Playing every PS1 game - Driver 1&2, Ducati World, Duke Nukem

Driver

Being able to produce graphics of a higher fidelity than two-dimensional, cartoonishly abstract representations of real life meant that it in turn became possible to turn a game into a far more ‘cinematic’ experience than would ever really be possible previously, particularly when you could now throw in trendy FMV clips between levels (at least, as long as it’s not some terrible live-action ordure). Something else you could pull off, and something we learned with Driver, was producing a game with a distinct visual design ‘motif’.

Some levels let you be the one doing the chasing instead.

In this case, it is a game that is a clear send-up of 1970s muscle-car-action-gangster films. It’s about cars, cops, drugs, pimps, and lots of people calling other people things like ‘cat’ and ‘cowboy’. The soundtrack is wah-wah funk bangers. There’s a big difference, though, between character-driven offerings like Starsky and Hutch or Bullitt, and a game like Driver - it’s not about Steve McQueen; the car itself is the character.

Pedestrians go about their daily business. Unlike GTA, they always manage to jump away just before you run them over.

Sure, there is a guy driving said car - (presumably) the titular Driver - but he’s an individual only present in interstitial FMV cutscenes, and even in these scenes, he barely says anything. You don’t get a proper look at his face at all until the ending (and a very brief one at that). Other characters’ faces also remain mostly in shadow, or in the background. Meanwhile, in game, it is the Dodge Charger, the Gran Torino and whatever else you’re driving (and whatever is being driven into you) which are front and centre. The American subtitle for Driver is ‘You are the Wheelman’. At the risk of coming off like some sort of pretentious chin-stroking pseud (it has been known to happen), it’s a subtitle that can be taken almost entirely literally.

It’s a graphical achievement.

So that’s why I am minded to forgive things a bit when I say the game is rather narratively weak and the gameplay a bit shallow. Driver is a car chase simulator, and everything else is just set dressing. The main ‘campaign mode’ of the game is given almost as much precedence on the main menu as the other game modes - ‘Take a drive’ offering a very early glimpse of the sort of freeform sandbox gameplay Grand Theft Auto would eventually be credited with inventing, and another mode which lets you skip all the setup stuff entirely and jump straight into a car chase, either as the chaser or the hapless chasee. Many players at the time (including myself) would probably have barely ever bothered with the primary thrust of the main campaign, and stuck with the alternatives, which offered more or less the same thing, just in a more direct way.

The famous first level.

Of course, the other reason why players won’t have taken a shine to the main game - according to common wisdom - is that whole thing about the first, ‘tutorial’ level in the car park. 25+ years later, the sorry opening level is more or less the only thing the game is known for and all anyone has to say about it. Let’s clear it up - yes, it would be pretty tricky for a totally green player to complete on their first go, but it’s not actually that hard. I didn’t have much of a problem with it as a wee lad - the issue is that the instructions are just a bit unclear, and the time limit a bit too stringent. It’s a shame, as it meant so few people would have ever pootled around any of the environments beyond Miami and San Francisco. They certainly wouldn’t have been treated to the exceptionally (to the point of being almost broken) punishing final level, where you are asked to drive a Presidential Limousine - which is certainly not equipped for Vanishing Point-style car chasing - across New York City in the pissing rain while the cops, FBI and other criminals try to turn your vehicle into a Presidential Cube.

Finishing the final level by the absolute skin of my teeth.

There are a lot of bells and whistles put onto Driver - the post-level ‘Film Director’ mode which promises much but delivers basically nothing is thrown in your face a lot - but underneath it all is a game that is at the end of all things just a bit too simple. The ‘cars are the characters’ idea is cool, but it just means that the police - much like you, manifesting as the vehicles themselves rather than the people driving them - are tooled with no crime fighting abilities beyond ramming you until either you die or they do for ‘felonies’ as heinous as mounting a kerb. The game maps themselves are built in such a way that you spend about 70% of your time driving down very, very long, straight roads, and then when you do decide to turn, the game’s charitable approach to physics means that it is intensely easy to schwoop your car out of what was beginning to look like a ‘cool Steve McQueen powerslide’ into a unrecoverable tailspin. The controls are just too unresponsive.

The ‘Film Director’ mode. It gives you a dozen different options, apart from ‘rewind’. Useless.

But nobody had done anything like this before. People had wondered what Grand Theft Auto in 3D would look like (whether it would even be possible), and Driver showed everyone. In hindsight, it was 50% game, 50% tech demo.

Kept my attention for: A few days
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 6/10

Driver 2

Driver was a decent game, but the problem it suffered with was that the core concept of the game was shallow. There wasn’t much that could be done about it, either. I’d not played Driver 2 before, but before loading it up I had sort of already guessed at what was to be in store. The options for the developers were either keep things pretty much exactly the same and create effectively a mission pack for Driver, or go big and try and do ‘everything’. They went for the latter, and what came out was a game that shouts a lot, and has all the AAA-game lustre, but is actually just not as good as the original.

A curved road??

There are some improvements. We finally have bendy roads! The maps in general are larger and feel more like a city than a mostly-featureless grid system. The air-hockey car handling has been toned down a bit, and you can now more easily drive around corners without tying yourself in all manner of vehicular knots. The game is visually pretty incredible for PS1, but this comes at the cost of frequent and immense slowdown, dipping into single digit frame rates way too often. This is unforgivable.

The levels are the same sort of thing. Here’s the ‘chase this guy and ram him’ flavour.

They lost sight of what was good about Driver, though, which was the 70s gangster movie characterisation and focus on the cars themselves. What happened to the funky music? The loose (and to be honest, pretty unintelligible) plot from the original has been replaced with mountains and mountains of FMV scenes, with lots of dialogue and cinematics. Who cares, though? You don’t actually do any of the gunfighting or kicking-in of doors, as the levels are still the same sort of ‘drive from point A to point B and avoid the cops’ fare as before, and no plot development or anything narrative-related ever happens in-game - you have to wait for the end-of-level FMV for that. It means it feels a bit like watching a ropey gangster film, but you have to stop every few minutes to complete a driving minigame in order to unlock the next bit. It’s the same sort of disconnect as in Gotham City Racer.

There are so many FMVs that the game needed two discs.

As if only to shut up all the moaning about not being able to get out of the car in Driver, in Driver 2 you are…able to get out of the car and run about. There is absolutely nothing else you can do with this mechanic, other than get back into a car. It looks terrible too. Bizarre. The ‘Film Director’ mode is back, and is entirely unchanged, so still rubbish.

Look familiar?

It comes across as a bit of a template for what would later become The Getaway on PS2. It’s mildly funny actually to think that Driver 3 was infamous for being terrible, and by all accounts the entries following it were pretty average. Well, Driver 2 is worse than Driver and Driver itself wasn’t actually all that amazing. You wonder how it all managed to go on so long.

Kept my attention for: A few evenings
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 6/10

Ducati World - Racing Challenge

I don’t know too much about motorcycles, and the most I can say about famous motorcycle manufacturers is that I once owned a Suzuki Swift (which, yes, is a car). So I wasn’t exactly going to be diving into Ducati World as a tourist trophy anorak. In fact, the thing I was most afraid of was that this would be another ‘oh wait it’s actually Midas Interactive slop’ bait-and-switch operation.

Opponent bikes are mostly an annoyance with a terrible habit of driving right into you, sending you flying.

Believe it or not, Ducati World is actually a serviceable motorcycle racing simulator. The pointers taken from Gran Turismo are all there - ‘licence tests’, buying new bikes and filling up your garage, winning races to earn money - and this is no bad thing, even if it is more of a cardboard cut-out facsimile of the level of depth you find yourself amongst with Gran Turismo. You can also spaff your hard-earned dollar on multi-coloured helmetry and road leathers, though to what particular practical benefit is not quite clear.

Get used to it.

There are two immediate takeaways once you get into the racing, and that is fast, and that it is hard. The frame rate does well to keep up with the pace at which you’re flying around the circuits, and it almost has a Wipeout feel to things. The real difficulty is the controls, which I can’t quite work out are so tricky due to realism, or just shoddy design. The controls are certainly responsive, but you do sharply swing from left to right very easily, and accidentally barrelling into a wall and theatrically flying over the top of your bike into the road is commonplace. Once you get the hang of it, though, flying through a lap without having a wobble is satisfying.

A simple chicane like this can turn out to be a total death trap.

There’s not much else to it, though. Maybe I’m just not a motorbike nerd, but collecting motorbikes in Ducati World doesn’t feel as interesting as the sort of range of four-wheeled options for you to pick up in Gran Turismo. Buying the more expensive bikes would require an extreme amount of grinding the same races, which again isn’t dissimilar to GT, but…GT is just a better game.

Kept my attention for: A couple of hours
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10

Duke Nukem

This is actually a PS1 port of Duke Nukem 3D, probably the most successful of the various Doom clones of the mid 90s.

Believe it or not, that smeared mess of pixels is an enemy. They try and give you the game over.

This game is cack. Disruptor wasn’t much different, but crucially afforded the player the ability to strafe left and right with the shoulder buttons, meaning actually seeing where you were trying to go was fiddly yet possible. You are furnished with no such freedom in Dook Nookum, so a lot of time is spent running into walls and haphazardly rotating in place to try and continue on your next straight line into the next wall.

You see, Duke is a ladies’ man.

The graphics are poor imitations of what PCs would have managed at the time, and so enemies cut grainy, incomprehensible pixel blobs that you are simply asked to rotate yourself toward and hammer X to shoot at. God forbid they are perched on a higher elevation, or even ‘jump’ up in the air toward you, as aiming upward or downward is done with a laboured y-axis view correction with the shoulder buttons, with all the pace of a turning cruise liner.

Let’s not..

The 17-year-olds-smoking-weed humour is all still there, but the sound mastering and graphics are too poor for you to keep track of the wisecracking from Dook or the various visual gags. A waste of half an hour.

Kept my attention for: Half an hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 3/10