Review
The Magic Police Film
by J Nash (December 2nd, 2010 at 2:01 pm)
Game: Driver. Publisher: Gameloft. Authors: Reflections (original game), colossal numbers of people (iThing port). Currently free (normally (£2.99/€3,99/$4.99). Buy the game or play the demo. (ALERT. The game is about 400mb. The demo is about 402mb. Yep.)
Welcome back to Flabshack, where I attempt to educate my pretty self about famous iThing games (except it’s already become “famous games with iThing versions”) to reduce my ignorance (eg about the history of tower defence) and valuably enrich the lives of Podgamer readers everywhere (eg by having the inventor of tower defence assassinated with a blowpipe).
Today: Driver. And the problem with Driver is that THANKS CRAIG FOR MENTIONING THE DRIVER SALE BECAUSE NOW I HAVE TO FLABSHACK DRIVER WHICH I’VE BEEN PUTTING OFF FOR MONTHS BECAUSE I HATE DRIVER SO MUCH.
I hate driving games (with the notable exception of Midtown Madness) but have been trying to drag myself to play Driver because of its historical importance as a “pinion game” — games that aren’t necessarily the first, but which are the ones everyone subsequently rips off and effectively define a genre from that point on. (Or, of course, poison it: pinions aren’t necessarily the first or necessarily any good.)
So everything post-Driver looks, feels and mostly plays like the open city squealaround, with horrible spongy cars, slightly embarrassing movie references filtered through not quite remembering those films properly, flee-ruining indestructible scenery and random traffic. It’s in the DNA. (Or DMA, eh? Eh, eh?) (Except I think they were Rockstar by then.) (And I’m sure they said the whole presentational similarity thing was a coincidence of practicality, because that’s how third person games look.) (But I have to hold on to this tenuous link because otherwise I’ve been playing Driver for nothing, NOTHING.)
Driver of course was heralded by idiots as The Car Chase Game, but in fact it more closely resembles Pachinko: you drop your car at the top of a mission and tumble down the bouncy flashing glittery sparkly map of random police and maybe land in the right hole.
Here is how approximately 2,000% of Driver’s missions play:
1. “Oh no, a thing! Drive to this distant spot because a countdown.”
2. “You arrived! Drive back but the timer’s now off.”
(There’s the occasional attempt to mix things up by insisting you don’t crash, or in the one interesting bit having to chase and ram someone, but expect the 1-2 version and you’ll never be disappointed except by playing it.)
This in itself isn’t particularly damning, but, you see, the police.
Not-promo shots SHOCKER. (These are the Free Ride mode though because I can’t face starting the game again.) Anyway, the first one was San Francisco; this is New York.
To be fair to the The Car Chase Game game idea, the police in Driver do indeed act like they’re in a movie, ever alert for the call to action and pursuing you with relentless crashery. The thing is, you’re the extra in their film about police, which is a film called The Magic Police.
Police cars appear randomly in Driver, popping into existence anywhere on the mini-map. They always know you’re the crim (even in levels where you’re in a completely different car and driving responsibly). If you outwit or wreck one, it randomly reappears elsewhere on the mini-map.
This means that it’s entirely a waste of time trying to do anything about the police — in fact, you’re penalised for driving well (ie, losing them) because the random respawn could be significantly worse. (Everyone who’s played Driver has stories about the police appearing directly ahead, or round the final corner or something.) You’re statistically better off just ploughing along the green route line and grimly ignoring whatever happens.
“But J Nash,” you quiz keenly, teasing your tawny locks, “it is car chases.” Except, of course, (with vanishingly rare exceptions) you’re against the clock. There’s no opportunity to get in a real chase — whipping around the streets whenever danger looms — because you’re always on a timer. Play a mish for fun and you’ll be sacked for missing your appointment. It’s Madcap Driving to Work Simulator.
Los Angeles.
(I think something went wrong quite late in the design. My suspicion is that the first half of a typical mish — beating the clock — was intended to be police-free, or at least you’d only be chased if you were obviously a maniac. The second half, the clockless escape, would have all the police naturally alerted that you’d robbed the bank or whatever, and there’s your chase. But someone said, “Nah, just switch the jam-jars on all the time.”)
To be fair, if the police happen to appear on a side road and you’re currently clear of pursuit, it’s possible to slip past by watching their headlight cone of interest. Here is the number of times during the whole game this will randomly occur: 4.
(Probably the funniest thing about all this is that everyone, everyone complains about the police-pop lottery of Driver’s final mish, apparently having played the rest of the game with a paper bag on their head or something.)
Thus the hollow centre. I elide the spongy period driving itself because that’s a matter of taste and you can probably guess mine by examining this photograph of me playing Midtown Madness 3′s European bits and saying, “Hurrah, I can steer again.” Let’s have a quick look at the iThing port.
Miami. Actually, I think the radio stations are iThing-specific. (The radio stations are awful.)
It’s really quite decent, with an unpesky joypad. (You can also drive by tilting, a-ha, a-ho.) The burnout and handbrake are a bit fiddly as they’re at the top and bottom of the “steering wheel,” but I never had to use them (Glargh! — Driver fans) and in fact still have no idea what a burnout is. (Heurghk! — Driver fans.)
All the speed and missions are there; I’ve no idea if there are any iThing-specific bonuses, but there are mini-games where you escape, chase, etc, and a Free Ride (where tellingly you can’t switch off the police). There’s a lot of loading, but it’s modernly brief, except the effect is ruined by the endless “Are you sure?” checks and “Tap to continue” post-load pauses.
(Also by flybys that I assume were in the original; the notorious insta-fail train-chasing level, for example, begins every single time with an uninterruptable 12-second camera swoop.)
I’m not sure whether to blame the original or the port for the checkpoints but they’re beyond rubbish and into pitiable: the game snaps an autosave when your goal appears on the screen, not the mini-map, so if you lose you can either restart the level or jump 15/16ths of the way in. As you probably lost because the time ran out with the goal in view, you now have another exciting chance to do that again.
The ridiculous plot twist is revealed in this tense and entirely untouched scene. (At least you can skip everything.)
Comically for the appalling plot (and for a game that can’t shut up about movies, the story, told in lifeless CGI arguments before and/or after more or less every mission, is staggeringly inept) all 400mb-odd of videos have been converted with the wrong gamma, so the clueless dialogue about people you don’t care who they are is performed by murky electricity bill defaulters.
(As an aside, I became completely stuck in the train chase — and to be fair, when I played again last night I realised that the game would only bin you if you were a certain distance from the train, ie you could hopscotch it to the known destination as long as you didn’t outstrip it straight away — and, using a handy save-game-editing tip, sneaked the end of game reward cheats of Invincibility and Legal Immunity for further missions. This intriguingly showed up the clunky level design, with the average half-minute policelessly left on the clock quantifying how much fun Reflections allow you to have in chase mode.)
One idea that impressed me was that instead of jogging through a list, you accept one of (generally) three available jobs, outlined in answerphone messages. The branches converge at plot points, so strictly they’re side missions, but it’s a clever notion that’d promote replaying if the game wasn’t Driver. It’s a shame nobody ripped that off and that Driver itself dropped the idea, presumably for cost reasons.
Thus Driver. I’ve had it for months, since the last 59p sale, and wouldn’t even slightly recommend it. For free, it’s an interesting historical artefact if you like seeing how a few tweaks can make such a difference to a genre game (ie, you’re me mentioning Mid Mad again). Otherwise there are about fifty better iThing driving games, I expect, because I hate driving games (I certainly hope there are fifty better iThing games than Driver) and you have no reason to play this at all ever. That’s the thing about pinion games: sometimes you make Manic Miner, sometimes you make Driver.
For a glimpse into fracturing, you can also read J Nash vs Driver 3, a similar educational experiment, OF DOOM.
Not half an hour ago, I attempted to play Driver, procured for free thanks to Podgamer’s recent post, whilst riding on a number 57 bus. I fear my brain will never recover.
“I wish someone would hurry up and invent GTA3″, I remmember thinking at the time of the original PC release. Cops are hard to get right in games. They’re either laser-guided invincible battering rams like the ones in Driver, or complete mugs like Mafia II. There’s not much in between.
Semi-tangentially, I recommend Red Faction: Guerilla to cleanse the palette of indestructable scenery impact disappointment.
Oddly, in the last ten or so years on, my Midtown Madness has become broken. Thanks, the relentless march of PC technology!
Embarrassingly I never did manage to get round to reviewing Mid Mad 3 (the Xbox one) but can EXCLUSIVELY REVEAL that after pogoing wildly for the length of the entire game (which took months to complete because of the final bonus spray paint jump on the dock in the Cadillac) the score would have been 80%.
(In fact, the original subtitle for this item was STOP IN THE NAME OF THE LEURRR as a ref to Mid Mad 3′s plucky Parisian doppleringly scenery-leaping gendarmes, but it would have misrepresented Driver’s police as fun.)
In the original PS1 Driver the cops would only chase you if you had at least a partially filled Felony bar or broke the law (ie ran a red light, drove too fast or on the wrong side of the road) in their field of vision. So missions that started with a timer and an empty Felony bar would make you balance speeding and corner cutting with Cop avoidance (which was entirely possible) and safe driving.
I have no idea how this compares with the iPod version as the decision to put the Burnout and Handbrake buttons in between the d-pad controls is probably the most retarded control decision I’ve yet seen on the format. Those buttons have to be used whilst turning, frequently flicking between turning in to the corner and reverse lock. So to bunch all those buttons in such a way as to make it virtually impossible to use together is almost an act of vandalism. They’ve deliberately broke their own game.
I love Driver but I didn’t even play past the first mission.
You can indeed slip past the police as I mentioned, but even if you discount their absurdly hair-y triggers (“Look out, Sarge — that car’s existing”) the fact they’re random kicks the entire game into the bin.
To be fair, the buttons are scattered for tilt driving. I have no idea if tilt driving is acceptable to someone who knows what they’re doing, but I’d forgotten there’s a third control option that’s even worse: the virtual stick. My best guess is it simulates a Playstation joypad, because there’s a dead area so large you could fit a game design in there.
Driver was at its best in the PC version, when you craftily edited the config files to:
a. Give yourself huge figures for mass and power, and
b. Give the police huge figures for acceleration and how easily they’d detect you, but very low mass.
This meant two things: firstly, you could plow through traffic like a freight train, sending all other cars flying into the air. And secondly, the police would now accelerate so fast they would launch themselves into orbit at the slightest nudge.
This transformed a somewhat tedious game into a gloriously insane car physics funhouse.