Superb.

I’m far more impressed than I expected to be.

Since my last post, I’ve mainly been playing PGR3. In the default our of car view, it seemed all right, just another PGR game but a bit prettier. Changing to the in-car view, though, changed things completely. For some reason unknown to be, it just started looking better and immediately became more immersive. I tried the first race in career mode about ten times and failed it every time. (I had the difficulty set to medium and refused to take it down.) So, as I was rubbish at single player, I decided to dive into the online career mode. Played a few more races there – and even won one of them. It’s just such incredible fun.

Then I set up a private online game so myself and a friend could have a chat and race each other. That lasted a few races, until we decided to play Gauntlet. So we leapt into that and died horribly. Still, got 15 gamer points for collecting treasure.

I’m not sure how achievements work. I thought I’d got a few from playing Gotham, but I’ve only got one. Anyway, I’m sure I’ll understand in time.

I’ve just realised, actually, that you can see what I’ve been playing on the main page of this gaming diary. Cool.

A couple of further PGR3 notes -

The soundtrack is quite possibly the best “licensed tracks” soundtracks ever that doesn’t feature J-Pop.

There’s a crash we can sometimes reproduce in the online mode. If someone’s playing with the mini-dashboard while the online stuff is loading the game can get stuck on the loading screens. Everyone can quit out, except the person who had their dashboard up. They have to turn the console off, because their dashboard stops responding.

As for the console OS itself, it’s worth mentioning how great it is. Everything’s all just there whenever you need it. It’s taken all the different bits of the original Live and packed them into one place. It’s very slick and, if not quite intuitive, then easy to use once you work it out. And, yes, Jeff Minter’s Neon is great.