Project Gotham Racing 4 (Xbox 360)

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If they'd simply separated church and state, this complaint wouldn't be here.

Some other minor quibbles for the brass at Bizarre Creations:

- This title was tested on a 36-inch flat-screen television, and some of the descriptive text in the new red-and-white onscreen menus was nearly impossible to read from a reasonable distance. Translation: The text is too damn tiny.

- Enough with the five-second countdowns! It's great that you like to flex your designing muscles with snazzy camera fly-bys at the start of each race, but someone playing the game for a few hours in one sitting has more than gotten the point. It would be nice to have the option of skipping them.

- It would help to be able to switch vehicles after a race in Arcade Mode without having to go back out to the main lobby.

- They're called wrap-around menus -- look into them.

But these few gripes aside, PGR4 is a welcome return to form for the Xbox's best racing series. Add in an increasingly satisfying Xbox Live experience, and picking up this game is the right call.

Sadly, it is likely also to be the final PGR title developed by Bizarre Creations. When Activision acquired Bizarre in September, Microsoft quickly issued a statement reminding everyone that PGR is solely owned by Bill Gates & Co. If this is indeed the end of a beautiful friendship, at least Bizarre went out with a bang.

This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.