Project Gotham Racing 3 seems to be the Xbox's answer to PlayStation's Gran Turismo. Project Gotham Racing 3 puts the 360's power to good use and provides a high bar for PlayStation 3 to try to reach.

The graphics in PGR3 are stellar; extremely detailed environments without hints of pop-in and realistic looking car models that are replicas of actual cars, yet they can take damage. The damage can even be seen in the "dash" view, a view that shows not only the road ahead, but also the steering wheel and your hands, the dash, and even your side mirrors, unless you manage to scrape them off on an excessively tight turn in the track. This "dash" view also allows you to change your camera angle around, to look out your side windows or glance up to check your rear-view mirror. While this view is really cool and interesting, I found it a bit difficult to manage both the car and the camera. Fans of flight simulations may feel more at home with this capability.

The crowd looks amazing; you'll see a variety of men and women in the crowd, even some small children. (Most of the faces used on these spectators were taken from the developers, as I understand it.) Not only is there a diverse collection of faces in the crowd, but their behavior does a nice job of straddling the line between group social behavior (they all jump back when you smash into the fence and cheer when you pass) and robotic uniformed motion. If you watch them closely, you'll see that they have their own attitudes to some degree. I even saw one guy that seemed to be aggravated by two little Asian girls.

The sound effects are pretty good in Project Gotham Racing 3, but what's more interesting is the way PGR3 handles the music. The music is divided into playlists - think radio stations - and each specialize in different types of music. My favorite is the Alternative Rock playlist, which includes Morrissey, Presidents of the United States of America, Hot Hot Heat and Bloc Party. Other playlists include Rock, Electronica & Dark Electronica, Hip Hop, Industrial, Bhangra, Japanese Pop and Classical, including such talent as Staind, Secret Machines, Dark New Day, Skindred, Chemical Brothers, New Order, Aphex Twin, Orbital, The Streets, Kool Keith, C-Mone, Skinny Puppy, Covenant and Medieval Punditz, among others. Additionally, you can listen to your own music by either streaming music from your personal audio player or by ripping music to your 360's hard drive in advance.

Project Gotham Racing 3 gives 360 gamers a nice racing simulation experience that's more forgiving than a lot of formula racing games, but not by much. You'll need to learn how to draft off of the cars ahead of you and how to properly corner if you want to be able to come in first on the higher difficulty levels.

Not only that, but you'll also need to be able to pull off some interesting and stylish moves to build up something PGR3 calls "Kudos" points. These are awarded for successfully clearing cones in the cone gate races, drifting, drafting, driving on two wheels... if it's cool, it probably earns you kudos.

What you need to be going after, specifically, depends on your goal. The three things you can work towards are Credits (which can be used to buy additional cars), Kudos (which are used to unlock concept cars), and Medals and Trophies (which unlock new races). You'll be working on all three at the same time, but you can change your racing style to match your goals by focusing more on style and daring (for Kudos), speed (for Credits) or winning races (for Medals and Trophies).

As you work your way through the Gotham Career mode, you'll be challenged by a large number of different events. There's Timed events, such as Hot Lap, Timed Run, Breakthrough and Time vs. Kudos, Racing Events such as Street Race, One on One and Eliminator and Style Events, including Cone Challenge, Drift Challenge, Overtake Challenge and Speed Challenge. These events take place on a decent variety of tracks in some nicely detailed and perhaps familiar locales. If, however, you find yourself wanting to race on a track in a city that you haven't yet unlocked events in, you can satisfy your craving by building your own race in the Custom Race feature. (This is a good way to pick up a couple of Achievements, by the way.)

Of the racing offerings that were available on the Xbox 360 at launch, Project Gotham Racing 3 leans the most towards the simulation side. If you want to win races, you'll need to drive a clean line and actually brake in the curves (gasp!). To be a good driver in PGR3, you'll need to be a good driver.

Luckily, there's still hope for you even if you're not God's gift to racing. There are several different difficulty levels to choose from. If you try it on the hardest difficulty rating, you'll need to be really good. If you're not, setting the difficulty to the lowest setting will also lower your goal, such as having a goal of coming in third rather than finishing first. Of course, the greater the challenge, the greater the reward, so you don't want to set the difficulty level lower than you need to. However, if you find yourself doing much better in a race than you had anticipated and coming in first when your goal was third, you'll be happy to know that over-performing in lower difficulty levels will get you a bonus.

Project Gotham Racing 3 presents a nice simulation racing game for the Xbox 360. The only thing lacking here is a steering wheel controller. While the difficulty level is a bit advanced, PGR3 provides a good challenge for gamers who like realistic racing games.

One extremely rare feature of PGR3 is that you not only get to use computerized versions of actual cars, but the cars can actually take damage as well. While this might not sound like much, licensing usually relegates a game to have one or the other of these features. The rule was always: "Licensed cars or cars that take damage. Choose one." Project Gotham Racing 3 delivers both and does so in a game that has enough going for it that it could do fine without either.

Also available in your "garage" are two arcade games made by Bizarre Creations. The original Geometry Wars and a new sequel to Geometry Wars: Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved. Both of these are just the trial versions, mind you, but you get enough to get a good idea of what each game is like. Retro Evolved is really pretty cool, with some really cool special effects. (Retro Evolved actually uses every chip in the 360, by the way.)

If you're looking to jump onto a track, get your car up to 200 or so and then jump into a power-slide around a hairpin turn and then (and only then) hit the nitrous and maintain control of the car, you're looking for a different game. If you would like to try to put your skills to the test in some of the coolest cars available on the market and race against others in realistic conditions on recognizable tracks from around the world, pick up a copy of Project Gotham Racing 3 today.