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By madness
#119
GameSpot Review
SCORE: 3.8 /10
bad
Gameplay
5
Graphics
5
Sound
6
Value
4
Tilt
1
Difficulty: Hard
Learning Curve: About 1 and a half hours
Stability: Minor Problems

Full Review:[/align]
Don't waste your time with Driver 3.
The Bad: Awful control; broken physics; horrific ai; weak voice work; poor textures.

Nine months separate the PC release of Driver 3 from the release of its console counterparts. A sane, logical type of person might assume that the large gap between the borderline-broken console versions and the newly released PC edition was used to fix the game's serious problems. But those people would be mistaken. Driver 3 for the PC is just about as broken as it was on the Xbox and PlayStation 2 last year, and thanks to the ill-conceived introduction of a mouse and keyboard into the mix, it manages to be even worse, overall.


Driver 3's cutscenes are one of its few strengths.

The Driver series is helmed by an undercover cop named Tanner. This time around, Tanner is trying to infiltrate a Miami-based car thief ring, which is working to steal 40 exotic cars and ship them out of Miami. Part of the game's story involves finding out who the thieves in the car ring are working for, where the cars are going, and who's double-crossing whom. You'll start out in Miami, eventually make your way to Nice for some French car chases, and you'll also spend some time in Istanbul. The story is mostly told via prerendered cutscenes that fall somewhere between a music video and a movie in terms of style and inspiration. Generally speaking, the cutscenes look pretty good. In fact, the cutscenes are probably the best part about Driver 3.

Despite featuring three large cities to drive in, Driver 3's main mode is a linear, mission-based game that sends you on mission after mission until you've unraveled the game's story. Each mission has clear-cut objectives, like chasing after a guy who double-crossed your gang, stealing three cars and driving them into the back of a moving truck before the truck gets to its destination, or driving around on an enemy's turf and busting up the place by crashing through exploding barrels and other objects. At the end of every mission, you're given the option to save and then you can continue on to the next mission. The missions tend to vary from city to city, but the lackluster gameplay really prevents many of the missions from being much fun.

For a game called "Driver," you may be surprised to find yourself spending quite a lot of time out of your car, and that's where the first significant gameplay problem comes to light: The on-foot action is awful. Your control over Tanner is stiff, at best. You can fire weapons, you can halfheartedly jump, and you can duck to perform some pretty lame rolls. While you probably wouldn't expect much more from a gruff undercover guy like Tanner, all of his movements look stilted and jittery, and the gunplay--despite giving you access to a number of different pistols, submachine guns, an assault rifle, a shotgun, and a grenade launcher--is decidedly underwhelming. The combat in the game isn't tense at all, and it mostly consists of running up to enemies and blasting them...before they blast back, if possible. However, the game is pretty liberal with the health packs, so you can certainly trade shots with most of your foes without worrying too much. Since most of the game's artificial intelligence is incompetent, you can usually get the drop on the bad guys.


Driver's technical issues really get in the way of the rest of the game.

The game's driving portions are better than the on-foot stuff, but not all that much better. You're given a map of the city with a pretty clear indication of where to go, and you're usually in a hurry, so there isn't much time to explore the game's cities in the story mode. The physics behind the driving appear to be designed to give you that '70s-cop-show-car-chase feel, in that everything has been exaggerated. Even the slightest turn around a corner is a tire-screeching, sliding-out affair. Getting slammed hard by a cop car might send you flying into the air, causing you to barrel-roll a half-dozen times before crashing back to Earth.




The problem is that the driving isn't especially fun, as you constantly feel more like you're fighting to stay in control of the car than skillfully outmaneuvering your pursuers. Sometimes you'll hit a ramp and land just fine; and sometimes you'll land differently and roll your car, forcing you to retry a mission. There are also some discrepancies between what you can and can't drive through. Some objects will let you drive right through them, while others will stop all of your forward progress with a loud, damaging crash. What's more, it's even occasionally possible to crash into objects like streetlights or trees, essentially making it look like the streetlight or other object is growing out of the middle of your car. This causes your car to become completely stuck.


The AI routines make the game's cops look like complete idiots.

The driving AI isn't much better than the on-foot AI, either. Police chases--which happen more often in the game's additional modes than they do in the main story--are especially ridiculous. Cops basically aren't smart enough to get out of their cars and shoot at you unless they can get close enough to you. So, for example, if you were to jump over a guardrail and swim out into the water surrounding Miami, a cop that's pursuing you would simply drive his car into that guardrail, back up, and then drive into that guardrail over and over again. If you can get the cops to get out of their cars, they aren't much smarter.

A big part of the problem with Driver 3 lies in its control. Both on foot and in a car, your control over the action is limited, at best. The game supports analog gamepads as well as a mouse and keyboard. If you spend some time configuring the controls, you can get a dual analog controller to function much like it would in the console versions of the game, but your ability to turn with an analog controller is severely limited. Tanner turns very slowly, then suddenly accelerates his turning. This makes drawing a bead on anything nearly impossible. The mouse and keyboard might not have that problem, but they have plenty of others. Steering with keys on the keyboard simply isn't refined enough to deal with the game's sloppy car physics, making even the most rudimentary car chase a real chore. Also, if there were an award for "worst default control scheme," Driver 3 would win it, hands down. Why, exactly, would anyone make the 5 key on the keypad the "fire weapon" button and leave the mouse buttons unmapped? The default control scheme is clearly an exercise in insanity. After some trial-and-error, it's possible to reconfigure the keys to make the game playable. Well, as playable as this game's going to get, anyway.

Aside from the main story mode, the game also has a few secondary modes, though they really don't add much to the experience. You can opt to simply drive around a city in the "take a ride" mode. There are also some driving games to play, such as checkpoint races, a survival mode that forces you to last as long as possible against the game's dopey, crash-happy police AI, and so on. You can also save replays and edit them by inserting different camera angles, slow-motion effects, and so forth.

A big part of what makes Driver 3 so bad is a series of technical, graphical glitches that make the game look like an absolute mess. You can run it in a wide variety of video resolutions, and you can fiddle with the draw distance and antialiasing, as well. When you get it all turned on, Driver 3 actually starts to look pretty good...provided you're standing still. In motion, Driver 3 is a flickery mess. After testing the game out on a few different video cards, it seems that the lighting has been programmed to flicker on and off everything. At times, Tanner's whole head is lit up like the sun is hitting it directly, while the rest of him stays dark. As you drive around the city, objects like trees and buildings flicker like crazy. And when you run the game in higher resolutions, the textures start to really look like trash.


Driver 3's voice cast carries some Hollywood-caliber names, but no Hollywood-caliber performances.

The sound side of things is pretty underwhelming. Car engines and the like sound appropriately throaty. But the game is missing a lot of the little touches that would help it sound more alive. When a car takes too much damage to continue on, the engine merely stops making noise and the car rolls to a stop. A more prevalent sputtering noise, or something to that effect, would have helped. Most of the gunfire is rather subdued and unimpressive--this only serves to make the on-foot combat seem even more ineffectual. Additionally, the game's voice work is quite stiff. Michael Madsen voices Tanner, and while his gruff, gravelly voice fits the character, the delivery is a little too flat and uninterested. Similar criticisms can be said about most of the voice cast, including Michelle Rodriguez, whose performance as Calita is phoned-in and wooden. Other voices on the cast include Mickey Rourke, Iggy Pop, and Ving Rhames, who plays your partner in the game and narrates most of the cutscenes. The game's music is most prevalent during the cutscenes, and it works with the action quite well, giving the game's noninteractive sequences a slightly more cinematic feel.

Driver 3 is full of the sorts of glitches and problems that final retail products shouldn't have. On top of that, a recently released patch for the game doesn't fix many of its showstopping problems. The control is terrible, the visuals are buggy, and the AI is straight-up broken. Short of being threatened at gunpoint, there's no acceptable reason to play this game.
By Jeff Gerstmann
Posted Mar 28, 2005 3:39 pm PT
By Delta-38
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#1175
I'm Srorry but why are the graphics so low? (5 Points) tha graphics are great. They are better than thous from GTA!!! and Gta got 8 Points for graphics !?! WHY?
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By madness
#1191
Delta-38 wrote:I'm Srorry but why are the graphics so low? (5 Points) tha graphics are great. They are better than thous from GTA!!! and Gta got 8 Points for graphics !?! WHY?
The graphics are great for this game, I don't have a problem with them. I think they are the best graphics ever seen in a XBOX or PS2 generation.

Although I think Gamespot was reffering to the texture and graphical glitches and that also may include the pop-in problem. Although non of those problems really affected me. Plus in the PC version you really only notice the clashing textures and everything else is fine.
By Delta-38
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#1194
If you like the game you play it anyway.
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By madness
#1207
Delta-38 wrote:If you like the game you play it anyway.
Yeh, of course... I really never listen to any of the reviews their all full of crap and bullsh**, as it's always your own opinion which counts. Not some person who thinks they can review something for everyone, DRIV3R has many great things about it which in that gamespot review they don't include a single one of them, it's liked they only looked around in Miami in Take A Ride and that's all. I think they really need to play the entire game to review it properly.
By Delta-38
Registration Days Posts Posts Posts
#1213
Well if you write a rewiew on a game or a movie or a book as a mather affekt you don't read the back of the book or the first too pages and say 'This book sucks because the begining sucks' so first Play;Wach;Read than write rewiews. :evil:
By Delta-38
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#1215
Sorry for the mistakes!!!
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By madness
#1218
Delta-38 wrote:Well if you write a rewiew on a game or a movie or a book as a mather affekt you don't read the back of the book or the first too pages and say 'This book sucks because the begining sucks' so first Play;Wach;Read than write rewiews. :evil:
Good Idea!

I really think they need to have people and the person who rates [Racing/Driving Games, Action Games, Strategic Games, ect...] those types of games must like that type of game that there playing so if the don't like let say Racing/Driving Games and they don't like it they can't dis it because they don't like Driving games for a start.
By Delta-38
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#1223
I agree. If I like a game from pictures or whatever I will play it. But not everibody is like that, there are people who won't play a game because someone wrote bad things about it.
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By madness
#1226
Delta-38 wrote:I agree. If I like a game from pictures or whatever I will play it. But not everibody is like that, there are people who won't play a game because someone wrote bad things about it.
And those people should wait for the game to become cheaper and purchase it and they just might like it. But it's best for them to take a look around at the demos, videos, screenshots and everything too see what you think about the look of the game even before you purchase the game when it's cheap, me I had to purchase DRIV3R straight way and I had loads of fun playing it too.

I didn't care about what the reviews said I just bought the game because I liked the look of it and I really liked the previous games Driver and Driver 2.
By Delta-38
Registration Days Posts Posts Posts
#1232
I only played Driver but it was my favorit game at that time. I even bought a Graphic card for it to run properly. RIVA TNT 2
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By madness
#1236
Delta-38 wrote:I only played Driver but it was my favorit game at that time. I even bought a Graphic card for it to run properly. RIVA TNT 2
Same here, I had some extra cash from my birthday when i was 8 and I deided to purchase Driver. My dad pointed it out and I took a really good look at it and the game looked that good that I purchased it stright away from the shelves. Basicly that was the first Driving Game I ever played before that I played games like Mario and I played Duke Nukem 3-D which my dad used to play alot, well my dad never played Mario, I was just given an old Windows 3.1 computer with that on it.

Anyways when I was 8 I had my own Windows 95 PC and when I brought DRIVER home it wouldn't play in the computer and I wasn't really all that happy, I was a little frustrated that it wouldn't play because my video card wasn't really all that good. Anyways my dad got a new computer for his business accounting work and I played it on that and it ran really great on High Quality and it was the best and couldn't stop playing it and when my dad wanted to do his accounting I never really wanted to let go of the keyboard although I knew i had to.

Then I got an Video Card upgrade for my Birthday I think and they I could play Driver in my computer and Driver and the new video card was the best present I ever got. Once I got that new video card the only game I would play is Driver and that's all i'd ever play for like another 3 years until I got a Playstation 2. Driver just cought me like DRIV3R did with me to and I just can't stop playing it.
By Delta-38
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#1239
did you play parallel lines? the graphics are not so good as thous from driv3r but there is much more going on. I dident play it. I'm waiting for the PC release.
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By madness
#1256
Yeh, it's pretty good although I still do perfer DRIV3R for many reason which you all most probely know off. But I guess to have a bit of a change in the game you play is great for a series like Driver, even if it is like 1 game is better in graphics and has less / and not as good graphics and has more happening in the game like way more traffic.

Anyways, they took the Film Director out of Driver: Parallel Lines so they could let the game do alot more as the Film Directory did chew up alot of CPU.
By Delta-38
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#1260
Maybe they will put it back when they release it for PC
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By madness
#1373
lets all hope they do, although they may not spend so much time coding it in. Unless it like for both the Wii and the PC, since they both have better processing power than the origional release on the XBOX and the PS2.
By Delta-38
Registration Days Posts Posts Posts
#1377
So will the PC version run on my PC:
AMD 2200+ 1800ghz 65-ram Gforce 5500 ?
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By madness
#1378
No specifications have been released at this present time.
By Miller
#2811
Yah, you guys have some valid points about the quality and reliability of online game reviews offered by so-called professionals.

I remember reading this review when I was looking for another game to buy last month. When I got to the part where the dude started moaning about controlling of the car, I thought he was going to elaborate by saying something besides that he sucks at driving, which is about all heard him saying. I don’t know what I can drive through and what I can’t. Well, if it doesn’t get knocked out of the way, I guess you can’t drive through it, bud.

No, I’ll tell you what I thought he was going to warn me about, and the reason is because he used some sort of phraseology like—aw, what did he say? Oh, yah, “…you constantly feel more like you're fighting to stay in control of the car than skillfully outmaneuvering your pursuers.” When I read that, I expected him to mention what I had feared in postponing the purchase of this game (how does one even decide on which games to buy anymore, with too many good ones to ever have time to even look at—well, if it has a replay feature and a lot of stuff being destroyed, that helps me). See when I read, “fighting to stay in control of the car than skillfully outmaneuvering your pursuers,” I recoiled like Dracula from a cross. In Driver, you could really get into skillful maneuvering, but in Driver2? It was a let down for me, and that’s where my apprehension lay concerning DRIV3R.

I mean did it not seem to you guys like there were invisible vortexes and mathematical crap at work all over the place, creating gravitational variations along your route so that if you got just a bit off the optimal course you would crash or spin out quite easily? I’m not talking about simulated draft or anything you might be able to regard as cool, but stuff that made me think the developers were anything but cool. If I had to deal with that business in real life, I wouldn’t even get in a car, man.

For example, the close shave that I liked so much in Driver was nearly impossible to execute in Driver2 because if you tried to narrowly scrape past something, a wall or another car or whatever, it would almost seem to reach out and grab your car (and please don’t mention car bumpers, because I’m not talking about that either). Or the same would happen even if you did hit something in a way that really would not have hung up your car, meaning the glancing blow or whatever. You can tell easily enough what would have stopped you and what wouldn’t (especially if you’ve wrecked as many cars as I have), and this aspect of Driver 2 made the act of trying to minimize the result of an impact practically an exercise in futility, as they say. And other cars were closing in on you like magnets. I understand it’s a game, but how about a little bit more driving simulation and a little less Donkey Kong, please?

Speaking figuratively, the game was going to arbitrarily decide what happened to your car based on what would piss you off the most instead of the laws of some sort of consistent physical world that you could interpret and negotiate. Out of all the many possibilities, and indeed the likelihood of something else happening because you handled the crash in the best way you could expect to up to the point of losing control, a collision that did not result in a dead stop would almost guarantee that your vehicle would ricochet towards some object that would stop you in your path. And likewise, if you tried to power slide through a group obstacles, such as trees on a grass surface, the car would almost certainly slide toward the trees, regardless of how well you drove…unless you used a little trick to counter the problem, and I don’t mean simply driving your way through with greater grace.

Don't even talk to me about missions in which you are chasing other vehicles. That is practially all game and nothing else. How about when they move through traffic like a snowplow? LOL!

To me all that business took the “skillful maneuvering” right out of the game, or at least redefined it as something less like driving, but actually replacing it with fighting for control of the vehicle. You were offered a world full of gamy gimmicks, to which you had to respond with your own gimmicks, like letting off the gas just for an instant to break loose from the collision coarse the software had you locked into if you didn’t change the input. And I don’t mean the way you regain control of a skid in real life, but rather just some little bit of alteration of the math you’re using to counter the game’s math. I liked it better when the response you got from the car was based more upon what you did with the steering wheel and pedals rather than where you were in relation to other objects and how the outcome would affect your chances of completing a mission on time. Driver2 was more about beating their rigged BS with…well, like I said, tricky gimmicks instead of driving skill.

But then, I'm one of those guys who actually believes the game would be more interesting if the cross traffic at an intersection drove through more randomly instead of being timed to get in your way. Because there again you know that in order to slip right through all you have to do is let off the gas for an instant, and that's just too gamy compared to not knowing what to expect or what to do about it. There would still be a risk, and you'd still have to do the work; it would just seem more believable and less rigged up and..I don't know. I do know that was a part of the game from the first in the series, and I thought it was stupid.

So that’s what I thought the reviewer was going to mention in the above review when I was reading it at Gamespot. Maybe the guy didn’t notice that’s what was making it difficult for him to handle the car in a skillful way. I don’t know, and won’t unless someone else mentions it, because I have not bothered to try the missions yet. I’ll get around to it when I’m bored someday…maybe, but beating the kinds of missions Driver2 threw at me in a DRIV3R world is not my idea of fun, so much as frustration. It’s simply not what I bought the game for.

I think the maps are killer, and so are the vehicles. I’m having a good time just playing 'Take a Ride' with all cities and areas unlocked by a savegame download. Heck, I still have Driver installed to play 'Take a RIde', and that's one of the first games I played when I started gaming on a PSOne in late 1999, having not really gamed but a couple of times prior to that since the Atari 2600 or whatever that was I had at the house as a kid. I know, I’m missing the famous FMV sequences this way, but I don’t care. I even took out the car selection FMVs, too so I could save a couple Gigs on my small 40GB HD (didn’t know that was going to be inadequate when I bought the thing...lack of foresight, to be sure).

Too bad the (quick) replay that the Auto Director in DRIV3R offers isn’t up to par compared to previous Driver games when it comes to camera views offered. I like the new stuff in Film Director, as well as the rest of DRIV3R, but somebody really did not pay much attention to setting a couple of default aspects of the game up so they would be as fun as in previous Driver games, including those of the Auto Director. In that regard I guess the review above may have a good point about the default controls, but I couldn’t care less about something like that. Who ever used default controls on any game in this day and age? And once you change them, they’re set. You certainly can’t change the default views that the Auto Director cycles through, which is a shame considering what is on offer out of the box.

Having said all that, I’m sure glad I bought this game. I like it a lot. Without a Film Director, Parallel Lines isn’t being installed on my PC. Too much other stuff to play that I would only leave aside for another Driver game if it had a Film Director. On that point, I guess I need to look and see if there are replays in DPL, but they can’t be worth much if they look like the quick replays in DRIV3R. If there are replays, and the camera shots are well conceived, oh, that’s just going to piss me off that they didn’t do the same for the Auto Director in DRIV3R. It might get me to reconsider purchasing DPL, though I doubt it. I’m too fond of games set earlier in History.

OMG, did I write all that? I guess my posts are really therapy more than anything that will be read by others. And I guess I need to learn to be more concise. So far, I never figured out how to sum things up very well. Sorry.

BTW, don't get me wrong, I liked the missions (more than the guy at Gamespot), and played them all in the first two Driver games. I was talking about the gameplay more than the mission design.

*[Edited about 500 times for various reasons, mostly spelling and grammar...and aesthetics, I suppose...and clarification...what's next?]*
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By Sedans
#2827
freight train mode ruled!!!
By Miller
#2860
LOL! I guess it all does. Driver took me quite by surprise, to be sure. I mean I hadn't played video games since I was a kid, except for a couple times jamming some scrollers on a Supernintendo or something like that at someone's house in the early 1900's. Contra, I thnk it was. Can't remember after this many years. Is that a game, Contra? Anyway, so I saw the neighbor's kids playing some game on a PSOne later in the 1990's, and thought, 'Man, games still look pretty lame,' because they were playing this 2D look-for-stuff game with a from above, looking straight down type view that made things seem cramped and stiff and flat, like the way GTA started out...I think. -----Did GTA look like crap at first, before it went 1st person and shooter? I wasn't going near that title after looking at the screen shots on the box at the rental place, not when I could rent this killer game they had called Driver, and some other game where your car had weapons and you could run over pedestrians and smear a big blood stain down the road or my favorite, just ram them into the wall of a building. LOL!---- Anyway, I was surprised, though when I saw this 3D racing game this guy was playing on his N64 called Wipeout.

So I bought a PSOne and started playing Driver and Medal of Honor. Didn't realize you could do a whole lot better with a PC. But when I found out, I got all excited at all the WWII games they had for PC. Then I found out about modding and how with PC games, you could get a lot of bang for your buck with mods and TCs.

Anyway, it seems like they mellowed out a bit with the traffic closing in on you and all that stupid crap in DRIV3R, which I was glad about.

I guess if that dude (Babbs, was it?) makes some more episodes of his movies, I'll get to see the DRIV3R FMVs and missions long before I ever play them. Anyone who bothered to read this, but hasn't seen that guy's Episode 1 Miami flick needs to check it out over in the DRIV3R threads. It says something like 'My Movies or My Videos : Episode 1 Miami'.
By Miller
#3720
Miller wrote:I guess if that dude (Babbs, was it?) makes some more episodes of his movies, I'll get to see the DRIV3R FMVs and missions long before I ever play them.
I didn't realize that Babbs already posted all his missions here earlier on. Thanks for that, BTW. After a short while of spending what time I had for jamming vid posting to that story thread instead of playing games, I managed to get in some more time behind the DRIV3R wheel. I am glad to see that the gameplay in DRIV3R has been made less frustratingly gimmicky in contrast to Driver2. It's nice to be able to pull off the so-called close shave with greater ease and to sideswipe another car without getting stuck to it.
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By madness
#3799
You certainly have many interesting comments their "Miller" all at which I've spent lots of time reading for the past 15mins.
I remember reading this review when I was looking for another game to buy last month. When I got to the part where the dude started moaning about controlling of the car, I thought he was going to elaborate by saying something besides that he sucks at driving, which is about all heard him saying. I don’t know what I can drive through and what I can’t. Well, if it doesn’t get knocked out of the way, I guess you can’t drive through it, bud.
I couldn't agree less, the reviewer at Game spot has no idea and probably can't driver for sh*t or should I say for a million dollars, which ever makes more sense to you.

looking straight down type view that made things seem cramped and stiff and flat, like the way GTA started out
I downloaded the revised classic version from rockstars games website and I couldn't even play it for any longer than 20minurtes, it was just too boring and I could barely work out how to go to other missions the game was just crap and was poorly designed. You take a look at the gta series and if your one of those who wants to compare it with driver you'll notice that the gta team didn't have the brains to make a 3D version for the ps1 while the driver team (reflections interactive) where able to make a pretty great 3d game.

At least Reflections could utilize the ps1 technology so well, while take-two interactive could barely put a few sprites together with a script to make it look very 2Dish and boring.
I like it a lot. Without a Film Director, Parallel Lines isn’t being installed on my PC.
I really hope Ubisoft and Reflections Interactive spend the time making a Film Director for the PC and Wii releases of Driver: Parallel Lines. In a way wasn't that what driver was all about. Hollywood Style Car Chases, well you need some film and a director and the director was present but I could find any film. So hopefully they spend some extra time implementing a Film Director which I've said for the millionth time.
Crazy Copper Frenzy

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