Project Gotham Racing 2

I've been playing this game (on the XBox) a lot lately, and spent about half this weekend on it. It's so addictive, especially since you get to compare you scores against everyone else in the world and your friends in particular.

What I've noticed this weekend in particular, though, is that winning in the Kudos World Racing at the medium difficulty level (that is, getting the silver medal) is not really as good of an indication of how good you are as it could be. The reason is that each time you get to a new class of cars, you probably buy the best car in the class to do your races. You therefore make up extra time on straightaways versus the computer opponents just because you have a better car.

I can tell that medium difficulty is actually harder than that because I played a bunch of the street race and timed run levels in the game where the car you drive is picked for you and is usually not the best car. Medium difficulty there was much harder. The good side is that I've learned more about how to take turns for maximum speed much better, although not nearly like the guys who are the top scorers on those boards.

There's one cone challenge level, the one that uses a Morgan Aero something-or-another, that I have a gold medal and came very close to the platinum. On that one, I'm placed something like 1292 in the world, which for that level is something like 30,000 people. I feel pretty good about that one. Of course, you go look at the ghost for the top guy on that board and you see him execute the whole race flawlessly (okay, I did that - every cone gate plus slides between got me the whole race in one chained combo) but he throws in a couple 360s and extra slides that make his score just dwarf mine.

I could go on, but I need to go get some breakfast! (Oh, look - racing and blogging both came before breakfast. How interesting.)