Weather[edit]
The most prominent addition to Project Gotham Racing 4 is advanced weather effects that affect the look of the game and the physics of the cars on the track. The weather can change from sun to rain to snow to hail within a single race. A system logged on to Xbox Live will download weather data from The Weather Channel, allowing users to set in-game conditions to mirror current weather in their respective cities.
The game simulates ten types of weather, including clear days, clouds, light to stormy rain, fog, snow and even ice. In user-created races, weather is fully customisable along with all the other race variations. In the game's expanded and improved career mode, weather is predetermined, which adds an extra obstacle for players to overcome.[8]
A screen shot of a race in London
Bizarre Creations has released two videos showing the weather effects; one of the rain effects in St. Petersburg and one showing the snow in the Nürburgring.
Tracks[edit]
Project Gotham Racing 4 includes many of the tracks of the series' previous installment, including Tokyo, New York, the Nürburgring, London and Las Vegas; plus five more cities and tracks: Shanghai, St. Petersburg, Quebec City, Macau and the Michelin Test Track.[9]
Online components[edit]
Project Gotham Racing 4 introduced a new online game mode, called "Bulldog". One player starts out as the Bulldog, whose job is to tag every other opponent in the game, thus creating new bulldogs as they go. This mode is played in an open section of a city, allowing the players to turn on to any street they want. Both cars and bikes are allowed to play in this mode simultaneously.
PGR Nations was launched with the release of the game. Players connected to Xbox Live would race on behalf of a certain country and their average statistics would be added to the total of their country's through a leaderboard.
Vehicles[edit]
Project Gotham Racing 4 features more than 130 vehicles,[10] including the newly introduced motorcycles.
The game marks a return to the car balance of Project Gotham Racing 2, with cars ranging from low-performance hatchbacks to high-performance supercars. Project Gotham Racing 3 emphasized supercars and special models, but did have a few high-performance production cars.
Geometry Wars: Waves[edit]
Main article: Geometry Wars: Waves
The game debuted with a bonus mini-game Geometry Wars: Waves, which would later be included in Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2.
Along with an ad campaign Microsoft also released various promotional items, the biggest being Project Gotham Racing Mobile which contained a code that unlocked a sneak peek trailer via the Project Gotham Racing 3 website.
Project Gotham Racing 4 was included as part of the Xbox 360 Live 12 Month Messenger Gold Pack, which included the game, a 12-month Xbox Live Gold subscription card, a wired headset, and a chat pad controller attachment.[11]
Soundtrack[edit]
The soundtrack features 57 songs from a number of different genres. In-game options allows players to switch off particular genres or songs to create a custom playlist of the available songs. A song, called "The Shadow", was exclusively written and performed by The Prodigy and was remixed by Chris Chudley from Audioantics. It plays on the game menus and credits.[12] It dynamically changes when the player moves along different menus in-game.