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Cutting Edge Driving Games!
by Jeremy Horwitz for Gamers Today
With rare exceptions, the driving game genre has sat relatively stagnant for the last several years, as sequels and stale concepts have dominated PlayStation and PC offerings. Several companies, however, have recently demonstrated that there is still plenty of room for driving innovation by pushing the envelope of software in gameplay, graphics, and even themes.
Perhaps the most significant deviation from the norm is Sega's recent 18 Wheeler: American Pro Trucker, an arcade game that is also available for the Dreamcast. After choosing from several big rig drivers with slightly different driving skills, you are supposed to carry cargo across the country by driving on highways and major local roads. Your skill is measured both in speed and lack of damage to your vehicle during transport; rival truckers will also attempt to slow you down and ram you off the road. While there's little question that 18 Wheeler isn't as fast-paced as most racing games, it offers a unique control scheme and a surprisingly robust graphics engine: the highways, cityscapes, and major vehicles are possibly the most realistically detailed in any home driving game to date. As it previously accomplished with Crazy Taxi, Sega has also stepped beyond conventions to make an entirely new type of driving game. Though 18 Wheeler is definitely not for everyone, it's worth checking out.
Less innovative in gameplay but certainly graphically noteworthy is Namco's Moto GP for the PlayStation 2, a visually overhauled version of an otherwise forgettable arcade motorcycle driving game. Of primary interest in Moto GP is an impressively implemented camera system that spotlights some of the benefits of post-32-bit processing power and hardware 3-D perspective correction. A robust camera options menu enables players to select from a variety of traditional and untraditional views - drive from a perspective-corrected viewpoint running diagonally alongside the motorcycle, or view the action from above, for example. Once you've finished a race, you can watch it in replay with television quality camera shots, some of which realistically simulate the imperfect bouncing motions caused by whipping winds and human video camera operators. Combining the camera system with perfect motion capturing and wholly plausible 3-D motorcycler models, Namco has produced a racing simulation with only one visual flaw - first-generation PS2 aliasing, which is the only thing keeping Moto GP from looking like moto TV.
While 18 Wheeler has an all-new theme and Moto GP has all-new camera behaviors, Bizarre Creations' Metropolis Street Racer takes a revolutionary step towards realism in scenery. Sony's Gran Turismo titles are generally accepted to possess the most comprehensively simulated set of actual vehicles ever incorporated into a game. Metropolis Street Racer strives for near-perfect accuracy of backdrops, replicating several major districts of three international cities - London, Tokyo, and San Francisco - almost down to the square foot. Residents of the cities will recognize the homes, sidewalks advertisements and trees in their neighborhoods, say nothing of every San Francisco hill, London fountain, and Tokyo electronics store you could imagine. MSR also offers more than its fair share of actual cars from major manufacturers, and incorporates a soundtrack which attempts to simulate a handful of radio stations from each of the three countries (complete with deejay chatter and commercials). By committing to replicating actual cities rather than creating artificially interesting scenery around famous race tracks (in Gran Turismo fashion), Bizarre Creations has made the most believable racing experience ever set in or around a cityscape. Published by Sega, MSR is available in Europe for the Sega Dreamcast and will be released in the United States in January.
If anything is missing from the games previewed here and many others in arcades and on consoles and PCs, however, it's the pure adrenaline-pumping fun factor of early 16- and 32-bit titles such as Out Run, Virtua Racing and Daytona USA. (One notable exception, the aforementioned Crazy Taxi, is due to get a sequel in 2001.) There can be little doubt that the most recent vehicle simulations are going visually far beyond what their predecessors could handle: the detail and complexity of large vehicles, congested highway driving, skyscraper-laden cities, and unusual multiple camera angles could not have been achieved on the last generation of game consoles - more polygons and computational horsepower have led directly to more believable and interesting simulations of real-world driving. Now if developers could only make them as fun to play as they are to watchÂ…
