"I'm sorry, officer, I thought I was playing Driver." It's time to realise that this excuse doesn't get you out of gaol free.
Steve Owen

Just when you think the PlayStation is about to keel over at the prospect of surviving another year as the best-selling console, along comes a game so packed with originality that you can't help but giggle like a child. After Gran Turismo and Metal Gear Solid, this summer's saviour was Driver, a wonderfully original take on the tired racing genre that has you wheel-spinning around the roads of Great American Cities, outrunning the police and helping criminals to escape (the Daily Mail can send its best hacks back to the bar - you're an undercover cop, so there's no outrage there).

It's been a couple of month's coming, but Driver has finally made it to the PC. By rights it should be much better than the PlayStation version. After all, we've spent £700 more on our PCs, furnished them with 3D cards and the world's finest force-feedback steering wheels. With almost unlimited power, memory and hard drive under the bonnet, Driver PC should be God's gift. Only it isn't. It's still a good game, but while it was unlike anything else on the PlayStation, we've already been spoilt with the excellent and fairly similar Midtown Madness, which does many things better than Driver.

For starters, Midtown Madness moves like a bitch, flying on our PII-300 test machine. Pedestrians leap with fear from their highly populated pavements, while satisfyingly crunchy pile-ups cause tailbacks as far as the eye can see, all with little slowdown. Driver, on the other hand, even with very modest detail settings, slows uncomfortably the moment you put more than one other car on the screen. Considering the cities are nowhere near as detailed as MM's excellent Chicago, this is unforgivable.