Good evening, folks. I'm going to try my hand at a weekly series of posts on games that, for whatever reason, received critical or commercial failure. I'm not going to claim that all of these games are hidden gems, but all of them listed have some goodness to them, deep inside. Given half a chance, and with nothing better to do, they'll entertain you. So, with an eye on the neglected, sad, orphaned little children of the gaming world, we'll start with...

Driv3r



Crime Against Gaming: Being generally buggy, having terrible on-foot portions, hiring big name actors to read terrible dialog. The story really is that bad. It's filled with unlikable protagonists, as voiced by Michael Madsen and Michelle Rodriguez, among others. It's inked with that incredibly heavy pen that soils many a crime film. There's no laughs, no interest. Everyone is silent and stoic. Sadly, whenever a video game sets out to make a "gritty and realistic" crime drama, the end result is dreary, dry, and culminates in an unentertaining pastiche of the genre. The villainesses are sexy and wearing plastic. Tanner, once again, decides to go rogue to stop a ring of car thieves, and in the process, apparently kills half of Europe. The man's got to learn to set priorities. And as for the claims of bugginess, well, you have to see some of the car flips to believe them. The proprietary physics engine, when it works, is great, but when it doesn't work sends cars flipping out through the city, sometimes to a polygon glitch space known to some as the "NegaVerse."

Sample Review Quote: While the game itself isn't completely broken, it's uninspired and frequently frustrating or boring. Consider that, along with all the glitches, and it adds up to be a game that isn't worth your time or money. (GameSpot)

Can you have fun playing this game? Legitimately, yes. Especially with the usual minigames on offer. Reflections created a great physics enigne for its time, buggy and unfinished as it may be. The cars drive really well, with lots of tail slides. The graphics for the cars and cities were detailed and nice. The things that made the original Driver a great game do exist in here, but they're surrounded by a wall of utter crap. The on-foot missions really are that bad. The only way to make this game remotely playable is to switch into first-person mode, at which point the shooting becomes ridiculously easy. The enemy AI is non-existent. Compare that with the car-chases, in which the enemy drives frequently weave through traffic, apex turns, and are generally really hard to keep up with.

The key to having fun with this game is in the mini-games. Though they stupidly decided to put guns in the driving section (No! Bad game! Don't do this!) the jump-into-a-car-chase mode is a good time. The driving games help you recall what was so good about the original Driver, and are improved by the much, much, much better graphics, especially on the Xbox or PC.

Check out the screen shots versus what other car crime games were available, like True Crime or Grand Theft Auto. Hell. This game looks better than the released-two-years-later San Andreas. (Is it as fun? Well, no.) And Driv3r marks the last time that the company chose to allow you to play straight-from-the-menu driving games... this feature was axed in Driver: Parallel Lines, and the mini-games that were left were put into hidden points around the map. So, there were some fun games to play, but they were freaking hard to find.

Driv3r is a game in which you have to find your own fun. It's there, especially if you are trying to beat your own times, or against friends. It's a case where the designers had something good going, but got lost in the money, the media blitz, and the all-star cast and left those elements behind.

One interesting feature which the game had, and others should have stolen, was that every time you booted up your save file, celebrity actor Ving Rhames chimes in with "Previously on Driver..." and it shows a montage of some of the gameplay you went through and clips from the story. This would be incredibly useful in anything from Final Fantasy to Grand Theft Auto IV. As long as it was skippable or optional.

Sadly, the car chase mechanics that made the Driver series so good are hard to find now. While the Grand Theft Auto series has some of this involved, it gets absorbed in its own quests and universe to the point that the driving is secondary, and frequently floating, dull, and uninspired. The only game in the horizon that seems to be focusing on this is the Vin Diesel creation Wheelman.

Did this game deserve the abuse heaped on it? Yeah, honestly. The story is crap. It was a buggy mess. But if you wanted a then-next-gen Driv3r, you could do worse. True Crime: New York worse.