Project Gotham Racing 4 (Xbox 360)

Bikes and cars seemingly can get along together

I love PGR. The series' fine balance between simulation and arcade driving is in my opinion unrivalled and I anticipate each new game as much as the next Halo. Plenty of people claim the street racer lacks character, but its city streets and powersliding cars make for incredible racing action and I'll turn my nose up at anyone who claims different. With my excitement for number 4 reaching near dangerous levels I sat down with some guys from Bizarre Creations at Games Convention expecting the world.

The most obvious change to the game this year is the introduction of motorcycles. It's something that hardcore PGR fans sneered at when it was announced, but after seeing the game in action (and playing it briefly) it isn't something we should be worried about. Firstly, you needn't use bikes if you don't want to, but they actually appear to offer a similarly exciting driving model to the cars.

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Bikes obviously can't do the same insane power slides that cars can, so Bizarre had to figure out how bikes could compete for kudos on a level playing field. The answer seems to have been tricks, such as wheelies and body movements that score you points. Without having the time to put this through its paces it's hard to say if the two different classes will work seamlessly together, but it looks very promising.

The game's set-up seems substantially different this time around, with your first choice being a male or female driver, your nationality and your livery (colours). The idea is that you can give your vehicles a distinct look, but don't expect to be painting the Mona Lisa on the side of your Porsche. Your nationality will also play a big part, with your country's flag colours appearing throughout race events both on and offline.

Arcade mode is once again where you'll find a series of race events to compete in, each with medals to go for. Each event has a medal available for bikes and cars, with the colour of your medal obviously determined by your performance. One of the new event types included is Superstar, which ties in to the new Kudos rating system. Each slide is now rated out of five stars, with 200 points gaining you one star. In Superstar events you need 14 stars to win the event.

One of the focuses of development in PGR4 has been making the cities more like what you'd expect from racing circuits.

One of the focuses of development in PGR4 has been making the cities more like what you'd expect from racing circuits. So, while a number of the cities will be familiar to fans of the series, they haven't simply been dumped over from PGR3. Taking Vegas as an example, we were shown the new rumble strips and curbs that have been laid down on the tarmac. These create racing circuits out of the roads and also make things more fun. On the corner demonstrated the new curb had created a run-off area to the side, meaning tussles for the racing line don't end up with players smashing into a barrier, instead simply veering off track for a few moments.

Career mode is where you're likely to devote most of your time, and this too has been given a drastic overhaul. The newly designed mode now features a race calendar, with your goal being to climb up the rankings. At the start of the game you are ranked a lowly 72, and this means that certain events on the race calendar aren't open to you. Over time you move up the rankings and more events open up as you move through seasons.

Weather effects look amazing and add variety to the racing

Invitational events will crop up on the calendar from time to time and these give you a chance to win cars that might otherwise be out of your price range. The guys at Bizarre Creations have livened things up a little by creating invitational events that aren't your bog standard racing game events. One example given was an Electric versus Petrol race off, with you driving the electric car. The seasonal nature of the career mode means that failure isn't the end, with the event being replayable the following year.

In the past Kudos has been nice to earn but didn't really get you a great deal in the game. In PGR4 Bizarre wanted to make it a real currency so it's used to buy all manner of different items. These range from new cars to new circuit layouts, and there are a number of more unique items. One of which is a 3D glasses mode for photo mode, and another is a special Gamer picture that requires 1,000,000 Kudos points - something Bizarre says only the most hardcore PGR players will achieve.

PGR2 pretty much set the benchmark for online racers and with PGR4 similarly brilliant things are planned. The most notable inclusion is the party system from Halo 2, meaning you can get together with friends and hop from race to race without having to find each other over and over again. Online events are now also a series of races, so you'll play three or four tracks before moving on to another game.

Cat and Mouse returns and has seen some changes, which Bizarre claims are for the better, and a new mode called Bulldog gives you an entire city (well, the area that's included in the game) to drive around in. In the free-roaming area you start with one bulldog, and everyone else runs away. Each time someone is tagged that driver also becomes a bulldog, until the game ends up with seven bulldogs against one standard driver.

The city streets have been modded for better racing action

And there's more to PGR4's online functionality than simply playing against others. Gotham TV didn't quite work as Bizarre hoped it would, with the service becoming pretty dull once the hardcore players had become established. Gotham on Demand is the new TV-like service, and it uses the Microsoft Content Server to let players get the content they want, when they want it.

According to Bizarre there is no limit to the amount of data you can save on there, so all your replays, photos and ghost times can be saved and shared with thousands of other players. Photos are now auto tagged and you can add certain words to help identify them in searches, and in keeping with the current trend for user generated content, you can even rate other people's photos. And yes, you can decorate your garage with your own snaps.

That's pretty much it as far as info gained from the Games Convention demonstration, but the guys from Bizarre did reveal that a PGR4 exclusive Geometry Wars would be making an appearance (Geometry Wars: Waves) and that cone challenges have been changed quite significantly. All this info and I haven't even talked about how great the game looks or the new weather system. Barring an unforeseen disaster, PGR4 will be a must own racer come October 12, but rest assured that we'll be covering every single raindrop in detail when we review the game next month.