rec.autos.simulators

But...

4. Driver has way too many little walls alongside too many roads: you can't
drive anywhere you'd like too. Very annoying. And unnecassary, in my
opinion.
5. Getting from one end of the city to another is a big bore: too many long
straights with very boring scenery (the sea...). Due to this, you get to the
borders of the 'playing field' far too soon when you try to evade the police
in a certain part of the city, which are too small. Unlike MM, where you can
drive like a madman without crossing the same street for a long, long time.
The full version will have 4 cities, but when they are all divided into
little parts like in this demo, MM will still seem much bigger.
6. The borders of the 'playing field' are UGLY. I haven't seen such UGLY
cardboard tree-walls in a long long time. And they are WAY too obvious. In
MM I can't remember borders like these. Somehow they are very natural: only
the waterside and the side of the highway keep you from driving further. In
Driver you got LOTS of places where you think you should be able to drive
on, but you can't. And again, they are way too visible...
7. Other (non-police) cars don't react to what you do. Not like in MM,
anyway.
8. The sunglare is nice at first: you don't get some circles on your screen,
but the whole screen is 'whitened' by the light. It looks like an
over-exposured movie (and this game is all about participating in a movie!).
Great. But this effect should fade away after a few seconds, as it would in
the movies. Driving down a long straight road with only a over-exposured,
completely white road ahead of you gets boring mighty quick.

But...

this is an unoficial beta version. So what am I talking about :-) What still
should make this game worth buying are the different types of missions
you'll get. When you're driving like hell to fullfill an exciting mission,
you'll forget a lot of the negative points above. But not all, I'm afraid...

Jeroen

Ditto, I wish I could drive onto the beach and plummet my car into the
ocean, but those stone barriers are just unreal.
The whole city seems barricaded.

There too many long stretches of road where there's nothing to look at, the
traffic drives too slow, and the road is overly narrow.

Yep, the ugly shrub barrier that barricades the entire perimeter of the city
ruins the whole atmosphere of driving in a city.
In MM, Lakeshore Drive starts at point A, and circles the border of the city
which is right next to Lake Michigan, and eventually lead into a highway
that goes for long stretches and circles back to point A. Neat, no dead
ends, and not obvious that the city is enclosed at all.

I intentionally drove on the wrong side of the road, and what do they do?
They just honked at me while threy drove at low speed and crashed into me
every freaking time!! Why can't the cars attempt to swerve out of my way
like in MM, damn it! It's not even scary to drive on the wrong side of the
road at all in this Driver beta demo.

I hope the pedestrians, better textures, and more traffic can liven it up,
as well as fix the CPU traffic cars so they don't run a red light to make a
left/right turn.