I like racing games, but I haven’t found many recent releases in the genre that really genuinely excite me and thrill me.
Part of the reason for this is that there only appears to be two types of racing game these days: fairly hardcore simulations of varying degrees of severity, and open-world content games that have so much stuff in them they end up feeling directionless.
On a whim the other night, I popped 2005’s Project Gotham Racing 3 into my Xbox 360. And I promptly had a very good time with a type of racing game that it doesn’t feel like we really see any more. Let’s get more into it after the jump.
Project Gotham Racing 3 is, like its three predecessors (don’t forget Metropolis Street Racer), an event-based street racing game with arcade-style handling, licensed cars and courses based on real locations. The emphasis is not just on driving fast, but also on engaging with an “extreme sports”-style scoring system, whereby you accumulate “Kudos” points for various daring manoeuvres during races. The exact focus depends on the individual event; sometimes you simply need to beat the clock or a field of opponents, while at other times you have a target score to attain.
The Project Gotham series, right from its first installment Metropolis Street Racer on Dreamcast, has always taken pride in its tracks unfolding in realistic locales, and indeed in Project Gotham Racing 3 you’ll find yourself racing around London, Tokyo, New York, Las Vegas and the Nürburgring. Each setting very much has its own character, and the way in which the different races all take slightly different routes through the streets mean that the game is constantly interesting and varied, particularly when combined with how differently all the various events play.
There’s also a wonderfully inclusive approach to difficulty. The “medium” difficulty level is pitched at relatively experienced racing game players, but doesn’t demand that you drive with absolute perfection or win everything; it instead strikes a good balance whereby you do have some scope to overachieve, but you also never feel like you’re banging your head against a brick wall when you come up against a particularly tough challenge. If, however, you do want those tougher challenges, there are two harder difficulty levels above “medium” — and two easier below it, too. Plus you can pick your difficulty on a per-event basis, meaning you can always come back and replay events once you get better cars.
The game is also balanced in such a way that you never really need a particular car in order to progress; instead, the challenges scale themselves according to the rough performance level of the car you choose to take them on with. This means you can theoretically stick with the first car you pick up throughout most of the game — or you can simply indulge yourself and buy new cars as you progress, as and when you feel like it.
While the game does track the medals you attain in the events (clearing a particular difficulty level awards you an appropriate medal, with the aforementioned “medium” difficulty corresponding to silver medals) along with a somewhat opaque “rank” system that it never really explains, there’s no experience point system or anything like that, so no need to grind, and never any feeling that you’re not playing “efficiently” enough. Accumulating various total numbers of Kudos over your complete playthrough does unlock certain cars, but there are plenty available without even touching these unlockables.
You know what’s nice about all this? The fact you can just sit down with it and it not feel like it’s a massive fucking commitment just to start the damn thing up. There’s no grinding for experience to “level up”, there’s no sense that you need to repeatedly play the same events just to unlock the one car that can actually beat the next challenge and there’s just a generally joyful, exuberant feel to the whole thing that I haven’t felt for quite some time.
At this point, I’m sure someone is thinking about bringing up the recent Forza Horizon games. But Forza Horizon falls into the “content game” trap mentioned above; its sprawling open world is fun to drive around, but it can also leave the whole thing feeling overwhelming and directionless — to say nothing of the somewhat patronising way Forza Horizon 4 in particular allows you to continue to higher and higher tiers of competition even if you come dead last in events. It just felt meaningless after a while. The Participation Trophy of video games.
No; the thing I like about Project Gotham Racing 3 (and other games like it, but we’re specifically talking about PGR3 today) is the fact that it does place those constraints on you. There’s no freeform driving around, there’s no going off-piste and finding shortcuts (or indeed going “the wrong way” other than straight up turning around) — just a course laid out in front of you, asking you to master it.
And Project Gotham Racing 3’s handling is an absolute delight, even with a controller. I invested in a steering wheel setup a while back and very much enjoy it for those times when I am in the mood for outright driving simulations, but the great thing about Project Gotham Racing 3 is that it is an unashamed console game, designed to be enjoyed to its full potential with nothing more than a regular controller.
The handling of the cars is responsive and swift. Throwing them into a drift is simplicity itself. The in-cockpit view (new to this installment in the series) features a strong degree of “head sway”, giving the real impression that you’re being thrown around by these cars as you slam them around corners.
And that noise. That noise. That “tickytickytickyticky” noise any time you’re earning Kudos. That noise. I’d forgotten how good that noise was, how wonderfully satisfying it was to pull off a particularly impressive manoeuvre and hear the “tickytickyticky” of your score counting up. How satisfying and buttock-clenchingly intense it feels to build up an ever-increasing combo, knowing that one clip of a wall will send all those precious Kudos points straight into the dustbin. It’s absolutely wonderful, and I haven’t felt anything even remotely like it from more recent racing games I’ve played.
Bearing all this in mind, I find it quite surprising that Project Gotham Racing 3 — or indeed the series as a whole — doesn’t really get talked about much these days. These were big-name games in both the original Xbox and Xbox 360 eras, yet these days it almost feels like both them and their creator Bizarre Creations are largely forgotten.
There’s probably a combination of factors at play here. Firstly, Bizarre Creations famously went under after Activision spectacularly failed to promote their first post-Project Gotham racer Blur (itself an absolutely excellent game for different reasons to Project Gotham). And secondly, none of the Project Gotham Racing games are “backwards compatible” on Xbox One or Xbox Series whatever consoles.
Given how “big” these games were, you might think that absolute madness, but to understand why, it’s worth pondering exactly what something being “backwards compatible” on the later Xbox models actually entails.
You see, the Xbox One and Xbox Series whatever actually aren’t “backward compatible” at all (except the Series plays One games, leading some to argue that the Series consoles are more of a “PS4 Pro” situation than an actual new generation, but I digress). No; in order for something to be “backward compatible”, it specifically has to be “rereleased” digitally as a port for the more recent consoles, and the supposedly “backwards compatible” part is where you can put your original Xbox or Xbox 360 disc in the drive and use this as a “product key” to automatically download the recompiled Xbox One/Xbox Series blah version.
Since this “backwards compatibility” is actually a “digital rerelease” — you’ll note that pretty much everything “backwards compatible” you can just buy digitally on the Xbox storefront if you don’t have a disc — we start getting into licensing ugliness with games like Project Gotham Racing 3, which features not only a soundtrack of licensed music, but also licensed cars. And do you think Microsoft wants to pay up for the licenses of cars and music from a 19 year old game? Of course they don’t. So they don’t. And that means you can’t play any Project Gotham games on more recent Xboxes. And that, in turn, means that people who weren’t playing Project Gotham Racing 3 19 years ago aren’t talking about it in 2024.
Which is sad, because Project Gotham Racing 3 is a lot of fun. A lot of fun. Sure, it shows its age a bit — the textures are low resolution, there’s some ugly dithering on distant, hazed or partially transparent objects (although Unreal Engine still does this today), frame rate snobs will scoff at how it runs at 30fps, load times feel quite long in this age of high-speed SSDs, and modern racers just straight up look nicer… but it plays wonderfully. It occupies an absolutely perfect sweet spot between the typically more realistic simulations that feature licensed cars, and the overexaggerated arcade handling of purely fictitious racers like the Ridge Racer series.
It is an absolutely wonderful game, and a breed of racing game we just don’t see any more. I think that’s a real shame. So if you, like me, tend to veer more towards the arcade racer end of the spectrum and like the idea of flinging real cars around real places at unreal speeds, I highly recommend you find some means of playing Project Gotham Racing 3. You can get an Xbox 360 for dirt cheap these days, and I bet a copy of Project Gotham Racing 3 won’t set you back more than a pound or two. No excuse.
Anyway, I’m off to enjoy some more of that sweet tickytickytickyticky action. I need more. I can’t get enough.
More about Project Gotham Racing 3
Want more Pete? Check my personal blog I’m Not Doctor Who, and my YouTube channel ThisIsPete. If you enjoy what you read here, please consider buying me a coffee.
Did you know you can subscribe to MoeGamer as a newsletter and get new posts delivered right to you? Just pop your email address in below and subscribe for free. Your address will not be used for anything else.