PGR2 Paris Booster Pack released

Last year, Project Gotham Racing 2 raised the bar for online-enabled racing games, integrating the Xbox Live service so completely that it even downloaded leaderboards and ghost cars in single-player mode. Since then, the game's multiplayer racing has often filled a gap when we've had no one around to tackle face to face, and often we've been sat down with a mate and wound up chucking it on anyway. It's that good.

However if you've been playing it more or less constantly since it came out at the end of November, the chances are that you've played through every city, seen every track variation and cleared the game completely - right down to gathering every medal and car. High time then for another example of how Xbox Live should be handled - in this case via the PGR2 Paris Booster Pack, released for download this week by Microsoft and Bizarre Creations.

Yes, Paris. The pack, which weighs in at 2996 blocks and took us about ten minutes to download, consists of seven new courses set around the new location, and eight new cars including some very shiny Ferraris and a racing green TVR Cerbera Speed 12 - previously only available to people who had every Platinum medal. In fact, the developer has kept a lot of the colour schemes locked up specifically for those people, so if you see a differently coloured Cerbera prowling around online, you'll know you're up against someone who cleared the entire game...

At first glance, the accuracy of the city's design appears to be on a par with the locations in the retail release, and we certainly enjoyed racing through streets lined with cafés under a canopy of trees, leaves fluttering into our path, powersliding round L'Arc de Triomphe and scooting around the Eiffel Tower - just a couple of the landmarks lovingly recreated for the Booster Pack.

The full car list comprises the Chevrolet Corvette C6 Z51, Porsche 356A Carrera Speedster, Ferrari 250TR, Ferrari 365 GTS4 (Daytona), Ferrari 288 GTO, BMW 645Ci, BMW M3CSL and the aforementioned TVR Cerbera Speed 12. Again, each more than lives up to previous standards, and it's a pleasure to watch the reflections of Parisian landmarks washing over the gloriously detailed models, all the while meaty engine noises mash your eardrums.

Paris even has its own radio stations, which were shipped on the DVD ahead of time to save on the download size (which would otherwise have been well over 100MB). Obviously this raises the question of whether these items were held back specifically to launch as Downloadable Content a few months later, but it's clear from the 2996-block download size that the content isn't just being unlocked on the disc, which is encouraging. We reckon Bizarre Creations wanted Paris in there and had the soundtrack planned in advance, but took the opportunity post-release to really polish it up and make sure it was up to standard.

Which segues nicely into the only slight snag - it's another Premium content update. However, when you consider how much work obviously went into it, that the price has been fairly set at £2.99 in the UK (compared to $4.99 in the States), and that not so long ago we would pay full whack for entire racing games with an equivalent amount of content, it doesn't seem quite so galling. In fact, if Bizarre fancies releasing some more city Booster Packs in the future, we'll be happy to cough up all over again, if only so we can get in there first and reclaim top spot on the leaderboards for those first five minutes...