|
|
|
|
||
        |
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
4 Smileys - 1 Smiley Poor, 5 Smileys Excellent
Platforms: Playstation, Windows 9x/ME/00, Mac
Buckle Up
There's an old adage that goes something along the lines of "Nothing improves your driving like having a police car follow you." Throw that notion in the garbage as soon as you throw Driver into your CD ROM. In Driver you take on the role of Tanner, an ex-racing undercover cop who doesn't understand the meaning of the words "vehicular safety." You smash through barricades and parking meters, tear down populated highways at frightening speeds, pulverize all vehicles that get in your way, terrify innocent pedestrians, and generally tick off the local law enforcement officers. I can't think of a better way to waste my time when I should be studying for exams.
Installation Installing Driver is a breeze. You simply double click the installer file on the CD and select a location for it to install to. You can optionally tell it to install either the Glide version or the non-Glide version only (it installs both by default). Unfortunately, unlike the PC version, there is no minimum install option. If you don't have over 200MB free on your hard drive, you'd better start trashing some of those Backstreet Boys songs in your Napster downloads folder.
The Interface This game was originally released for the Playstation, and it shows. The main interface is an awkwardly navigated image, different parts of which light up as you cycle through them with the arrow keys. You're also provided with a textual description of what the currently selected option is. To start a new or load a saved game, you select "Undercover." If you don't feel like playing the actual game, you can "Take a Ride." In this mode you basically drive around one of the maps in the game (you can only access two of the four maps until you have gotten to certain levels in "Undercover" mode), practicing avoiding the cops and finding hiding places and short cuts within the cities. You can also choose to play one of the many smaller "Driving Games." These are quick little games you play in order to improve your driving skills. There is also a "Training" mode in which you practice maneuvers, and a "Car Chases" section in which you can play saved car chase movies from the game. I'll cover these in more detail later on. Then there's my favorite section, the mysterious "Cheat" option. In "Undercover" mode, after you have completed the initial level, you are presented with another menu. This one is similarly navigated with the arrow keys, only now the items to select from are various objects in a three dimensional motel room. The door lets you exit, the TV lets you save and restore, and your answering machine is where you find out what your next mission is. While this menu holds a lot of novelty to begin with, it becomes tedious to cycle through the different objects in the room, watching the point of view change from one to the other every time. After the first few missions I found my heart longing for good old plain text-based menus.
Lookin' Good The graphics in Driver are reasonably decent. It would be nice if the textures of the buildings within cities weren't so two dimensional looking and repetitive, and it would be nice if the movie scenes between missions in the "Undercover" mode weren't so horribly rendered and badly acted, but this is of little consequence to the game. The graphics are not up to par with some of the other 3D games hitting the market these days, but they're good enough as to not hinder enjoyment.
Undercover Woes
I didn't find playing the main feature of the game and going through the missions very entertaining. The first mission you have to complete is performing a series of maneuvers in under a minute. This is extremely hard, requires tons of practice, and leaves absolutely no room for error. I practiced and practiced, and attempted the mission exactly twenty six times before finally giving up and finding a cheat code on the Internet that lets you bypass it. This first mission, in my opinion, would be enough to discourage most people from continuing to play the game. Only the incredibly patient who have possession of a gamepad truly have a chance to complete this level. The following missions are, for the most part, based heavily on the elements of time limits and luck. Often you will be given an incredulously short amount of time to reach a horrendously distant destination, sometimes with little or no reason behind the time limit. You will be required to drive at top speeds the entire way to reach the destination before time runs out, which means attracting a lot of the boys in blue. A single crash on the way usually means having to restart the mission. On top of this, the game sometimes doesn't let you reach the destination if you have a cop chasing you (which you almost invariably always do, unless you're very lucky or, ahem, you used a cheat code). Then, on top of both of those, even if you manage to shake the cops and reach your destination in time, marked by a big red arrow hovering over the street, it seems you need to stop within one nanometer of the arrow or else it doesn't register - something that's hard to do perfectly every time. These three elements combined make the missions incredibly difficult and frustrating. Some of the levels were fun. For example, one of your missions is driving a taxi like a maniac until you scare the passenger into sharing needed information. Unfortunately, the fun missions are few and far between. My problems with the "Undercover" mode were not merely related to the extreme difficulty. I had technical problems as well. Some of the movie sequences between the missions would stop playing part way through before finishing. Also, my answering machine in the motel room menu wouldn't play any messages, so I never knew what my next mission was until after I was already behind the wheel. These issues greatly hindered my ability to understand the story line. When I contacted MacSoft technical support, they informed me that they had not heard of anyone experiencing this problem before and gave me a few suggestions to fix it. All of which, unfortunately, were fruitless. Overall, I would have to say that I didn't find the "Undercover" mode of the game enjoyable. Unless you're the type of person who likes a good challenge and is able to do the same missions over and over until you finally luck out and get it, then you probably won't enjoy it either.
Don't Judge A Book By It's Cover
If the game is so horribly, awfully difficult and bad, then why did it get four Smileys? Did the scale suddenly change to out of a hundred as a mean trick to play on people who don't bother to read the review? No. There is much more to Driver than "Undercover" mode, and these extras more than make up for the difficulty of the game's missions. First of all, controlling the cars is fun. The driving physics are far from realistic, but who wants realistic when you've got six cops running you down the wrong way on a one-way residential street at 80mph? The game was designed to imitate car chase movies from the 70's (and it has the music to match), and this it does with raw perfection. Tons of wheel-spinning, tire-burning, hubcap-popping action can be produced by even the most amateur players. I could spend hours driving around in the "Take a Drive" mode of the game, seeing how many wacky stunts I can pull off before a cop sees me, and then see how long I can last until I'm caught. The police in the game are great. If you obey the traffic rules, they leave you alone. But as soon as one of them spots you make one wrong move, be it smashing a car, or stopping a little too close to the car in front of you at a red light, the chase is on. The police in real life have concerns such as safety of the general public, and safety of themselves and other cops. They strive to arrest criminals while minimizing danger and maximizing efficiency. Those cops are lame. The police in Driver have only one goal in mind: smash your car up! Oops! You ran a yellow light! Now you die! This fact has been criticized in other reviews of Driver, however I say rock on! Cops that want to arrest you are boring. Cops that want to destroy you are cool! Some of the "Driving Games" that you can choose from in the game are typical run laps, perform maneuvers, avoid pylon type games. Given the car-chase oriented driving physics of the game, I lost interest in those games very quickly. The ones that I played over and over were "Carnage," where you are given an invincible car and the goal is to cause as much destruction and damage to the other cars on the road as possible, and "Survival," where, as the name implies, you see how long you can survive with several cops just inches behind you. I can't even begin to express how fun it is to tear up over the hilly roads of San Francisco, slam the breaks, and watch six or seven cops fly through the air and smash into random unsuspecting vehicles in front of you. The scene I described above is something that you can enjoy over and over again thanks to the built-in film director capabilities in Driver. After you've played a game, you can retrace all of your actions and record them from a variety of different angles. You can place cameras inside your car, inside chasing police cars, on tripods on the ground, and in the air chasing either your or a cop's car. Sometimes making your movies look sweet is just as fun as playing the game itself. My only problem is that there's no way to export the movies to Quicktime or some other externally viewable format.
In Conclusion
If the "Undercover" mode worked correctly and wasn't so frustratingly difficult, I would have given it the extra Smiley. Fortunately, even without the main game, the additional features and games provided in Driver are a source of loads of entertainment. The lack of multiplayer capabilities is a mild disappointment, however not surprising for a game ported over from Playstation. I also question what the point would be. Simply playing a game of "smash the other guy's car before he smashes you" would get old fast. The true charm of Driver is the ability to break traffic laws and evade cops without the nasty fine, jail, and possibly death related consequences this would earn you in real life. All said and done, I have to say that Driver is an enjoyable game, so long as you ignore the intended main "Undercover" feature. I've wasted many hours and will probably waste many more simply evading cops and smashing up other people's cars, then watching all my deviant behavior in the splendor of beautifully directed movies.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Title
