Challenges range from racing and time trial affairs that are about speed to more technical cone and drift challenges that are about stringing Kudos-heavy moves together, and each adopts a different route through one of the game's city areas - London, Vegas, Tokyo, New York and Nurburgring (Ok so Nurburgring's not a city, but it might as well be for the distance and range it offers). Career mode allows you to pick one of five difficulty settings before tackling each challenge - and your daring or confidence in your ability informs the choice, because if you don't live up to the goal you've set you won't bank any points. PGR3 arrives on Xbox 360 with surprisingly little to add to the mechanics and structures that underpinned PGR2. The closest you can get to Japan in a game without flying JAL wearing Connect 4 as a hat. And that clicking of the Kudos meter, which tots up points for drifting, drafting, riding the curb tightly, and comboing it all together and suchlike, tickles your ears with the promise of points to go with your podium positions. It's not a realistic game - you bump and scrape when you should be deflating like a turbo-accordion, and the collisions between cars on the track and the AI drivers' apparent lack of concern about them and the way you're all bashing past each other is wrong, but that's easily overlooked because the core skill that it asks you to develop is so satisfying. It was inspired in Metropolis Street Racer, it was inspired in the first PGR. Applying this to exiting tight turns and using a model that rewards sharp braking and traction loss was inspired. When you clamp the accelerator and fishtail the back of the car and then wrestle it straight, it isn't just forgiving, it actually awards you points. When it comes to that warning about not using these driving techniques in real-life that devs whack on the front of racing games these days, it lurks somewhere in the gap between Ridge Racer's 'because you will die' allusions and GT's 'because nobody's this good'. That's about as close as I've ever come to PGR in real life.Īnyway, PGR was always a brilliant idea. Until it did that, it sounded like Kudos-clicking. What I used to do when I drove in was lock the steering hard right to enter, and then see how far I could get up the road as the steering wheel unravelled itself before the indicator registered the straightening and clicked off. To get onto it you had to do a 90-degree right turn. I used to live down a road that curved left, banana-like round to my house at the end.

Project gotham racing 3 car list