Game:

Project Gotham Racing (2001)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 2:01:45

3,738 views

74

I have already played and shown every mainline game from several big racing games franchises, for example Need for Speed, Gran Turismo, Forza and Dirt. However, there are still a couple of notable franchises that I haven't touched at all yet. One of them is Project Gotham Racing, which had 4 games from 2001 to 2007. Here you can see a playthrough of the Quick Race mode in PGR 1, showing 16 races in 4 major cities using 7 different cars.

Timeline:
0:00 Game Intro
5:04 San Francisco (Easy) - Federal Reserve with Mercedes-Benz SLK 320
8:33 London (Easy) - Big Ben with Mini Cooper S
11:58 Tokyo (Easy) - Asakusa Challenge with Toyota MR2 Spyder
16:19 New York (Easy) - Water & Nassau with Mercedes-Benz SLK 320
20:32 San Francisco (Medium) - Russian Hill Challenge with Audi TT Roadster
25:28 London (Medium) - Admirality Arch with Audi TT Coupe
29:26 Tokyo (Medium) - Shibuya Challenge II with Audi TT Roadster
34:48 New York (Medium) - Park Loop Reverse with Audi TT Coupe
40:21 San Francisco (Hard) - Historic District Challenge with Volkswagen New Beetle RSi
46:11 London (Hard) - St. James's Park with Volkswagen New Beetle RSi
54:55 Tokyo (Hard) - Eki-Mae Hairpin with Volkswagen New Beetle RSi
1:04:37 New York (Hard) - Whitehall to Wall with Volkswagen New Beetle RSi
1:13:05 San Francisco (Very Hard) - The Tour with Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VII
1:23:37 London (Very Hard) - Bridge St. with Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VII
1:33:36 Tokyo (Very Hard) - Koshu Kaido Nishi with Volkswagen New Beetle RSi
1:45:09 New York (Very Hard) - East to West 40th with Reiji's Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VII
1:58:27 All Cars in PGR 1

Project Gotham Racing 1 is a game for the original Xbox but it's also playable on the Xbox 360 via backwards compatibility. Unfortunately the game has a major issue on each of the two platforms. On Xbox 360 the graphics look nice but the game suffers from heavy slowdowns in a lot of races. On the original Xbox you don't have the slowdowns but the graphics are really ugly, especially on a European Xbox like mine. I tried multiple different cables and adapters over the past weeks and even tried to mod my console to unlock higher resolutions but despite everything I tried I was unable to record from the original Xbox with an acceptable quality, so in the end I played the game on the Xbox 360. This means that the game is not running at full speed in a lot of the races here. I am obviously aware of this, so please don't point it out or talk about it in the comments if you can avoid it. It is not possible to show this game with both perfect graphics and perfect performance at the same time. You have to choose one of the two and I decided to go with the better graphics.

PGR 1 features tracks in 4 major world cities with San Francisco, London, Tokyo and New York. There are 3 different game modes with Quick Race, Arcade Race and Kudos Challenge. You have to play through all 3 modes to unlock all of the cars. The most interesting mode is Kudos Challenge but in this first video I am doing the Quick Race mode, which consists of 16 races against AI. The opponents choose their cars based on your car and not based on the difficulty, so in some of the races I am not using the best car available to make things easier. I still ended up using every car except the Camaro though, which I might show off in one of the other two modes in the future.

It was very interesting for me to get to know this game for the very first time and the other PGR games should probably be even better, especially 3 and 4, since those are made for the Xbox 360 and should run perfectly. I always like to play through a franchise in order though, so I first wanted to try some PGR 1, even though I wasn't able to run this game without issues.

Have you played Project Gotham Racing 1 yourself? Feel free to share your thoughts and memories about the game in the comments.