:B: - PGR 4

Project Gotham Racing 4 is a really excellent racing game.

On the scale of simulation to arcade, it leans more towards arcade, but is still kind of in the middle. It's a 'realistic' racing game where you get points to unlock stuff by doing drifts, 360s, drafting your opponents, or doing tricks on your bike. It has weather, loads of tracks, loads of unlockables and lots of modes so you don't get bored just going round a track over and over again.

I think PGR 4 might be my favourite racing game ever, and I'd nominate it for best racing game ever.

I started a new game since the last time I played, 2 or 3 years ago, was on my old gamer profile so I don't have access to it any more. I had forgotten how much stuff there was to do in this game. I started the career, because that's the easiest way to earn Kudos, which unlocks things. I've been dilligently completing races, drift events, time trials and invitationals for a good 10 hours now and I've only just broken into the Master rank. I'm 17th, and am about 250 points away from being first. In any other game, this would only be a few races, but here, your rivals also get points for each race, so it's going to be a long time to get to the top, which I guess is accurate.

I've barely scraped the surface of the arcade mode, which has 108 medals in total, split roughly evenly between car and bike. Each medal has five ranks, for difficulty - Steel, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum - and Platinums are really, really hard to get. It'll be a very long road finishing this mode too.

Then there's the DLC packs, which added World Championship mode. There are three parts to World Championship mode - Arcade Challenge, DLC Challenge, and Platinum Plus. Arcade and DLC Challenge are pretty easy going, at least as far as Platinum Plus is concerned. Platinum Plus takes the difficulty of Platinum to a whole new level. I'm not sure I'll ever complete that mode.

All this and I haven't even touched on the online. I haven't played any of it, so I wouldn't know where to begin with telling you about it. It's really intimidating as the game has been out a very long time, so the only people left playing it will be experts. This is an open offer for anyone to add me to their friends list - I'm RequiredCosine - so we could play sometime. I just don't want to go it alone.

PGR 4 is so much fun, I'll probably continue playing this for a while.  5/5 stars.

New - Bioshock & PGR 4

Back in the mists of time, when my family got our first 360, I got two games, Bioshock and PGR 4.

Bioshock first got my attention with the original trailer, and it was one of the few games where it grabs my attention so badly that I go on a media blackout for that title, so I can go into the game totally blind. I don't regret it at all, my playthrough of Bioshock stands as one of my top three gaming experiences. I haven't played it since. It's now almost exactly four years since I finished it, and I think it's time to go back.

Project Gotham Racing 4 was the game that sold me on the 360. The console wasn't on my radar at all until I went into Gamestation in late November and saw it playing on the demo machine. I'm a huge fan of racing games so I toddled over and gave it a go and it felt so fantastic to play that, knowing I wouldn't be able to play until Christmas when we got our console, I bought it so I'd be able to play it right away. I traded it in long ago, but got cravings to go back.

I've been on a bit of a past games kick recently. I'm feeling the desire to reacquire my old 360 games to replay them. Forza 2, Crackdown, Prince of Persia... all games that I really enjoyed but got rid of to get newer and shinier games. I'm wondering whether to go crawling back.

(The only reason my past games kick only includes 360 games is that I still have all my old games for my other consoles!)