Project Gotham Racing
What started with Metropolis Street Racer on the Dreamcast, was fully realised with PGR 4 on the Xbox 360 in 2007.
Created by Bizarre Creations, the last entry in their series logged into the Weather channel so it could recreate your current weather in the game. It also had over 130 vehicles and included motorcycles which handled quite well and were fun to play with.
The game had a system called “Kudos”, which meant that points were awarded for driving with style, be that drifting or overtaking. This gave the game great replayability. This game looks great, but where it shined the most was in its handling model.
Forza Horizon takes a lot from this series, and in many ways is a spiritual successor to PGR but there has been a serious lack of good arcade racers in the last few years, so let’s have a good track-based one too.