Yep, I'm going to go agaist the general opinion and claim that like franchises moved to the current generation, the latest just isn't as good as the original, for a number of reasons...

Handling
Apparently the sequel is more accessible (Read: Dumbed down) than MSR, but personally I find it more clumsy and frustrating. The first got the mix between realism and arcade perfect, so why mess with it? It just doesn't feel nearly as fun or real.

Music
MSR was full of wonderful J-Pop, fantastic dance music and hillarious songs making fun of artists like Oasis and Will Smith. PGR features licensed junk. Utter junk. Nothing but horrible indie/rock, chilched hip-hop and the fucking Chemical Brothers (What do you think this is, Wipeout?). Why was the Japanse pop/dance music replaced by some pretencious Japanese rock stuff? Why is there so much "Trying to be cool and hip" American/UK rock through the game? Regardless of your opinion on it, (Cheesy) heavy metal just works better with racing games and PGR simply doesn't have as much variety in the genres as MSR. Driving to some of these tunes made me sick.

With the change in musical directions the style, heart and soul was ripped out of the franchise. Who honestly thinks any of the crap they included is as catchy or fun as Am I Only Dreaming? It reeks of Microsoft marketing men influencing their decision to appeal more to the American audience and I don't like it.

And don't mention the custom soundtrack. How dare you make excuses for this tragedy, I want to hear fresh new tunes in my games not my old CD's and it always sounds too quiet anyway. Having said that, if I could get hold of the much in demand MSR soundtrack, I'd rip it in a second.

Radio
I think it's pretty cool that the DJ's/Stations have been replaced by real names, as they were nothing special anyway, but why in gods name don't the songs match up with the cities anymore? You'll remember that in MSR the American stations played rock/R&B, the UK stations played Euro dance music and the Japanese stations played Japanese music. PGR throws that out the window so we now have Japanese stations playing things like The Chemical Brothers. Why? And where are the adverts? All this just makes the whole thing seem less authentic and makes the various cities seem way too similar. Whoever decided to mess with such a winning forumula is stupid and should be killed.

Real-time day/night system
Where is it? I loved how if I played MSR at 9:00 at night it would be nighttime in the game, or if I played it at 5:00 in the morning there would be a slightly eerie sunset. The developers of the game gave the rubbish excuse that it was too hard for them to get the lighting right everywhere if they implemented it. Why can't they just admit it was rushed out for launch?

Well that's it for now, but I'm not happy about this Americanized sequel. The soul has been ripped out.

:angry: Pikachu

Yet another really interesting thread from Pikachu! I can't wait to read the replies!

Man, I hate it when you leave your hip-hop in the wash too long and it gets all chilched.

Pffft, it's not my fault there's no edit button in this forum.

I didn't like either games to be honest, and I haven't even played Project Gotham Racing yet.

The music was dire in MSR :o

Yes there is. I've certainly got one, and editing is enabled for all signed-up members.

MSR always frustrated me immensely in that on one hand it was one of the most playable and inventive racing games for years, and on the other hand threw it all away be making some of the most elementary mistakes possible in such a game. Night levels that sadistically obscured right angled corners in pitch black darkness? Why was this allowed to happen? Not to mention the initially fantastic idea of the kudos points that inevitably fell apart after you worked out how to exploit it (come on; you know you did it at least once) or after some unforgivable bug gave you thousands of them for no reason.

And the music. Good lord the music. I don't care if that horrific mess was supposed to be ironic, ("Ho ho ho - no one likes country music, so let's make the player suffer through track after track of it on the American races until they work out where the overly-clumsy cd mute function is!", utter bastards) but listening to an excrutiatingly bad Oasis parody for the third time in a row whilst stumbling around impenetrably black racecourses nearly made me snap my disc in too.

Still, even after all that it was miles better than Ridge Racer 5.

Listen to this chap, he's making sense :)

The music in F-355 was worse though.

I loved MSR's soundtrack. :) The Pop/dance songs were brilliant, especially Passion. Apparently Sega produced some of them internally, I guess that's why the sequel had such generic and dull tracks.

As for the gameplay, I haven't really played enough Project Gotham to say, but it feels more floaty. Truth be told, I like Sega GT 2003 more, I don't know why so many people hate it. Ah well.

I cuss MSR bad, but love PGR.

If I could work out why, I could make this post quite interesting.

*thinks hard*

I think it's the structure, more than anything, actually. And it's easier. MSR was too annoying and one of of only three DC games I ever got rid of. (The other two were Sega GT and Ultimate Fighting Championship. UFC I only took back in protest at the fact that the manual was just an advert for the strategy guide, more or less.)

Anyway, PGR good, MSR bad.

I actually enjoyed the feeling you got from staking everything you currently had (effectively) on the outcome of every race in MSR. It meant you had to be a lot more sure of yourself before you even thought about racing. And practicing actually mattered. With Gotham I often just start a race and drive round to see what I can do. Set my goals high and retry until I either did it or got bored. It feels dirty that way, mainly after getting used to having to practice lots in MSR before deliberating on what I thought I could achieve. Penalties in MSR forced me to drive properly, but I'm back to slamming other cars all over the place in Gotham.

Something else: Gravity. Getting air in San Fransisco is fun, but it makes it a lot harder to control. The cars must weigh nothing, as even the slowest of them can be made to slide around corners without trying. It's fun, but I do like to have to learn to drive the cars before I learn to slide them. This is easier to do while not on the moon.

Gotham also lacks Jazz. Driving around London at night with Capital Jazz on the radio is probly my favourite thing to do in a driving game. Gotham does have "Aisle 10" though, which I grew to love after too much JSRF.

So essentially, as dull as it may sound, I seem to agree with everything initially proposed. I'll still have to buy Gotham 2 though.

The kudos system is more developed in PGR.

You could really mess up your game by one bad race in MSR, but in PGR that is fixed.

IT is also annoying in MSR when you get knocked by other cars and lose all those points for wicked slides. That is changed in PGR also.

I prefer the Tokyo tracks in MSR though - personal opinion!

Both excellent - PGR more refined though!

MSR was nasty. Everyone seemed to rate the game based on what it probably could have been rather than what it really was. Staking it all when you knew there was a 99% chance of some CPU drone smashing you off the track at the start of the race was no fun at all in my book.

PGR is a massive improvement because they focussed more on the actual driving rather than the racing, but they still need to sort out the AI for the sequel.

Also comparing MSR to Ridge Racer V is a bit like comparing curry and Guinness. Both taste good and give you the squits, but the actual method of execution is very different and there's no reason why both can't co-exist happily.

Until the next morning.

He says it like we all think it :o

Finally someone I can relate to...

...Actually... don't I know you from somewhere ;)

That's not more refined, they just made the races less intense and challenging. It's way too easy to get tons and tons of kudos in Gotham.

EyeballToothball said it better though. I miss the Jazz music from MSR as well!

Quite very possibly yes. :)

Yeah, but it's even easier to lose tons of kudos in MSR.

And the problem with that is that all too often it's not actually your fault. We all make mistakes - Watch the F1 qualifying and each driver will make at least one minor mistake during their one lap. But what they don't have to worry about is some mindless drone ramming them up the back for no apparent reason other than abject stupidity.

Scoring well in the races was often more luck than judgement.

I think I worded my first reply poorly...

...In MSR, if you f00k up, you're fooked! Your Kudos can get really messed up and you may struggle for a while... Personally I felt this made me less inclined to replay certain levels for fear of f00k ups and just moved on.

In PGR, you never really get points deducted. If you got say 800 Kudos, you'll never get less than 800 Kudos, but next time, if you get 900 Kudos, your total score goes up by 100 to 900. So instead of punishing a poor performance it is rewarding good performance...

... this is certainly the impression I got... but it is personal... so you can't really take too much from it!

While I agree it is easier to get Kudos in some circumstances in PGR, it pissed the hell out of me when you execute a damn fine slide in MSR and then get hit by some dodgy AI that was never really your fault...

...While the no car hitting penalty in PGR can be manipulated negatively, I believe it is generally for the better...

---

I agree that a slight edge of intensity may be lost from Gotham, I prefer trying to perfect laps and points in PGR to MSR.

I stand by PGR > MSR!

BUT

Tokyo MSR > Tokyo PGR

All in all I love them both!

Easier to get Kudos in Gotham? I suppose that's true if you play properly. I found out how to get shameless amounts of Kudos in MSR, and exploited them (I made sure to feel very dirty while doing so). They fixed all the things like that in Gotham though, which was both good and mean of them.

I don't know. I'm still left with a greater sense of achievement from doing well in MSR than I get from Gotham. The fact that I had to risk everything for the chance of doing better meant that every single point of extra Kudos you earned, I felt like I really had earned it. It's a nice idea to remove penalties from Gotham, and the ability to restart at any point is a great idea in theory at the very least. But I felt less from doing well after doing a challenge countless times in Gotham than facing a challenge and beating it after a long time practicing in MSR.

I find that the main difference between the two is that you have to be more sure of your own skill in MSR, while you don't in Gotham. While on paper, I'd probly say that Gotham was better because of all these things. But after playing both, MSR really feels like a test of your own skills. I found that more exciting when faced with that.

I did like the opponents in Gotham though. While at first I got really annoyed when they drove me off the track, and confused when they spun, I came to realise that this was exactly how I drove. It did make it somewhat more interesting, since I haven't really driven against 5 other people who drive like I do in games. It increased the challenge a whole load.

I have to say I love MSR and it was the reason I bought my Dreamcast. With the official steering wheel there's nowt quite like it.

Shame there were no homeless people to run over on Leicester Sq.

matt

my way of thinking is that PGR is just an up-date realy.
just a real shame they didn't include the real-time clock like in the DC version