Welcome to the criminal underworld. You're a cop named Tanner and you're undercover... deep cover. Posing as a getaway driver for hire, you'll be ripping it up through the mean streets of the wildest urban jungles: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Miami. Tailing unsuspecting victims, picking up "shipments", and of course, getting away from the big heists, you'll be doing it all (and then some) if you wanna make the big bust. The only things you need to leave behind are a trail of blown red lights, dazed pedestrians, and burnt-out cop cars!
Believe it or not, Driver is one of the best-selling video games of all time, and its sequel (already available for the PlayStation) is one of the fastest-selling titles in history. Millions of copies of this game have shipped worldwide, and now, three years later, MacSoft has “converted” it to Macintosh.
In truth, the company simply dumped it onto the Mac — not from the PC, but straight from the PlayStation, with hardly an improvement in sight.
The game itself is pretty straight-forward: You play the part of an undercover cop assigned the task of infiltrating some kind of underground car-smuggling ring. In gameplay terms, this equates to lots of spectacular Bullitt-style car chases through the streets of San Francisco, New York, and Miami. Because San Francisco is easily the most interesting location to drive in, the game makes it available from the very beginning, but only as a practice location — its place in the plot occurs much later.
The driving scenarios are mission based: Steal a car and take it to a body shop, catch up with some drug smugglers — the scenarios include basically anything that could happen in an episode of Miami Vice, or worse, Nash Bridges. One of the few flaws in the gameplay is the lack of balance between missions — some are extraordinarily easy, while others border on the impossible. Fortunately, the learning curve for driving the car is pretty simple.
The car’s controls are basic in the extreme — left, right, gas, brake, and hand brake — but the realistic physics model gives players a tremendously subtle control over vehicles. The driver can hammer into a 90- degree turn, slam on the hand brake, and zip through the turn like a Tron light cycle. Learning the weight and relative instability of your big, heavy piece of American seventies heavy metal is essential. It’s fast and stupid in the best Detroit tradition. The feeling of achievement when you master 180- and then 360-degree spins is worth the admission price.
The other cars and obstacles react realistically to collisions, and while police cars can smash your car to bits, you can leap over them or simply knock them out of the way. You need to control the mechanics of crashing every bit as carefully as those of collision avoidance. You should avoid street side obstacles like trees, but you can happily bash parking meters and trash cans to oblivion. And yes, you do have to drive on the sidewalk.
The game’s very first level is one of its many failings, however: a training mode that’s actually much more difficult than most of the in-game missions. We know a few PlayStation players who gave up the ghost without ever making it out of the training garage, but the trick here is to actually read the instruction manual— not the first port of call for most console players.
Graphically, the game is a contradiction. It lifts all of the textures and models straight from the PlayStation version, and this shows. Chunky, low-res bitmaps decorate the otherwise sufficient polygonal scenery, and the game actually installs two separate versions: a software mode and a Glide mode. Glide is a long-abandoned graphic technique first used by early, crappy 3dfx cards (it works on ATI cards, too) — why it's included here is one of the game’s multiple mysteries. But you’ll probably be using the Glide mode, since it's sharper and smoother than the rather ropy software mode. The animation and sense of speed, however, are stunning, as is the realistic volume of city traffic.
Worse yet is the fact that the draw-in distance is about two city blocks in this virtual universe. This is unforgivable and smacks of outright laziness — running it on a G4 with a Voodoo 5 and 384MB should make for a much broader landscape. Again — and inexplicably — the Mac version lifts this distance from the PlayStation game; the only saving grace here is that the Windows rendition shares the problem.
And then there’s the sound. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of hearing a fully blown Hemi or a giant American V8, then you’ll remember fondly the rich baritone grunt and the dense wall of roaring power. Quite how that became the wasp-farting-in-a-can noise that warbles limply from your Mac speaker is a mystery. Add to that the ridiculous, embarrassing voice-overs from the cut scenes, and you have perhaps the most sonically challenged Macintosh game ever made.
So why, with all these problems and this malaise of hateful crap, is this one of the best driving games ever realized on the Mac? Because it plays like a dream. Even the awful, unstructured, get-from-point-A-to-point-B missions are incredibly enjoyable. Racing against the police (who don’t know about your undercover status) adds to the sense of drama and pace as you tear through city streets, mount the sidewalk, or smash through park benches. The feeling of being chased is ironically very liberating. And making it to the San Francisco streets is reward enough — you’ll realize that you haven’t played the game until you try to control a two-ton car on a 50-foot jump right over Lombard Street.
Driver has some nice extras built in that alleviate the otherwise tawdry level of finish — for example, the Director mode lets you record and edit “movies” of your in-game exploits, adjusting camera angles, positioning flybys, and even seeing the action from your pursuers’ point of view.
It’s also possible to earn and store cheats that change the physics and the pace of the game.
A few graphical tweaks and even some rudimentary changes to the interlace would have made Driver an instant and all-time Mac classic, but this product has always been problematic and the Mac version feels particularly unloved and unfinished. But it’s still, to coin a phrase, hecka fun.
O'Connor, Frank. (March 2001). Driver. MacAddict. (pgs. 50-51).
Will NOT work in OS X Classic environment.