Games You Should Buy

A jet black Dodge Charger slides from the freeway with a screech, running onto a dirt track barely wide enough to accommodate it. The panicked driver just manages to avoid losing control of the car altogether, steadying the nose as the accelerometer nudges 100. Back on asphalt, a 1967 Chevrolet Camaro is also nearing a ton, switching lanes to avoid head–on traffic. The Charger tumbles across clumps of mud and stone, sliding back on to the tarmac. In doing so it connects with the back end of the Chevy, launching it high into the air where it flips on its side twice and lands back on the road, a smoking ruin.
This is 2007, and I’m watching Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof.
See, I missed out on the golden age of car chases on the big screen. Vanishing Point, The Italian Job, The French Connection… all of these were lost on me and my pathetic post–1970’s birth. With this in mind, it’s probably fair to say that I wasn’t the target audience to Reflection’s late–90’s gaming revolution (Incidentally, it was a genuine revolution – perhaps the first 3D game to wrestle sandbox game play away from the jealous clutches of the time-rich sociopath and have it land squarely at the feet of the well-adjusted young go-getter that comprised the Playstation’s fan base, Driver couldn’t help but feel like seriously new shit). This was no skin off my nose: what fun, I reasoned, could be extracted from a game bereft of enemies, obstacles, or any real objective to speak of?
I was, of course, being relentlessly ignorant. Today any game offering less freedom of exploration than Driver seems hopelessly dated, with play restraints of any kind being questioned by a player base that have learned to expect endlessly pushable boundaries. Since 1998 the realisation that some area, object or function of a game is inaccessible has ceased to be met with the query, “So what am I supposed to do instead?” Now the question on everybody’s lips is, “Why the hell not?”
Of course, the Grand Theft Auto series has become the watchword for non-linear gaming of this kind, a beacon of choice which a horde of “me too” bastardizations have no qualms over following religiously. For many, Rockstar’s low budget E3 2001 booth was the breeding ground for the new wave of urban sandbox games, with both headliner (and eventual flop) State Of Emergency and vaguely promising side project Grand Theft Auto III being unveiled. In reality, the ground work to this exciting new genre had been laid several years before in Reflections Newcastle-based studio. Unfortunately for the latter developer, the huge success of the post-PSone Grand Theft Autos, coupled with the deteriorating quality of the Driver series (from genre-defining revelation to tired, cheapened experience within 4 games) has justifiably moved the limelight somewhat.
But anyway, back to me and my experience, or lack thereof, of car chase movies. With only a handful of modern, CGI filled chases knocking about my head space, it made sense for me not to fully understand the tantalising prospect of recreating the best of the bunch. What I could understand, when I finally got around to playing the game, was the immense pleasure to be had from power sliding round corners in Miami, scattering debris from ill-placed garbage in San Francisco, and… well, that’s as far as I got. Epic though the Driver experience was back in the day, a massive slice of the fun was cut off from me because my miniscule thumbs and childish hand-eye co-ordination couldn’t cope with a training level so hardcore that it once played Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun and won. (Later it kicked Chuck Norris’ ass when he started bitching about meme theft.) This kind of unassailable hurdle has a sort of halcyon charm attached to it today, but as a child it proved to be teeth-grindingly frustrating, effectively reducing the game to two handfuls of roads for my 10-year-old self to cruise about in to my heart’s content. That this never got old, despite such a massive amount of game play being kept behind lock and key, speaks volumes of the quality of the game.
Forget all that, though; today I return to my PSone a veritable driving God. Police blockades, once an inescapable burden, now crumble before my lane-weaving proficiency. The blank spots which occur just before gaining air at the top of Californian hills, once a frightening game of chance, have become easily manageable with my intricate steering. Where I used to cower in fear at the prospect of coming across rubbish tips, shop windows, traffic light posts, parking meters, park benches, post boxes, fire hydrants, picnic tables, cars, vans or buses, now I happily eat up all obstacles with my feet at the pedals of a machine I feel perfectly in sync with. Be it my experience with slightly more complex driving films or with far more complex gaming hardware, I come to the driving fore with a great deal more confidence than before. And that tough-as-nails training mission? Bitch, please. Done within one go, dusted in two.
And here things go a bit hairy. Launching you into an undercover police campaign, the main game features a storyline which is never easy to follow - and probably not worth doing so, even if I could. The dialogue is an embarrassment, full of cringe worthy lines delivered by lazy voice actors which at best comes across as cheesy and at worst, xenophobic. Cut scenes which must have looked crazy cool at the time are now painful to watch, their noticeably slow movement only exacerbating the sense you get that the whole thing would have been better without them, or any story at all. If, by the time you get to the Big Apple, you’re not begging for a simple series of challenges without a superfluous plot to drive it, you’re a better man than me. In most games, particularly those from a bygone age, this failing would only constitute a small slap on the wrists, but Driver is a game firmly nailing its colours to the “cool” post, and the transfer from cinematic experience to interactive plaything really ought to have been more seamless than this.
But hell, do what you have to do to avoid this getting you down. Make copious amounts of tea during the FMVs. Sing to yourself in your head while Tanner shoots the breeze with generic Afro-American drug pusher no.34. Zone out completely until you’re back behind the wheel, chasing down proper bad guys and avoiding well-meaning bad guys once again. Because as an artifact, Driver is of historical importance to the advancement of videogames, and as a playing experience, few can touch it for the sense of speed and edge-of-the-seat action it provides. If you know your history, you’ll already have played it, and if you don’t, you better have a damn good excuse.