I'm a Giant Killer!
Over the weekend I dipped into the online experience that Project Gotham Racing 4 has to offer. It was a lot of fun, and not just because I was able to win several of my races. It was just a lot of fun, because it brought back a lot of good memories. My first real online gaming experience came with Project Gotham Racing 2. Before that, I had played the occassional game online here and there, mostly some PC shooter, but I never really saw the appeal. I preferred to just play games for the single player storyline, and when I wanted to play multiplayer, I gathered a group of friends and went head to head with them. But then Project Gotham Racing 2 came out and several of my colleagues urged me to get an Xbox Live account and race with them online.
Since they were boasting about their skills, I felt inclined to answer their challenge. I got myself the Xbox Live package, including headset, logged online, and was lost for several weeks of hardly any sleep and a heavily bruised ego. The lack of sleep came from the fact that this was an amazing 'one more go' game. One more go to try and break one of the many world lap records (which was I able to do once, but only because the game hadn't come out yet officially, and was only played by a handful of reviewers), one more go to try and defeat friends and unknowns, and one more go to try and increase my ranking on the ever expanding leaderboards. The egobruising came from the fact that I wasn't as good as I had always seen myself. Yeah, I was in the top 10 percent, but when you consider yourself the hottest driver in the world, you don't want to end last in a few too many online races with people who turned out to be just that little bit hotter. Or in some cases: a whole lot hotter.