Driver: San Francisco

She cuts the safety tie holding the camera operator in the news van and after he disappears shoots a rocket launcher
Camera too close to the car
Everyone has the same license plate?
Chase target tail lights leave a trail
The in-bounds streets during a mission are white on the minimap. Streets beyond the red boundaries on the ground are black.
- He can’t go through them! In a mission!
Quantum leaping between drivers (shifting), reflection of the eye as you fly around the map (but still over the streets, no crossing buildings)
- Until you get an upgrade
They Live billboards and crows
Chaos: you’re a cop, to help other cops you jump into the bodies of civilian drivers and ram their cars into the ones you’re chasing
Because so much is done through Shifting, mission select is sometimes mobile: choose a car with an icon, get a brief first-person sequence as you hear the driver and passenger talk about what is going on. Or fly across the city to the icon you want to activate.
- It’s sort of the same as driving, I guess
Upgrade currency is called “Willpower”
- Gain by completing missions, driving dangerously, and by unlocking garages and buying cars, which will provide I guess passive income??? in your coma????
Tanner’s ability (And our player skill) becomes available to:
- Cops
- Taxi Drivers
- anyone
- Ordell, who is trying to work his way up through the criminal organization
  - Oh, yeah, the street races aren’t the only weird race stuff in this game
  - Lotta sexism, too
  - The pulp cop movie / tv show aesthetic includes the politics you’d expect. This is 2011’s version of a badass masculinity.
- Teen in driver’s ed
  - the same kind of driving that increases willpower also increases the driving instructor’s heart rate
    - get him to 180bpm while demanding a discount for lessons
- the guy in witness protection whose “paranoia” bar has to be managed by staying off of main roads
That’s not how tow trucks work
This does turn a lot of the missions into a choice between “do you drive it or do you shift into a bunch of civilian cars and demoliton derby it”
He went into a helicopter passenger! Then into a van that stole platinum! then drove that into a truck and then drove the truck!
Halfway through you learn that your nemesis, Jericho, can also shift and as you drive through the streets trying to get away from him lightning starts striking cars as he takes them over and suddenly you’re on the receiving end of the “every car in oncoming traffic is going to try and head-on-collision me”
“He doesn’t care if civilians die; I do!” say the character I am controlling who, a few missions ago, smashed a freeway’s worth of cars into three ammonia tanker trunks.
- it’s ok, it’s all in a coma
- also, loading screen tips keep telling me to use traffic as a shield from his attacks, which seems like civilians might not be a priority
Those chase trails become something that exists for Tanner (like the barriers that he couldn’t pass) when he goes tachycardic and the city freezes and he has to chase an ambulance through the city streets, staying in its trails to lower his heart rate
- Requiring the precision driving that I have never been good at in racing games and have not learned in this one – fortunately in one phase of the mission cars start disappearing out of your way.
There are cabbies in London who hold the whole city map in their head. Tanner’s got San Francisco in his, and as he inches back closer to consciousness, the area of the map he can remember (and how much of it he can see at once) increases.
This is the coma-dream (and occasional nightmare) of the driving video game protagonist
His brain healing, or trying to make sense of sensory input
For the coma-bulk of the game, no one exists next to tanner in his hospital bed the same way no one in the game at all exists beside me on my couch
Tanner’s realization that he hasn’t, can’t change anything, that’s he’s “just been living off of TV news”
But what if everything he didn’t fix was all a fake-out!
When the game dumps you back into the real world, its a san francisco that’s been evacuated. There are abandoned vehicles in the streets, cop car roadblocks, and…a bunch of prisoners who were busted out of jail and are running around jumping out of the way of your car. I guess that’s all seen as an acceptable way to rein in the chaos-engine that is the game’s driving.