Turns out I’m not a huge fan of the Driver series; you’re learning things about me, maybe we share stuff in common, feel like hanging out? You buy dinner and I’ll bring the wine.
But let’s organise it later, right now I’ve got stuff to do, people need to hear why I dislike Driver and why Ubisoft trademarking a new Driver game is a bad idea.
Seriously, people are dying to hear about it, after the jump.
Cars are boring. Jeremy Clarkson has lied to you all this time; they say the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. No, the greatest trick was convincing people that stupid pieces of machinery matter more than their ability at easing travel. But let us pretend for a second that cars are exiting. Playing through a Driver game would make you see things through my eyes.
Before even playing the first game, the player was subjected to one of the most frustrating sequences possible; I could fill up an entire other feature talking about it. Mention “Driver’s training level” to anyone worth their weight in videogame-cred (this would be a lot of weight, these people are massive) and they’ll tell you the same thing:
It sucked. You got no help in figuring out how you were supposed to perform a list of tasks, there was an arbitrary limit on how many times your car could get bumped, and just to piss in your cornflakes, there was a time limit too. It was gruelling.
On top of that, even for an early 2000 game it wasn’t compelling. Driver isn’t a racing game; this would have given it some sort of competitive aspect. It was simply travel from point A to point B. Many other games can be simplified to the same extent, but in some of those games you’re playing as a dragon.
Dragons are sweet, cars are boring.
Driver 2 came out the year after, I am of the opinion that decent franchises with yearly instalments over saturate the market (Activision, for example shot themselves in the foot last year by releasing another Call of Duty game while the other is still selling strong). The biggest inclusion in this sequel was the ability to leave your car, serving little to no purpose and probably took away from its pacing. I don’t even want to talk about this game anymore, and I always want to talk about games. Driv3r!
That game won my award for “least intelligent title of 2004” (quite a surprise, given that the stupidly named Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising also came out that year), the developers also won an award for “playing GTA and attempting to make a similar game, missing out what made it special”. I played no further than a demo and quickly realised that despite claims that the series would be updated, it was still as awful as it has ever been…
…Something that leads me to Driver: The Recruit, (totally neglecting to mention “Parallel Lines” because before researching this piece I’d never heard of it. That’s an achievement by the way, I hear about everything. I’m like an eagle, with great hearing).
The claim that Driver can be updated is always going to be a falsehood; its main premise doesn’t allow for advancement past a very basic foundation, you travel, if you did anything else it would not be a Driver game. If it tried to really make the journey sections more fun, it would be Wheelman, a game that is only interesting because it is so astonishingly over the top. Driver is a game that belongs in an era that we’ve forgotten, a time when games were allowed to be terrible and that was of no consequence as we had very little frame of reference.
In a post-GTA4 world we can’t allow ourselves to sit through a crime drama that does nothing to set itself apart from the rest. Don’t buy Driver, don’t rent Driver, don’t visit any pages on Ubisoft’s website about Driver, don’t comment on news stories about Driver, and don’t casually glance at Driver sitting on the shelf of a store lest some impressionable youth misattribute it to passing delight. Perhaps then finally we will be free of this waste of data.
I hope you like this article; by the way, I hated writing it. Christ Driver is awful.
Source:
http://www.videogamesblogger.com/2009/04/26/driver-5-the-recruit-trademarked-by-ubisoft.htm
Popularity: 1% [?]
I don’t care for driving games… and I care for Driver even less. There. I’ve commented on a Driver article. Stone me if you want!
driving is overused in games. Why make a new Driver game when the last games sucked so much? I hated the driving in the last game and just wanted it to end.
I never ever got through the first induction mission in the first Driver, and when I went back to play it with cheats, the missions were boring.
The second was ok when I played it(note: I hadn’t played GTA at that time, and the internet wasn’t a big thing in my life at that point, so I didn’t know better) and Driver 3 was horrible! There was a cheat to turn on invincibility. If you had it on, you didn’t die, but the cars took no damage. If you didn’t have it on, the cops would shoot you dead as soon as they saw you, taking out all the fun. The first one had some fun extra modes(such as the pc’s mode where the objective was to smash as many cars as possible for points) were good, but the missions were lame. Why would we want another one, when I could just go play Burnout?
YAWN @ U miss reviewer.
To be clear though.
Top Gear is a pretty decent show.
I never completed the first Driver game.
I just spent hours in Take a Drive mode, jumping over bridges and making police cars fuck each other up.
Never completed Driver.
Just spent hours on Take a Drive, flying off bridges and making police cars crash into each other.
I really enjoyed Driver: Parallel Lines.
Fun takes on a new meaning when you load the game with cheats:
Every car, unlimited ammo, god mode… Ah… I can remember blasting around Brooklyn in an Abrams tank… Good times…
i honestly prefer cars to dragons mate, have you ever driven a car? they are pretty exciting
I have to say I really enjoy Driver.
It’s my favourite games series. And also, just becasue you don’t like it doesn’t mean you have to say that basically everyone thiks it’s shit.
I would much prefer Driver to GTA, which needs to include strip clubs and bad language to entice people to buy it, but with Driver, it’s just the driving that makes people like it.
And I hope Ubisoft announce Driver at E3.
You know what I hate … people comparing the DRIVER series to the GTA series THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING , sure they are driving games but each has its own distinct character and charm. I would tell the idiot who wrote this article to sit down and watch the 1978 move version of DRIVER, or maybe the move BULLET and perhaps even gone in 60 seconds that’s where the idea’s of this franchise came from , driver is about classic 70’s car chases , cop and robbers, car crashes, police road blocks and crazy stunts while creating a movie feel when ever you play the game where, the GTA series (which is great) is about missions and cruising around a city doing as you please. My message to gamers is don’t compare or analyse the two against each other like this dude has, I mean sure move with the times into this post GTA4 world, but how can one give an unbiased account of a gaming series created in 1998,2000,2003 and 2006 ,all are on obsolete consoles (PS1 and PS2) and all lack the amazing graphics of modern gaming and all lack modern refinement of this so called Post GTA 4 world. I would recommend getting out the old ps1 and playing the original driver you will see where I am coming from. This guy has played a modern game, then written about its competitors one of which is 11 years old and runs on a PS1. I’ve said all I am going to just approach driver games with an open mind , take a ride and enjoy what can come of it.
THE NEW GAME WILL BE GREAT
Thanks .
The comparison wasn’t in gameplay, it was in narrative depth.
I believe, actually, my post was that they’re different games entirely.
Y’know, what with GTA being good.
Also yeah “bullit” is a pretty sweet movie.