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It's raining. You're racing through a capital city at 120 miles per hour. You're in a Maserati 250F, a car that made legends of Stirling Moss and Juan Manuel Fangio (who in a single race, broke the Nurburgring lap record 10 times with one). You're powersliding like a bastard, and it's brilliant. You can only be playing Project Gotham Racing 4, a game that sings with its adroit refinement and howls with its exhaust notes. PGR2 may have made the legend and 3 took it into a new generation, but PGR4 cemented its reputation forever.In its time, PGR4 slipped by me at launch. I ended up getting it in the 2008 Christmas sales, and it made an amazing Christmas week game. But it felt so small. Almost meek, even though it had committed spectacular crimes against racing and added a pretty amazing weather simulation. It felt like a fabulous DLC collection, or PGR3 as it should have been if Bizarre Creations had two extra years to work on it, and it felt horribly confined within a single DVD. Compared to the swagger and heft of PGR2, and accounting for the rush-job of PGR3 (as touched on in Tom's lovely retrospective from last year), PGR4 is something weirder than a straight racing game sequel. It's a contraction and distillation of the PGR spirit on one hand, a ridiculous expansion and dilution on the other. PGR4 stands out for these kind of oppositions: cars vs bikes, sun vs snow, breadth vs focus, conservative vs radical, celebration vs funeral.
I can't think of many other games that are bursting with as many internal conflicts, just as I can't think of any other that had the sheer depth of taste to offer a Maserati 250F up for powerslides around Nelson's Column. And what a blast PGR4's take on car dynamics is. It's a shame that nothing has really come close to Bizarre Creations' fusion of rigorous simulation and arcade shamelessness, but it's proof of how awesome the studio was.
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