Previews// Driver: San Francisco Single-Player (pt1)

The acquired wisdom in the SPOnG office is that when something's fucked, it stays fucked. Or simply sits on the test bench in a cardboard box for months. Time to buy, build or borrow a new one. Gone are the days where things were repaired - we're living in a disposable society, and it's cheaper and easier to rip it up and start again.

Driver was an epoch-making, game-changing, paradigm-shifting title. It was an office favourite for months here in the SPOnG offices, (in our old, old offices). Every time someone reached a pause in their work, they would sidle over to the comfy couch (whatever happened to the comfy couch? Nowadays we have Aeron chairs, which are very dot-commy, but they are nowhere near as comfy, or as bad for our backs, as the comfy couch was) and re-try their last failed Driver mission repeatedly. For hours. And hours.

Driver 2 rearranged the furniture a bit, but not so much as to scare Tim, who by his own admission is afraid of change (and sheep). But Driver 3, or Dr3ver or whatever it was called, was a huge steaming turd. Everyone agreed, except strangely Future Publishing, who loved it… which was fortunate given that they had the exclusive previews, exclusive reviews and extensive advertising. It was almost as if they didn't play the game before giving it glowing scores on the assumption that the first two having been so good… how could the third not be? That's the best one can think of them, because the alternative - that they inflated the review scores in exchange for exclusivity and advertising spend - is unthinkable. The UK press would surely never stoop so low.

So with 3river, we forgot about the Driver franchise. Our happy memories were dashed on the rocks of time and distaste and replaced by sweet remembrances of a new breed of arcade driving games like Burnout and, well… more Burnout.

Then Driver: San Francisco fell on our figurative doormat and we were filled with 'meh', or whatever young people mumble nowadays, to indicate indifference. Still, we play everything, so it went in the PS3 and… wow. I mean. Wow. They've completely unfucked it.

When I say "they" of course, I mean Ubisoft, because the fucking of Driver was done by Infogrames pretending to be Atari. Reflections Interactive (now Ubisoft Reflections) has held firm at the development helm through all of the great and not so great and then very great again titles in the series.

So how did this unanticipated, unusual unfucking happen? Reflections has taken the game back to the drawing board, retained all that made the earlier games good (a yellow Challenger with black stripes and the character name: Tanner) stolen an idea or two from some other games, added a little innovation and hung it all of a central premise uncomfortably close to UK cop smash, Life on Mars. Set as it is in San Francisco, it could also be argued that the premise owes something to Iain Banks' book The Bridge.