The Route Creator: Keys to the City
Plenty of racing games are set in the streets of major cities, but Project Gotham Racing® 3 has its own distinctive approach to urban racing. With the game’s Route Creator, you can design custom race tracks set on the streets of New York, Las Vegas, London, and Tokyo. Whether you want to practice offline, or compete online, this feature adds millions of possible circuits to the tracks already available in the game.
The Route Creator is part of Playtime, an area that gives you plenty of tools for designing your own races. After you select that menu, scroll down to select the Route Creator menu, and then select the Create a New Route option. Once you’ve decided which city you like best, you’re ready to rock.
Create It
The first step to designing a custom track is looking at a map of the city, like this map of Tokyo. You can start your race at any point on the map that has a checkered flag (or more precisely, a start/finish line). From there, you select a waypoint nearby, creating a dotted line that zigs and zags through the streets. Once you learn where the landmarks are, you may choose a course that curves around them, or you might just decide on a path based on the sequence of turns made by the streets. Once you’ve traced a path that leads to another start/finish line, or the same flag you started with, you’re ready to save your track and give it a name.
We asked some number crunchers at Microsoft to calculate how many tracks are available with the Route Creator, and the results are astounding—more than you could race in a lifetime. Thanks to a bit of combinatorial mathematics, we can see how the number of choices add up.
Share It
Your tracks will be available for both offline and online play. For instance, you may decide to design a fiendishly diabolical track, practice until you’re good at it, and then challenge your friends to race against you on your own turf. For times when you’d rather race against offline opponents, the same tools you would use in most Playtime races, including menus that allow you to choose which computer-controlled cars you’re driving against, are available for tracks made with the Route Creator.
Project Gotham Racing 3 is available in London and Tokyo, which means it’s entirely possible that an American driver might be competing against gamers abroad who have a “home court advantage”… or he can invite them to New York or Las Vegas to prove once and for all which country has the best drivers.
Win
PGR 3 isn’t some flash-in-the-pan racing game that you bolt through and return for credit after a weekend. If you love to drive, the variety of races in the game is really up to you. You create your own offline races or invite friends to online competitions. You’ve got more than the keys to a garage full of cars this time. You’ve got the keys to the city. With Project Gotham Racing 3, you can drive it like ya stole it—and win in the city like you own it.