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Really shows off the gorgeous graphics of the XBox 360

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 59 / 61
Date: November 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

If you're a racing fan, this is a must-have game for your XBox 360. If you're just looking to see how good the graphics are on the XBox 360, at lesat rent this game. It's quite impressive!!

You choose from a number of real cars. There are Ferraris, Jaguars, Aston Martins, Lamborghinis, McLarens and much more. The cars look AMAZINGLY good with full detail, and you can choose the color as well.

You race your car through a number of circuits around some quite recognizeable towns. You end up in London, Las Vegas, New York City, Tokyo and Nurburgring. Each location is full of detail. When you drive down the river Thames in London you pass Big Ben. Vegas has gorgeous hotels that I remember from my visits there.

Doing fun stunts earns you Kudos points, so not only are you aiming to win your races to earn cash, but you also want to rack up Kudos points. That makes even the easier races fun, as you do spins, slides and much more.

The world you're in is quite interactive. The people watching the race take flash pictures as you drive past - but if you crash into a fence near them, they all cringe. There are clouds floating by overhead. Mostly, though, there are other racers on the track trying to get by you and steal the lead.

We found the controls to be very intuitive, and the cars handled quite nicely. Note that this is a GAME racing system - i.e. it's not pure realistic. If you smash into a wall at 100mph, your car does not explode into a thousand shards of metal. You simply spin off gently and keep going. That being said, most gamers really don't want a "realistic" racing game. They want a fun one, and this game delivers across the board.

I have to admit that for me, half the fun in this game is the gorgeous landscapes. In Vegas, you drive past the Excalibur and Treasure Island, and the details are picture-perfect. New York, New York is by the track in quite amazing clarity.

I also love the sound in this game - because the soundtrack options are simply awesome. You can choose from a number of soundtracks, from classical to alternative to J-Pop and more. You can even stream in music from your iPod or other MP3 player!

I suppose if you hate racing games, you probably will find this game to be boring. You're just racing cars around in circles with pretty scenery and great sound. But you'd have to be in the minority to not enjoy this game. The cars are amazing. The graphics are amazing. The sound is amazing. Because of the multiplayer options, including up to 8 simultanous live players online, you could play this game for eternity and still find people to challenge you.

If you want even MORE of a challenge, you can even create your own custom route through their maps! You can design your very own custom lap system and challenge others to play on it. Talk about variety!

Highly, highly recommended!

Great Addicting Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: December 02, 2005
Author: Amazon User

My girlfriend was against me getting an Xbox 360 until she played this game. There's something about this game that really makes it feel as if you're really driving. The attention to detail is amazing. This is the game I put in my Xbox 360 to play when company comes over and they say "oh, you have the new Xbox...". It is totally fun and addicting. My girlfriend is stuck playing the career mode and I actually come home to see her playing it.
This is a funn game.

Even if you are just looking for a racing game to round out your 360 collection, look no further than PGR3.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: March 10, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Project Gotham Racing 3 was the first game I got for my 360. In fact, I got a copy for Christmas before I even had a 360! Let me start by saying this, PGR3 is a great game, if you are looking for a racing game to add to your 360 collection, get PGR3.

The game plays like a forgiving racing simulator. It's not quite as realistic as Forza, but it's defiantly not as "arcade" as Burnout or Need for Speed. It took me about half an hour to get used to the controls, and about an hour or two to get good. The difficulty settings are very well implemented. Before each event, you chose the difficulty setting you want to race at. The first time I played through the game, I did almost everything on the medium (silver) difficulty. I completed all the events in about 12 hours without too much difficulty. I am currently working though it on the hard (gold) setting, and I am about a third of the way through.

The graphics are very good, but flawed in one way; there are a lot of "jaggies." On my HDTV, there is a very thin black jagged line around each car, which is a little distracting sometimes. However, if you don't have an HDTV, then you have nothing to worry about. On my regular TV the game looks like a really good original xbox game, and there are no jaggies.

The sound in PGR3 is amazing. There are five different views that you can drive in, and the sound of the car engine changes accordingly. When you race using the "dash view" (from inside the drivers seat), the engine sound is slightly muffled and just as it would in the real world. When your racing using the "on car" views (where you don't see any part of your car), the engine is noticeably louder and clearer. Each car has its own distinct sound, which is very impressive, and shows the length that the developers went to make a great game.

PGR3 also has a very good soundtrack. There are around eight different genera's of music including rock, hip-hop, classical, techno, etc. If you can't find something you like on the game's soundtrack, or you just feel like racing to your own music, you can easily play songs off of the hard drive or even you iPod.

The main point of any racing game is the cars. In PGR3, there are about 80 cars. They represent a cross section of automobiles. They have classic cars, racing cars, dream cars, concept cars, they have everything. The cars are grouped into classes based on performance. The only thing I would have changed about the cars would be adding a specific "racing class" and adding more racing cars.

The long term value in any "next-gen" game is its online multiplayer, and PGR3 has an amazing multiplayer. When you race online, you race against up to 8 other people in fun, lag free races. It's similar to Halo 2's matchmaking, where the developer's group races (game types) together and you choose what kind of event you want to race in. The people are very respectable, and much less annoying than those who play many other games. I have only run into a few annoying kids, and usually, the rest of the racers warn each other about disruptive players (example: "Hey, the kid in the blue Ferrari is a jackass, watch out for him.").

All in all, PGR3 is a great game, if you love racing games, than you will love Project Gotham Racing 3. Even if you are just looking for a racing game to round out your 360 collection, look no further than PGR3.

Xbox 360's answer to gran turismo 4

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: November 25, 2005
Author: Amazon User

first of all i like the gran turismo series,,,except gt 3 which was a let down(i call that a d-jam meaning that it sucked and was craptacular)... then comes along the project gotham series,,which was very nice indeed..lots of fun all around
i got this game on the x box 360 launch night and i was floored when i loaded this in my shiny brand new system...this is next gen racing at its finest... the controles are fluid very responsive..the graphics are top notch ! all the hot cars are there..from mustangs to the shelby cobra to the corvette and all the exotics as well..the street race mode is my favorite because you can just jump in and race..instant gratification :) this game should be taken for a spin vrooooom!! smell that rubber burning !

dont let others make up you mind for you rent this game or buy it you wont regret it

Really Fun

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: November 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game loving the rest of the Project Gotham Series. The whole series is amazing, but this one sure takes the cake for the best.

The graphics are amazing on this next gen game. The enviornments, the cars, the fans... It's all really cool.

The single player is a little different from the last ones. In this there are little sections of about 4 different kind of objectives (Time Trial, Cone Challenge, One on One, and a lot more). You get kudos from completing these challenges. Once you have enough kudos you can buy any car you want (which is different than PGR2).

Online is different too. In this you can choose any car you want (if you've bought them offline or not) if the game is unranked. There are also different classes of cars compared to the others. This game uses the system of Class A, Class B, ect. It's not like the others where you can choose American Muscle and stuff like that.

Overall this is a really awesome game. If you are a fan of racing this is a must have.

Great racing game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: February 26, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I've played the NFS games and this was my first venure into the Gotham world. I should say I'm really hooked. The solo career mode is very addictive. There are a variety of challenges (cones, time-kudos, street race) and they keep the game interesting. The kudos, the credits you get for winning games are just right (it won't take you ages) to unlock new cars. The music and graphics are great. I also love the online play and per car stats you can maintain. The controls are very good (I love drifting!) and overall this was a surprisingly fun game! I've been playing straight for weeks now :)

IGN review

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: November 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Read it here: http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/667/667076p1.html
they gave it an 8.8 out of 10.0

Best Racing Game I've Ever Played!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: January 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Project Gotham Racing 3 is easily the best racing game I've ever played - period! I've been a lukewarm fan of racing games until this game came along. Until PGR 3, my favorite racing game was the Need For Speed franchise. However, I hated NFS Underground. There was just too much stuff that interfered with actually getting to race for my liking. Perhaps it shows my age, but I wasn't all that interested in tricking out my car. To me, it felt like NFS lost a great deal in the transition from Hot Pursuit to Underground. I enjoyed Hot Pursuit but one of my biggest gripes was the sheer amount of time it took before I could purchase/unlock the game's pinnacle vehicle: the McClaren F1. By the time I got to that point, all the fun had been sucked out of the game and replaced with the single-minded purpose of just "racking up points" in order to unlock that car. Once achieved, I felt less than enthusiastic about continuing to play the game. Of course, my son came along and wiped all the saved data off the memory chip for the Gamecube (the console we played on prior to the Xbox 360) and after that, I've not played the game since.
When considering whether or not to purchase the Xbox 360, I saw the exotic car porn that was the trailer for the PGR 3 game on a 360 kiosk. Like everyone who saw the trailer, I was mesmerized by the sheer graphic rendering of the vehicles. It was very impressive! I wondered if, like so many movies, the best of what I'd seen was simply that from the trailer. How many times have you been to a movie only to discover that the best parts of the movie were the parts cut and used for the trailer? Not so with this game. In fact, you can't really begin to access the best features of PGR 3 until you buy the game.
Unlike every other racing game I've ever played, you start the game with an impressive array of cars available. These cars are ones you would normally have to work up to in other racing games. You start out with amazing cars. PGR 3 got this part right! You get to hit the ground running in this game!
After you select your first car and put it in your garage, you can start a number of races almost immediately. You can begin your solo career, go online or even system link with other 360 consoles. This is a very welcome feature to me. I don't like to have to go through a bunch of screens and jump through a bunch of hoops just to race. Sometimes I just want to pop the game in and burn rubber. PGR 3 lets you do just that, if you so desire. Of course, you can take as much time as you like before you begin a race.
One really great feature to this game is the availability to "test drive" any car. On other games, you may be able to see a ghost image of a car that will be available once you achieve a set number of points, but you can never really see any details about those cars. Not so on PGR 3. You can see every car that the game has to offer with the exception of concept cars that only become available after a set number of kudos points have been awarded. Sure you may start with 85,000 credits, but you can look at the Ferrari F50 GT and even test drive it! Yep, that's right! You can test drive any car on the test track - even if you don't have nearly enough points to buy it! It can let you know what you might want to work your way up towards. Nice feature! Smart design!
When you play the game online, you have instant access to all the cars right then and there. Sure you may only have an NSX in your solo career, but race online and you can jump behind the wheel of a McClaren! That's a sweet touch! The online feature is fun beyond belief, too. It is fun to race against total strangers and there is a staggering number of types of races (street race, capture the track, elimination, team, etc.) to choose from. There are also an equally impressive number of race venues to choose from (New York, Las Vegas, Japan, etc.). The person who creates the race can also control certain aspects of that race for participants who log on. You can set the conditions to Day, Night, Overcast, force the racers to have the "in car" view, control the number of AI racers, etc.
One aspect that blew me away and that also reminded me of the kiosk trailer was the replay feature of this game. Once you complete a race, you have the option to continue on to the next race or to watch a replay of the race you just completed. If you're not in a hurry, watch the replay. Trust me on this. It is absolutely unbelievable! First of all, you can save the replay to watch again anytime you wish. This in and of itself is a really cool feature. If you have an unreal race and you want to show off, you can save the race and watch it ad nauseum! During that replay, you can also take a picture. This is just too cool! You can forward, reverse, pause or restart the replay, but once it is playing you can toggle to switch the camera angle and freeze the frame. From there, if you select to take a picture, you can literally zoom your camera in on the scene from every angle imaginable. The precise detail is jaw-dropping. It really is! You can do all kinds of things with this picture, too. The game provides you with several Photoshop-esque special effects. For instance, you can adjust the aperture of your picture and thereby produce blur to give the effect of high speed movement. You can change the color and take the picture anywhere from black and white to over-the-top vibrant. You can adjust the focus, the lighting, the brightness, the contrast, etc. Once you get the angle, the effect and the subject framed as you like it, you can take the picture and save it. Again, like the race replay, you can view it at any time.
The best feature of PGR 3 is the amount of control the game gives you right from the start. The graphics are amazing and, arguably, the best graphics during the game are had when racing from the in car view. There are several camera views you can choose from. Two from behind the car, one from inside the car, and two from the perspective of a camera that would be mounted on the front bumper of the car. I might have missed one or two, but you get the point. I prefer the in car view and I sometimes toggle to the behind the car view when I have to thread the needle between cones or archways. I wasn't the biggest fan of racing games because of all the roadblocks to enjoying the game that seemed to be part of the genre. PRG 3 has completely redefined this genre of game for me and has far exceeded my wildest expectations for what I thought this game would be. It is so much better than I had even hoped for!

AWESOME GRAPHICS

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 9
Date: December 07, 2005
Author: Amazon User

this game has amazing graphics! and sweet cars! get this if you have xbox 360!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! this is a very cool game and its worth it.

Somehow, it betters PGR2.

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: January 03, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Anyway, PGR was always a brilliant idea. 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". 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. Applying this to exiting tight turns and using a model that rewards sharp braking and traction loss was inspired.

It was inspired in Metropolis Street Racer, it was inspired in the first PGR. It's still inspired. 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. 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.

PGR3 arrives on Xbox 360 with surprisingly little to add to the mechanics and structures that underpinned PGR2. 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. 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). On top of that, every single task synchs ever so elegantly with global leaderboards, so even the highest-ranked will have something more to push for.

Its principle divergence is in the way it separates these tasks from car classes. Now you simply go to a shop and buy yourself a car with credits earned by completing challenges - the idea being that you can use your favourite car throughout if you like. Along with the five grades of difficulty, this gives the game a level of accessibility that would've been alien in MSR or PGR, and even PGR2. You can make easier progress and move off tougher tasks by brushing them aside on lower difficulties, and the balance is such that even an accomplished racer will need to work for those Hard (gold) medals, which lurk tantalisingly just out of reach when you first attempt them, and their credit benefits, and Hardcore achievements are just that. Collecting cars as you go rather than having them prescribed will please everybody who ever whinged about the truck class in PGR2.

But you know what? I hate those bastards who whinged about the truck class, given what's happened. The concessions have bred profligacy by design. You gain enough credits by smashing through the relatively easy silver-medal band of races that you can amass a garage of Enzos, DBR9s, TVRs and other high-end machinery within a few short hours. The central Kudos mechanic of having to put your own imagined potential where your BHP is by selecting a target score before a race remains good - although personally I preferred the way you played with your shades of ambition by more closely defining your goals in the older games, half-second by half-second - but this is now more of a personal quest than a predefined one. It lacks incentives beyond the colours of medals, the ranks on Live and the badges you can earn that celebrate 360 spins and tasks completed in one combo. These are good incentives admittedly, but they're not as good as cars and new tracks were in the olden days.

PGR3 also plays with the separation of offline and online, and does this to better effect. Live's integration in single-player is limited to leaderboards and downloadable ghosts in Career mode (two of the best things ever done with Live, frankly), but now there's a distinct Online Career, with its own Live-specific Kudos-accumulation. There's a range of events to join in with at any given time. You can also set up your own Live races of course, in the game's Playtime area, and the way the game matches your connection speed and skill level to random opponents seems to work even at this early stage in the console's life.

The Route Creator, meanwhile, opens up a great many possibilities. It's simple to set up routes between start/finish and the waypoints available, and the results are easily distributable. But while the selection of cities is decent and the number of possibilities is barely conceivable (until a load screen somewhat comically suggests you "create over 100 million"), and nobody's questioning the devs' meticulousness in modelling each environment, the area covered is actually surprisingly small. Take London for example (since I live here) - the area covered is a fairly small section about ten minutes from my front door (by foot, mind you - not in a DBR9 or anything), and runs from Victoria Embankment through Trafalgar Square, loops round Piccadilly Circus without reaching upper Regent Street, and then circles back down to Pall Mall, St James's Park, and straight back to Big Ben. It's not that big. The Getaway's mapped area was many times the size and you could do the in-between bits. What is included works well - each city section features several memorable turns, straights and distinctive sections that combine to good effect, and to be fair Vegas and the winding sections of Tokyo feel more varied than London - but you have to wonder whether all that time wireframing buildings might have been better spent.

Which leads me inexorably to the question of how the game looks. This is undoubtedly the main thing people know about PGR3 at this point: the cars are enormously detailed, the environments are thoroughly mapped and modelled, and the visuals are presented in resolutions hitherto unseen on console hardware. And yeah, you've picked up on the tone - this is the point in the review where I say I don't think it makes as big a difference to the play experience as everyone's been so breathlessly declaring elsewhere.

Someone asked me a whole bunch of questions about PGR3's graphics yesterday. If it was true that the tarmac was virtually photo-realistic, if it was true all the pedestrians were 3d models, if it was true that you could stop and read the hoardings on the buildings, and see the light bouncing off windows and so on. Frankly I don't really know. My recollection of the tarmac is that it passes under me like a blurry grey conveyor belt, because I'm moving so damn fast. The spectators I only see when I stop, and that's only when I've screwed up, and when that's the case they're hardly my priority. The things you notice are the big things - the sun creeping over the skyscrapers in Shinjuku, the incredibly pronounced and sometimes blinding effect when you emerge from tunnels, the trees lining a road, the wealth of scenery. In terms of providing a world around the track, PGR3 goes the furthest so far, and yes, everything's presented in ways that other consoles can't present it, in a game that even PC owners who can reach these visual heights haven't much to compare directly to.

But you're only really going to notice where most of the grunt went in replays. Or on Gotham TV. The latter is a nice idea, but kind of ignores the unspoken truth about replay modes: they are boring. Watching the best of the best do their stuff is interesting, but watching eight mediocre players bashing into each other is not. Being one of as many as 30,000 people doing so simultaneously is a technical accomplishment, not an extra point on the score. Then if you look around, you're forced to admit that the spectators are automatons, and the trees aren't moving. It's quite a sterile environment, for all its definition and the wealth of objects outside the track boundaries.

But let's say you view it as a spectacular whole - even at this, for the most part the enormous amounts of incidental detail presuppose that you aren't actually racing. When you are, the key things are being able to see the next corner, or the next cone gate distinctly, and here the game is no better than any other. You'll notice far more impressive effects and depth of background material than you ever have before, and when you fiddle with that Photo viewer mode and actually marvel at the vehicle exteriors, you'll be hard pressed to think of another car model that includes as much. It's like watching those GT videos before Polyphony actually had to run them through the ancient PS2 graphics tech.

But we do still truly love the clicking of the Ferrari.
Hop into the cockpit view, which many are eulogising, and you'll certainly feel more immersed than you have elsewhere, owing thanks to the terrific engine sounds and enormous amount of in-car detail. But it's also kind of peculiar, because when you're in a car you don't find that half of your view is taken up by steering wheel, dashboard and the frame of the car; you focus on what's outside of the windscreen. The windscreen filter here is lovely, but unless you really divorce yourself from the interior modelling it feels more like you're leaning forward from the backseat, and the viewing window is quite restrictive. In the end I preferred the bumper cam, as I often do, not least because it's much easier to get a handle on the precise demands of the Kudos challenges and see what's coming when the track ahead fills the whole screen.

Let's give it its dues: when played from this perspective, PGR3 is an excellent, well-refined racing game. Cone Challenges, Drift Challenges, Street Races, Hot Laps, Eliminators, Time vs Kudos (where you stop the ticking down of the clock by playing up to the Kudos system - an excellent idea) - all are good, most are ridiculously compulsive thanks to the superb balancing of the medal targets, so much so that you'll happily pause and restart them every time you spin off and the chap ahead quickly builds up an unassailable lead. And while the range of challenges will probably feel a bit narrow to people who have stuck with the series since its birth on the Dreamcast, the temptation to try and scale those greater heights will appeal to the arcade mentality that still lurks within a lot of players.

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