Oddball Update

I decided to rent Driver 3 last night. And no, I refuse to called it by its canonical name, “Driv3r,” because that’s just dumb. I mean, if it were a game about 1337 hax0rs…nevermind. Anyway, this game had gotten a lot of bad press when it came out not long ago, so I never bought it. I own (and thoroughly enjoyed) the first two games in the Driver series, because they were the first games to really lend that “1970s car chase film” quality to a videogame. The earlier games even have a “Film Director” mode where you can assemble your own custom replays. Way cool.

So anyway, I picked up the Xbox version of Driver 3 and popped in it. Hey—what the hell is this? Somebody put an actual good game in this box. It has nice graphics with HDTV support, awesome music, great-looking vehicle models, nice physics…oh, it is Driver 3? Hmm…this bears further investigation!

Wow, man. I need to go out and buy this game, like, now, because it is sweet. It’s just like the previous two Driver games—I mean, next to nothing has been lost—except that it looks and sounds better than ever. Most of the reviews I read talked of really lousy hit detection, horrible car handling, invisible barriers forcing you to drive a preordained line, loads of bugs owing to a rushed release…well, it sounded like a crap fest, and for that reason I never even bothered to look at the game for a while. I’m glad I ended up checking it out, though, because I’m not having any of these problems. None!

First of all, the cars—they rock. As in previous Driver games, the models are obviously supposed to be certain vehicles we all recognize and love, but of course there isn’t any vehicle licensing going on here, so the developers had to change certain little minor things to make them look like fictional cars. And of course none of the vehicle models are ever referred to by name. But it’s easier than ever before to tell what they’re supposed to be. For example, Tanner (that’s your character) drives a black ‘70 Challenger. And the first bad guy you have to chase drives—get this—a 1980 Trans Am!

How do I know it’s a 1980? (Okay, prepare for eruption—you just asked a Firebird nutjob how to identify an F-body model year.) Well, it’s simple—the texture used on the trunk of the car has the Indy 500 logo badge on it, which was used only on the 1980 Turbo Trans Am Indy pace car special edition. Indeed; although Reflections had to erase the “Trans Am” words from the trunk lid, they left “Turbo” there, so it says “TURBO” and then a big blank space, followed by the Indy badge. Ha! The front of the car looks more like a 1973 T/A, and the hood is vintage ‘69 GTO, but what the hell. Everything else is exactly right, even the steering wheel. Love it!

There’s a variety of other cars too, of course, many of which you’ll immediately recognize. There’s something which is obviously a 1969-ish Shelby Mustang, but with round taillights and some other changes. There’s a ‘76 Corvette. There’s a funny little thing that looks kinda like a Nissan 300ZX (one of the older ‘80s ones), a bigass ‘77 Mercury Marquis with the little opera window and vinyl roof and everything. And lots more. You can also drive motorcycles, speedboats and other things. It’s a lot like GTA3.

Now, as much fun as it is to look at these cars, it’s even more fun to wreck them. Because the physics engine in Driver 3 simulates the same massively amusing, floating 1970s land yacht effects that that the previous games in this series did, and I love that. But going beyond that, the model deformation that occurs when you smash into something is easily the best and most detailed that I’ve ever seen in any game. As in GTA3/Vice City, doors crack open, hoods buckle, fly open and then rip off, etc. But the detail is amazing—all the textures are high-res. Going even further, bumpers tear off and drag behind you, body panels crumple and start to come off, and windows shatter into hailstorms of glass (complete with appropriate sound effects). And when the hood pops off, you’ll see that even your car’s engine is accurately modeled, rather than just being a flat texture stuck on a polygon! Astounding!

Since GTA3 and Vice City have both been released since the last Driver game, which came out just as the PlayStation2 was becoming available, you can see how heavily influenced the Driver developers were by those games. Driver 3 plays a lot like GTA3. You can get out of your car now, run around and carjack people, shoot at stuff, steal cars, do whatever you want. (And unlike GTA, when you get out of the car, you actually kill the engine and lights first.) Driver is still much more linear than GTA though; it’s very mission-based, there’s oftentimes no freedom to screw around in the city. Some missions are timed. Others require you not to wreck the car you’re driving because you have to deliver it to somebody. Same kind of stuff the first two Driver games treated you to. It’s not bad, just different. Although at times the specific requirements or time limits seem way too difficult to accomplish, but that’s another story which I’ll get to.

The music in this game really stood out. Usually I don’t pay much attention to music in console games because it seems to be throwaway metal/hip-hop crap or some other nondescript garbage (again, the GTA series is the exception here), but I really love the music in this game. Which is odd, because a lot of the reviews talked about how grating and annoying it was. I think it’s perfect. It sounds modern, but it still somehow captures that old “car chase movie” vibe. The only problem is that the music does not loop well at all. OMG, the looping is horrible. Sometimes it sounds all right, but it’s always obvious where the loop is. Other times the music seems to just stop, then bam! It starts over at the beginning! And most of the loops are a bit on the short side, although I haven’t run across any that are annoyingly so.

Voice acting and mission design seems to be good. The voices are way too quiet, but just turn the TV up during the cutscenes I guess. They got some real celebrity voice talent here; big name people like Ving Rhames and such, so that’s pretty cool. The visual quality of the cinematics (all pre-rendered CG) is really amazing; they are definitely beautiful.

The missions, while linear and limited in nature, are as fun as they were in the last two games. They’re also as frustrating as they were. Yes, you’ll find youself playing missions over and over just to get it right, because you can’t save your game until you complete the mission at hand. Most of the time this doesn’t grate on your nerves too much, but last night I came across a mission that just seems completely impossible. It’s one of those damnable timed missions. You have to hop in a Turbo T/A, crash through a fence and proceed to wreak vehicular havoc on some guy’s construction site, the idea being that he’ll be spooked into moving his operation out of Miami. But you only get a minute and a half, and the last part of the mission involves somehow lining up your fishtailing Trans Am with a very stupidly-placed ramp, jumping onto a building’s roof and crashing through a wall. Not only is the ramp positioned poorly, it’s nearly impossible to build up enough speed to make the jump! Aaaghhhh! I’ve tried it about a dozen times!

Concerning replays: The Film Director mode, easily Driver’s most fun-tastic feature, is back, and now it includes special effects like motion blur and slow-motion. I think all of the classic features are there, although for some reason it looks like they disabled the ability to rotate the camera to get a custom angle when you choose the Chase View. That really, really blows. Of course, when you rent games at BlockBastard they don’t give you manuals anymore, so I might be just missing the controls. I’ll continue to play with it. I’ve already mixed down one pretty good car chase, even though it ended with me piledriving my Buick into a lamppost and failing the mission.

Gotta get back to work now, so I’ll leave it there. In the end, I was surprised at what a fun gaming experience Driver 3 was—I found it more entertaining than Burnout 3, which scored a massive 98% at various review sites. I should really stop bothering with these reviews, I suppose!

Categorized as Games/Console, Games