Right, time to stop being lazy. Retrocity has returned!

Today I’m looking at a relatively modern game, released in 1999 for the Playstation, and then ported to Windows and Mac a year later. This game gives me a chance to reminisce a bit. As you may know, I’ve never owned any gaming machines other than a PC and a GameBoy Color which is lying around in a cupboard somewhere. But I first came across Driver on the Playstation. Back in those days, I would go round to a friend’s house. A friend who was obsessed with gaming. You might know him; his name was Tom. When the Megadrive was turned off, it was Driver that kept us entertained. We’d take it in turns to lead police cars on a chase up and down multi-storey car parks, or shunt cars onto the tracks and watch them get demolished when the tram came along.

Jumping over cars on the hills of San Francisco, a favourite pastime of mine

But when Tom moved away to some faraway land called Great Yarmouth, I forgot about Driver for a while. Then one day, looking for a new game to play, I came across it again. The PC version was being sold on Amazon for 1p. OK, so postage and packaging was £1.99, but £2 for a game this good was a bargain.

Driver is, quite obviously, a driving game. But it is not a racing game; I should make the distinction straight away. In undercover mode, you take driving jobs for people. Usually there is a time limit in which you must complete the mission, which can be a car chase or reaching a certain location without the police stopping you. Before you can access missions, you must pass the initial test, which requires you to show several driving skills in a car park within a very tight time limit.

While there is a limited variety of missions you can be given in a car, they do not get boring. The environment can change; there are different weather conditions in certain missions. There are many routes you can take; the city maps are open and do not restrict where you can go. If you do get fed up, or stuck on one mission for ages, there are several minigames available to play. These include car chases, checkpoint races, survival and carnage, where you have to cause as much damage as possible in a time limit.

But by far the best thing in Driver is the ‘Take a Ride’ mode. Choose a city, pick day or night, and then drive. This is the bit they put in to give Driver absolute replayability. There are 4 cities you can drive around, and the maps are huge. Admittedly there are many more recent games with much larger maps but for its time, this game was amazing. The whole city map will be accessible, and you can do anything you like. This is where you can stage car park chases and tram crashes. You can cause massive pileups or queues at junctions. Of course, if the police see you misbehaving, they’ll start chasing you. And they won’t stop until your car is completely wrecked. You can have up to 4 police cars after you at any one time, depending on your felony level, and they will also set up roadblocks on main roads. Once they’ve started chasing you, it’s just a matter of time before you’re wrecked. But it does give you plenty of opportunities to lead epic chases.

I slow down to maneuver around a road block on the Golden Gate bridge

Whatever driving mode you’re in, you will see the same indicators on the screen. You are told how much damage the car has sustained, your felony level and your speed. There is also a map, which shows your location and where there are police cars near you. The police field of vision can be seen, and this is a lot bigger when you’re being chased. Your speed flashes red when you go over 60mph, to remind you that the police will chase you if they see you going at that speed.

Once you’ve finished all the missions, cheats are unlocked which can make Take a Ride even more entertaining. Firstly, you can choose any car you’ve driven in the missions. You can turn your damage off and make yourself really heavy so that you just knock other cars flying and don’t slow down when you hit them. You can make your cars go super fast, which is especially fun when you take off on hills in San Francisco. I think the top speed you get to is around 300mph with the fastest car.

The whole game is designed to look, feel and sound like a 1970s car chase movie. You can hear this in the background music and see it in the cars. But it is even more evident in another great feature of the game. You can make your own car chase movie. While watching a replay, you can change camera angles and positions to make it look exactly how you want, and then save it and watch it whenever you want.

Editing a replay in 'Film Director' mode

So I can conclude that Driver is a fantastic game. Every car chase is different, and there is no limit to the entertainment you can get from it

Yesterday I finally acquired Driver 2 and a Playstation emulator, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while, so I will be able to report back on the sequel soon. According to reliable sources, it’s more of the same.

So it should be brilliant.

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