Driv3r / driver 3 (2005)

Trivia[]

• In the top-left corner of Miami, there is a small area known as «Little Havana» that has the appearance of an unfinished part of the city. Answering a fan-submitted question, Reflections stated that Little Havana «…was an area designed purely as background detail…and not somewhere that Tanner was meant to get himself into«.
• The game does not state a certain year, but it cannot be traced to a certain time period either. The vehicles suggest the 1980’s or the early 1990’s, but in a cutscene a laptop is seen, and other modern technology that did not exist in either time period is present as well. Possibly the game takes place in 2005 because some cars from Nice were built from the 90’s to the 2000’s, like the Citroen ZX.
• Versions for the Nintendo GameCube and the N-Gage were proposed, but were scrapped.
• It is heavily implied that Tanner was the one that flatlined in the ending cutscene, however it was most likely to be Jericho. Tanner was still wearing his black shirt on the operating bed, whereas Jericho’s shirt had been removed. The doctors used defibrillators, which don’t work through clothes, this suggests that Jericho flatlined and not Tanner.

Gameplay[]

The vehicles are modeled after real life vehicles and are designated to behave as such. For example, bullet holes appear when a car is shot, vehicles only take significant damage when the engine is hit, rims of blown tires screech against the curb, and individual pieces of the car can be shot out or can fall out after taking damage. If the engine is shot once it is overheated, the smoke turns black, the engine catches fire, and eventually explodes.

The weapons in the game are fictious. Each weapons’ firing range and rate vary depending on their type. When the game starts in Take A Ride mode, Tanner is only equipped with one weapon. Other weapons can be claimed by seizing them from police and armed civilians who have been killed, or from hideouts or safehouses. Pedestrians will flee if they see a gun or hear a gunshot and even runs out of the way if they almost been run over by vehicles. Weapons vary from pistols to grenade launchers.

The PC version of the game has an extra mission called «The Hit». The Xbox version allows for custom soundtracks within the game, although the player cannot change the song track.

The unemotional engine

With so much emphasis on Hollywood production values, you’d at least expect the cut-scenes to somehow provide some incentive to carry on with a gripping storyline, but in truth it doesn’t seem to matter how many times you see them, they remain among the most boring and disengaging in-game scenes we’ve seen in a long time. With a peculiar graphical style that manages to make most of the character models look inbred, not only does it not work as a spectacle, but the whole yarn is so disconnected that even the remarkably clever synopsis that appears when you resume your game upon reloading can’t help spark the whole affair into any sort of life. Tanner as a character is neither cool nor funny nor charming; you just don’t care about him in any way, and no matter who’s doing the voiceovers, the script is so self-consciously trying to be dark and cool that it seems to bore everyone connected with it. You just won’t care why you’re doing the missions, or who Dubois is, or why you’re chasing after so and so. It’s meaningless in the most depressing way.

Occasionally the soundtrack threatens to liven up proceedings, but apart from the odd obscure gem hidden within a lengthy cut-scene, you’re forced to put up with the sort of repetitive incidental music that was never designed for repeat listening. Get stuck on one of the missions and you’ll want to take a machete to the composer. To be fair it wasn’t his or her fault that the game persists in artificially drawing things out, but the fact remains hearing music reminiscent of The Professionals for literally hours on end is grating to say the least.

Characters[]

Catacomb 3-D (1991)

Первая серия знаменитого сериала, к тому же единственная, от начала и до конца сотворённая самими участниками Id Software, — последующие три части лично их работой не являются и лишь опираются на наработки из этой. Итак, волшебнику, которым управляем мы, предстоит долгая и муторная прогулка по подземным катакомбам, дабы столкнуться лицом …

Год выпуска: 1991Жанр: Action (Shooter) / 3D / 1st PersonРазработчик: Id SoftwareИздательство: Softdisk PublishingСайт разработчика: http://www.idsoftware.com/Язык интерфейса: АнглийскийПлатформа: PC CPU: 50 MHz+ RAM: 8 MB+ Video: VGA DOS (или эмулятор)

Locations[]

Miami, Florida

The starting point of the game, and Tanner’s home town, Miami is a beautiful environment that allows peaceful relaxation at it’s gorgeous beaches and calm town. This is the base of operations during the first part of the game, and is where the beginning of Driv3r starts off. All characters encountered, and Tanner himself, speak with American-style English dialects in this location.

Nice, France

The second of the three areas in Driv3r, Tanner goes to this French city after all of the missions in Miami have been completed. A different variety of vehicles are available, and all NPCs encountered that are not relative to the story or that are enemies all speak a French dialect.

Istanbul, Turkey

The final city that Tanner visits, this is the first and last city seen at the beginning and the end of the game, respectively. It is part of the opening credits and is the locale of the hospital at the end of the game. Every NPC that is either an enemy or a bystander speaks with a Turkish dialect in this location. There are a unique set of vehicles in this area as well, as with Nice and Miami.

Crash Bandicoot 3 (1999)

Креш вновь вступает в схватку со своим давним врагом Кортексом,но теперь ему одному не справиться. Его младшая сестренка Коко поможет ему. Графика заметно похорошела по сравнению с предыдущей частью.Добавлены новые режимы игры.Теперь недостаточно просто собрать кристаллы и разбить ящики — нужно пройти уровни на время. Крешу предстоит побы …

Год выпуска: 1999Жанр: Аркада developer: Sony C.Int.Тип издания: пираткаЯзык интерфейса: только английскийЛекарство: Не требуетсяПлатформа: Sony PS +возможность играть на PC Pentium 3 1Ghz, video 128 mb, оперативка 256 mb + эмулятор ePSXe(прилагается к закачке).

The talent within

As a pure driving experience you can see where the talent lies. These guys are evidently obsessed with everything to do with the look and the feel of the cars, and have clearly gone to great lengths to make them feel just so — with three intricately designed settings that offer a vivid template for your adventures, each lit dramatically in a variety of lighting and weather conditions.

However, it doesn’t take very long to see that as fantastic as some of these features are, they don’t really add up to being more than a very marketable gloss; to making it an easy game for the marketing bods to sell to people hungry for more Grand Theft Auto. As much as the game lends itself to sexy screenshots or a fantastic looking preview movie that makes Driv3r look like the best thing ever to happen to driving games, any sort of even vaguely cursory inspection reveals a multitude of cardinal gaming sins.

Driver (1999)

Его зовут Таннер. Он — рядовой коп, выполняющий опаснейшее задание: Подобно Штирлицу, руководство внедрило своего сотрудника… нет, не в немецкую армию, а в одну из крупнейших банд одного из крупнейших городов США. Надо сказать, что вместе с этим храбрым человеком, а точнее, под его личиной, таких городов мы проедем… правильно, четыре, …

Год выпуска: 1999Жанр: Action / Racing (Cars) / 3D developer: Reflections SoftwareИздательство: GT Interactive SoftwareТип издания: пираткаЯзык интерфейса: только английскийЛекарство: Отсутствует Pentium 233 / 32 Мб памяти / 3D-ускорительРекомендуемые: Pentium III 500 / 64 Мб памяти / 3D-ускоритель

Booby prize

The odd level here and there offers a glimpse of what might have been — the superbly tense Booby Trap mission that tasks you with keeping above 50 mph is one such rare flourish of Hollywood action movie-esque thrills, but looking through our notes it’s hard to think of one single other mission that wasn’t too easy or arbitrarily difficult, as well as being riddled with so many issues that gaining any actual enjoyment out of it was the biggest challenge of all.

Where the game really falls apart at the seams are the catastrophically and irredeemably poorly implemented on foot sections. Not only do they just plainly look awkward, with stiff and inappropriate animations and a general lack of polish and detail, but the AI displayed simply takes the biscuit, dunks it in your drink and doesn’t even bother to take it out. In more or less every scenario in the entire game, the same thing holds true. Tanner enters room, enemies scream vague «SHOOT HIM!!» type instructions to one another the second the hinges creak and then scatter to their pre-scripted spots. They then remain rooted like startled rabbits until you gratefully dispatch them one by one from afar thanks to the over-generous targeting reticule, which somehow believes it’s possible to deliver headshots with a pistol from 100 feet.

Driv3rgate controversy[]

The Driv3rGate Scandal- The Full Story (DriverGate) — Fact Hunt Special

Despite generally negative critical reception, the game did receive some positive feedback, as two magazines published by Future Publishing (PSM2 and Xbox World) gave it 9/10. Having played the game and seen the overall media response, readers of both magazines began to question the integrity of the scores, and a long discussion on Future Publishing’s GamesRadar forum saw the mini-scandal dubbed «Driv3rGate». The affair gained a fairly large amount of coverage in the games press and on Internet forums and was still being discussed as late as 2008. Another Future publication, Official PlayStation 2 Magazine (UK), gave the game 6/10.

Although a number of forums maintained that the magazines had come to a deal regarding publicity with Atari, no proof either way was ever cited and the scandal eventually simply died down.

Schtop! Driv3r is not ready yet!

The sorry truth is that Driv3r is in a shambolic state to release into the market. It’s not even an Enter The Matrix situation. Sure, many accused Atari of releasing that before it was ready as well, but at least it was pretty good fun from time to time, no matter how derivative or contrived the package was. In that sense ETM was below average, but Driv3r commits the cardinal sin of rarely even being entertaining on any level. It feels old, its design ethics have long since been usurped, its missions are unbalanced and largely lacking in imagination and no amount of cool vehicle physics and destructibility can mask some serious errors of judgement in the design stage, not to mention some appalling AI, botched third-person controls and all round weak programming.

Many would instantly try and compare Driv3r with the Grand Theft Auto games, but in reality it doesn’t deserve to be spoken of in the same sentence as Rockstar’s classics. True enough, GTA’s not perfect either, and has its own issues to address, but Driv3r never even comes close to matching the GTA titles for energy, cool, ambition, design, talent, craft, humour or more crucially entertainment. It’s a vastly restrictive game that’s not just flawed, but will actively wind up any passionate gamer that comes anywhere near it — something that contradicts the whole concept of videogaming being a form of entertainment.

In the wider sense, Driv3r is not just a disappointing game for a team of the talent of Reflections to come up with, but is simply so botched that it’s a class-A disaster for Atari. Some hardy folk seem determined to be blinkered to its many crushing flaws, but the rest of you should at the very least try before you buy — for an inflated cost of £44.99 in this country, too. No one should be under any illusions: Driv3r could be the biggest gaming let down of all time. For the good of us all, releasing a game of this importance in such a woefully unfinished state should never be allowed to happen again.

3
/10

Reception[]

After an extensive and intensive promotional campaign, Driv3r was met with mixed to poor critical reaction, with the vast majority of magazines and websites giving the game mediocre scores; IGN and GameSpot both gave the game 5.4 out of 10.

Driv3r was criticized for Tanner’s lack of hand-to-hand combat skills and melee weapons. There were also criticisms for the poor implementation of the ‘on foot’ missions. This was also a criticism leveled at Driver 2.

The game won the MegaGames.com award for Worst Game of 2005.

Police AI vehicles were criticized for the use of «doublespeed», a way of cheating in which a pursuing cop would suddenly double its speed making it hard (if not impossible) for the player to escape. The AI can easily stem from the series’ long use of rubberband AI. No matter what vehicles players can pick (either fast or slow or even a police car), the police AI seems to always catch up and stay with the player. There are some ways to escape the police, such as forcing them on to a sidewalk and crashing into a post, trees, or even vehicles.