pretty amazing weather simulation. It felt like a fabulous DLC collection, or PGR3 as it should have been if Bizarre Creations had two extra years to work on it, and it felt horribly confined within a single DVD. Compared to the swagger and heft of PGR2, and accounting for the rush-job of PGR3 (as touched on in ), PGR4 is something weirder than a straight racing game sequel. It\'s a contraction and distillation of the PGR spirit on one hand, a ridiculous expansion and dilution on the other. PGR4 stands out for these kind of oppositions: cars vs bikes, sun vs snow, breadth vs focus, conservative vs radical, celebration vs funeral.

The Maserati 250F - still quite possibly the most beautiful racing car ever made.I can\'t think of many other games that are bursting with as many internal conflicts, just as I can\'t think of any other that had the sheer depth of taste to offer a Maserati 250F up for powerslides around Nelson\'s Column. And what a blast PGR4\'s take on car dynamics is. It\'s a shame that nothing has really come close to Bizarre Creations\' fusion of rigorous simulation and arcade shamelessness, but it\'s proof of how awesome the studio was.PGR4 is more than fun, it\'s beautiful fun. Beautifully balanced and beautifully rendered, especially in the noise department. Wastegate and turbo, gear whine and exhaust note - all sound wonderfully clear and authentic, years before the grunt of NFS Shift or Forza 4\'s raucous trumpeting. The balance in the raw experience of playing PGR4 is so finely pitched that it all combines wonderfully; it sounds as good as it looks, and it looks as good as it feels. It\'s a testament to studious refinement - PGR4\'s entertainment-slanted demonstration of the three disciplines form a chorus in glorious harmony.

It\'s just a shame that Bizarre\'s skill in carving the finest blend of the real and the cartoon was infected with the kind of madness that thinks adding motorbikes was a good way to take the series forward. Perhaps the bikes would have worked better if they\'d been given a proper playground - imagine being given the Isle of Man\'s TT track to thunder around.I tried - I really did try - to like the bikes, as I do love them in real life, but I just couldn\'t reconcile the difference in technique and performance. In short, they were s.t. But then maybe PGR4\'s deliciously tight car list was too much to resist. Why should I be struggling around on a Norton 500 Manx when I could be drifting for Britain in a Jaguar D-Type, BMW M1 or a 288 GTO Evolutione? There are so many more - the Sierra Cosworth, the Vanwall GPR (the UK\'s competitor to the 250F), the Ferrari 250 GTO, the Aston Martin DB4 GT Zagato, the Lotus Esprit Essex Turbo, the McLaren F1 LM and the game\'s ultimate Ferrari, the F50 GT.Of course, lots of these are carry-overs from PGR3, but the list is boiled down to perhaps the most sparkling car roster in any racing game ever, and some of that is down to the cars PGR4 introduced.

It\'s such a great compendium of mainstream and enthusiast legends that I honestly want it made mandatory in every racing game. Retroactively and without exceptions; these are the cars you simply must include. More so than Gran Turismo\'s gloriously sprawling and idiosyncratic encyclopedia, or Forza\'s rambling predictability.Today, PGR4 remains an extraordinarily good time-trial game. Pick a route, pick a class of car, load some old ghosts and go racing. Revel in getting the end out, or nail your braking and apexes - PGR4\'s flexibility is just lovely, and never steps too far into Ridge Racer or Burnout territory.

It\'s not aged too badly either. Compared to what\'s available today, PGR4 stands out as an achievement with a singular vibrancy and clarity. It\'s the end of a line pushing to be the best it can be - a rare thing in a series with dwindling returns, and the downsides don\'t diminish any sense of its peak performance. The snowbound Nordschleife is probably the racing genre\'s most bastard hard location - like Rainbow Road with a serious strop.While Blur (rightly) has its passionate fans and celebrants, the basic premise meant PGR was dead - when all you have left is to turn to Mario Kart, it\'s a sad day for a racing series that climbed such heights as be deservedly legendary. While this might be due to the crushing pressures of a changing marketplace, publisher negligence and unfavourable financial climates, the tragedy is no less significant.

PGR4 was the death of something wonderful, and while its explosion scattered seeds of excellence across platform stablemates (most notably Forza Horizon), that unmistakable PGR quintessence seems lost in the wind, along with its uncanny balance of the sublime and the ridiculous.The joyously rewarding Kudos system has left a colossal chasm too - another PGR legacy that should be mandatory. Forza might have nudged close at times, but it never captured the badass glee of PGR at full force. Long live PGR4 - your spirit and verve may have been clipped into too small a box, but an F50 GT around Trafalgar Tour is still splendidly exhilarating, and in a way that only PGR could pull off. In PGR4, it\'s perhaps the best that arcade-but-real racing will ever be.

Appropriately enough for a game that introduces motorbikes, PGR4 restores balance to a series that was beginning to wobble. PGR3 wasn\'t sure whether to be a fast racer or a game of technical driving. With PGR4, Bizarre Creations was sure it could do both, and so it proves.Key to achieving that are several things.

Tweaks to the Kudos system, which rewards and encourages stylish driving, work in tandem with revisions to the handling model, while new ideas about track design (bundled together under the awkward \'Racification\' banner) subtly promote good driving practices without shoving them through the windscreen.The influence of these elements is felt throughout. Arcade mode, the new home of PGR\'s traditional hunt for top-scoring medals, is less esoteric. Cone Sprints - tasks that involve navigating a regular track strewn with cone gates as quickly as possible - are able to emphasise the importance of speed despite their supremely technical requirements, with no loss of appeal. The two concepts, once conflicting, are now snugly entwined.This harmony between the two extremes of what Kudos and high performance cars respectively imply for a driving game also have an amusing added benefit: it\'s now actually less jarring to encounter partisan disciplines, like Super Cone Sprint, which involves navigating courses made entirely of cones and penalises you for straying outside their boundaries. Before, tasks like this were a symptom of PGR\'s inconsistency, but PGR4 charts a path toward them that nullifies their potential negative influence.These changes alone would have restored PGR to higher marks, but Bizarre certainly hasn\'t stopped there. PGR4 is the first time the developer has been able to take stock, perhaps even since it finished Gotham\'s precursor, Metropolis Street Racer, and that retrospection hangs like a broad grin across the face of the game. Everywhere there is delightful evolution.Speed Challenge tasks, for example, used to involve preserving speed through a single tricky turn in order to register a high speed through a camera trap.

In PGR4, you have to maintain performance and skill across four linked equivalents, reducing the possibility of fluke success. Rain and other effects add further variety to tasks and handling models that already test gamers in a multitude of interesting ways.Track design is also improved, but more potently so is track selection.

The amazing corkscrew ascents and hairpins of Quebec and the high speed cornering of Macau circuits prove to be a welcome complement to the return (and refurbishment) of PGR3\'s host cities.Also important was the decision to split single-player pursuits into Arcade and Career modes. The former will satisfy people who spent hours tearing PGR3\'s style system apart in search of the game\'s most lustrous medals, but the latter is a less biased affair, closer to something like TOCA Race Driver.Set out as a revolving, year-long calendar of events, it moves you between a variety of disciplines in a structured way, with various mini-championships, invitation and one-off events, and as your driving matures so too does the range of tasks available.That range is greatly increased by a back-of-the-box bullet-point: weather effects. Blustery rain and icy surfaces radically alter race requirements, amplifying the difficulty somewhat but also feeding into a similarly broadened Kudos system (and have the added benefit of making an already brilliant-looking game look even more amazing). The range of cars is more impressive than ever, with trusty favourites, more lower-end vehicles and a good range of specials.Kudos now comfortably rewards speed as well as style. Traditional rewards for powersliding, handbrake use, completely clean sections and passing manoeuvres slot into a framework bolstered by rewards for holding a good racing line and achieving and holding speeds in excess of the once-magic 170mph.Visual feedback is much better, too. As you tick past certain thresholds, the game gives you stars, eventually culminating in a five-star trick and a brief fanfare at the top of the screen, after which you can keep feeding the beast with skill and verve, or dial it back in order to bank the points. As ever, the risk of striking a surface and losing your gains gives each competitive race a supplementary infusion of risk.

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PGR4 is also more forgiving of slight brushes and upsets, allowing for surprisingly strong collisions with the barriers, but without reducing the appeal of hardcore pursuits like Arcade\'s tougher goals.There is even time to play into the new Kudos star system with Superstar tasks, where the objective is to obtain stars, not Kudos, meaning that you have to end and restart style sequences artificially. This is perhaps a step too far toward the bad old days of style over speed, but it remains a guilty pleasure.Both single-player offerings are surprisingly vast, too, despite their potential to diminish one another, and offer satisfyingly diverse paths into the game. Both are accessible thanks to the range of available difficulty brackets, but neither discriminates particularly. Arcade simply lets you dial the challenge up or down task by task, while Career asks you to choose an over-arching difficulty.

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