Around the time of the first two Project Gotham Racing games in the early 2000s Bizarre Creations also developed two other games. The first was Fur Fighters which was a third person shooter with cute animals. I haven’t played it myself but it looks like some good, silly fun so I’m putting it on my wish list. The second, which seems even stranger to me, is Disney’s Treasure Planet. I’m a little curious as to how and why Bizarre Creations ended up working on this but I don’t really have any interest in playing it.

This was also a time when the competition for Project Gotham Racing was so high. Racing games of all types were incredibly good with so many great options like Gran Turismo, Burnout, Ridge Racer, V8 Supercars, WRC, Need for Speed, Midnight Club, F-Zero, Wipeout and so many others. Typing this out really makes it sink in about good things used to be and how many games there are that I still need to check out for the first time or go back to. I consider that both the first and second Project Gotham Racing games still easily rank among the best from this time, even with so many high quality choices available.

Project Gotham Racing 2 is almost exactly what you want from a racing game sequel. It aims to be better and goes bigger with a lot more content and features. I believe that some things might have been lost in the process though.

There is quite a lot to like about this sequel and a lot of what was great about the first game carries over. First of all it looks fantastic. The graphics here are really impressive. The amount of content is just as impressive and is a big jump from the first game. There are so many more cars including some extra diversity like SUV, wagon and pickup choices. They all look top notch for their time and have great visual damage too. The amount of locations has more than doubled and all of them are still detailed, accurate and look excellent. There are now 8 cars in races up from 6, although all this did come with the cost of a drop from 60 to 30fps.

There are more ways to earn kudos, a bigger soundtrack and heaps of events including some new ones. Kudos have been changed a bit as you now also have a Kudos level, so it works a bit like experience points. When you level up you get kudos tickets which you can trade in for new cars. Giving the player the choice over what cars to unlock was the right call with how much bigger the car list is here. Xbox Live is now a big part of the game with online play, ghosts and leader boards. They added a showroom and garage where you can walk around in first person looking at the cars, which feels really ahead of its time, and in the garage you’ll also find the Geometry Wars game. However despite being a much bigger game and looking like an excellent upgrade I don’t think it is the better game in many ways.

The car handling is slightly different; the cars now feel a little lighter and stiffer. Driving is still excellent though and sliding around corners feels a little improved. AI of the opponent cars has changed too. I would describe the first game as having crazy, dangerous opponents while here they are just stubborn and might bully you a bit. Track design seems a bit worse here but this could just be a symptom of more content causing me to not get as familiar with each course. I prefer the first game’s style, menus, UI and soundtrack too. Little things like this can matter more than you may expect and this game does just feel blander than the first. They removed the way difficulty worked a little bit and got rid of the Joker concept too. I also think this was the beginning of a shift in the wrong direction away from being a pure arcade street racing game.

Project Gotham Racing 2 has a more standard career like mode called Kudos World Series. This mode is big but linear and drags on too long especially the final few series. There is still a mode here called arcade and it is quite good as the challenges on offer involve using a specific car. It feels like a good change of pace and forces you to use a lot of different cars. The countdown timer, that people familiar with arcade racing games would know, is gone impacting the feeling of urgency. They also added the Nürburgring track which is not a city streets location. This is the start of shift towards Project Gotham Racing being a more general console racing game.

Project Gotham Racing 2 is a bigger, more enhanced game. But the first Project Gotham Racing is a better experience in some ways and I just slightly prefer it. Even though I prefer the first I still love this and Project Gotham Racing 2 is still a very special game. It’s a fun, highly polished, content rich racing game, in which you can slide a smashed up Ferrari through the streets of Moscow or Sydney while music blasts in the background and that makes it definitely worth playing even more than 20 years after its release.

8.7/10

I wouldn’t recommend trying to play the first or second Project Gotham Racing on Xbox 360 because they just do not work properly.

This is going to be part one of my play through of the Project Gotham Racing series. I plan on writing reviews for each one and I also want to talk a little bit about the developer Bizarre Creations along the way.

Bizarre Creations started out in the 80s as Raising Hell Software before a name change in the 90s. They earned some success and attention after putting out two Formula One games which led to them getting an opportunity to create a new racing game for the Dreamcast. Metropolis Street Racer was an ambitious racing game that I haven’t had the chance to play unfortunately but I’d like to give it a go one day. It was open world, with realistic environments and day/night cycle and it introduced the kudos system. It was received positively but didn’t sell well most likely due to being stuck on the Dreamcast but they were able to go on and create a spiritual successor.

I have really good memories of the first Project Gotham Racing from around 20 years ago. My family couldn’t afford to get an Xbox until very late that generation, we spent our money on the GameCube and Gameboy Advance first, but luckily a friend had one. I remember having plenty of fun taking turns and working our way through this game together. I was really happy to go back to it recently and discover it is still a bloody good arcade street racer.

The car handling is spot on. It doesn’t have the nuance or realism of a sim but the cars still have a really good weight and feel to them. It’s an excellent mix of fun, precision, style and aggressive driving. And you need to be aggressive because some of the game’s challenges are pretty tough especially if you want gold medals and the AI opponents do not mess around. They love to dive bomb into corners and mess you up. As frustrating as this can be I kind of like it and think it adds to the game. The AI opponents will mess up themselves and other cars not just you and you can be even more aggressive back to them. It made later races in the game feel like a fight. It also encourages defensive driving and feels at home in an arcade racing game.

The tracks are really well designed and the cities in the background are accurate and realistic. Adding to this are the fictional radio stations with popular songs from the time which creates a great atmosphere (or you can use your own soundtrack). The cars look excellent and there is good visual car damage. There are some other nice features like different weather conditions and night races as well. It is really good looking game and I love its presentation and style right down to the little things like menus and fonts.

The main modes on offer are quick race which is normal street races, arcade race which is a score based mode and kudos challenge which is a variety of different challenges like hot lap, overtake and one on one. The kudos challenges also do something interesting with difficulty. You raise or lower difficulty to get more or less bonus kudos and they offer one joker per set of challenges that doubles your Kudos. On top of these modes there are the usual time attack and split screen multiplayer and after a while medal pursuit unlocks which has time trials for each car. Unfortunately though Project Gotham Racing does still feel a little lacking in content and there are not a whole lot of cars or songs here. There are only four locations as well but they are divided into multiple areas with their own street tracks. There are also only six cars per race. While I’m on the negatives I’ll also mention that there are some endurance races (about 15 minutes or more) which I don’t really like in arcade racing games and some of the later normal races drag on a bit as well.

Adding the Kudos point system, that combos and will end if you crash, to an arcade racing game is obviously an awesome idea. Races aren’t just about position and time anymore now there’s a score too. This adds to the replayability and it is tied to progression as well. Progression works really well here with unlocks coming from completing events, earning kudos and time and distance put in. Things move along really well up until later in the game when it does start to feel like a grind and unlocking the final car requires quite a lot of kudos. Thankfully if you don’t wish to do this there is a cheat to unlock everything. That’s right no DLC cars, no paid shortcuts or paid for in game currency, just unlock it or use cheats. Speaking of the good old days this was an Xbox launch title. Anyone that brought this home with Halo as well would have been very happy with their new Xbox. There were many other titles as well especially for the Europe and Australia launch like Jet Set Radio Future, Amped and Dead or Alive 3. Japan got Silent Hill 2 and Genma Onimusha as well.

Going back to this 20+ year old racing game was a joy, I loved it. Even though I had Project Gotham Racing 2,3,4 and Blur lined up to play next, with a massive backlog beyond that, I still wanted to go through all of the quick races, arcade races and kudos challenges. Yes Project Gotham Racing is that good and still that fun, I highly recommend it.

8.7/10

Daymare 1998 started off as a Resident Evil 2 fan remake before becoming its own thing. So it is heavily inspired by older Resident Evil games and survival horror, but plays like something a bit more modern, and is crammed full of 80s and 90s references. It is very ambitious but also unfortunately very rough and doesn’t come close to what it is trying to copy. I kind of like it though, maybe even love it a bit.

Jank, awkward and occasionally frustrating, Daymare 1998 is in severe need of more time and polish. The environments and objects look good but they are let down by everything else. The zombies stumble towards you, limbs passing through things they shouldn’t, with weird rubber necks causing funny and unpredictable reactions to head shots. That’s if these zombies figure out which direction to move in, as they regularly spin on the spot and struggle to navigate doorways. And that’s if they’re not quietly hiding right behind a corner ready to try and jump scare you for the 20th god damn time when it didn’t work the first time. The best scare in the game came when I killed a zombie in a doorway and then as I walked through the doorway the zombie somehow got caught on the door and dragged upwards to become face to face with the character. The tougher zombies, who I think are known as Correct Form, just look goofy in movement and appearance. The Melted Man is generic and the bosses aren’t much better. There’s not much enemy variety here and none of them are intimidating or scary. The whole game isn’t scary or atmospheric either. The humans in this game aren’t a whole lot better. They just look low budget. Things get worse when you hear the dialogue and voice acting too. Anything emotional or dramatic falls flat not that these characters and their choices could be taken seriously anyway. Sadly the game never achieves a charming style of bad. A lot of it is just subpar and bland.

The gameplay has problems too. Exploration is often very straight forward. It rarely has that satisfying survival horror experience of slowly working your way deeper into a location by finding keys, solving puzzles and backtracking. Daymare 1998 is more linear but with roadblocks, there is nothing here that comes anywhere near close to the mansion from RE1 or the police station from RE2. The hospital is probably the area that comes closest to this except it still feels rather simple. Things are made worse by how long and tedious the game can feel at times; some of those chapters just drag on. It has a limited inventory, inventory management and its own brand of save rooms and items boxes but they don’t feel well implemented. Save checkpoints plus a small number of save rooms? Just pick one and do it right. There’s limited item space but not limited enough that I cared. It has a very basic hacking game that requires an item that will break if failed. It is pointless when you have checkpoints to abuse not that you’ll fail the hacking often anyway. There are pointless items and crafting and trading that don’t really add anything or get used well.

Shooting enemies doesn’t always go well because of the enemy issues I already described and other weird little things like a shot will go off but then there is a strange delay before the enemy gets hit. The enemies grab attack is a very long lunge that is a god damn homing missile that pretty much always requires sprinting to avoid. Don’t even get me started on the three stage tedious final boss that can be completely broken and silly in stage one and three if you take advantage of the pathetic enemy AI. The game never feels natural to control and this is coming from someone that loves tank controls and thinks they are excellent. There’s more to go through (bugs, technical issues, animations, gameplay issues) but I’ll stop here. You get the point – Daymare 1998 is not a completely awful, broken mess of a game, it’s just not very good in many ways.

However, I never once considered dropping it. Not only that I actually played through it twice. It’s rough, low budget, not great and was Invader Studios first game. On the other hand it is a likable game that is so ambitious, overflowing with passion and has good ideas. Imagine making your first survival horror game and not just focusing on a single location and character. Imagine going, nah we’ll have a few playable characters, multiple locations and shoot for something as good as our favourite game series. This is where all the problems come from. A tiny team shot for the moon on their first try and I can’t help but love and appreciate that even though Daymare 1998 ended up like this.

I really liked a bunch of the puzzles. I loved a lot of the ideas in the story and loved the effort put into the lore and documents. I liked the reveals at the end and the way things came together. I liked the environments and the zombies (when nothing is going wrong with them). I enjoyed the references throughout and that it is set in the 90s. One of the characters has a condition that causes hallucinations, which means getting attacked by false enemies. I loved that it’s viable and encouraged to try to dodge enemies and run past to save ammo. There is even a little melee attack that lets you clumsily bonk zombies, pushing them back and stunning them so you’ve got time to shoot or get away. I like that one type of the collectables and the secret rooms are found by sound. I like that they offer multiple difficulties and two modes. There is a classic mode and a modern mode that is a bit simpler and doesn’t use the games ammo management. Ammo and reloading is interesting as it requires you to combine bullets with the magazine, then when reloading there’s a slow reload and a fast one. The fast reload will drop the magazine on the ground and you need to pick it back up. It’s a cool idea that can add tension and could add to inventory choices and it feels like it belongs in survival horror.

These good ideas, and the ambition, the passion and that it is a type of game I like was enough to carry this experience for me. Daymare 1998 isn’t a very good game but it’s worth playing and there was more than enough here that I am going to purchase Invaders Studios follow up, the prequel Daymare 1994. Don’t let my score or the many other less than impressive scores this game has received scare you off. While I wouldn’t recommend this to everyone I would say that if you like survival horror then you should give this a try.

5.0/10