It's a Sunday afternoon — you're sitting along, watching a dull and mediocre show or movie, about to flip channels or go for some more Good & Plenty when suddenly the slick action music kicks in, the camera angles start to hop from place to place, and the action speeds up threefold, while super-tuned vehicles fly through the air, instantly gluing you to your seat. Why does late-night "Cops: Life on the Beat" have such good ratings? No, not because of the 1-900-WeAre18 hotline commercials that sandwich the actual show, (although that may be part of it) but because of the car chases. Even RealTV is laced with small-town cops pursuing desperados, bringing life to a show otherwise made completely devoid of entertainment through a hundred videos of rescuing trapped ducks and morons trying to figure out how to use their new palmcorders. What if you could just take the good parts out of movies and shows, what if the car chases sans sappy stories were compiled into one action-packed disco-attitude Bullit-based racing game? That's exactly what developer Reflections attempted to do with Driver, and they pulled it off very close to absolute blaxploitation perfection.

Here's the basic idea: You're Tanner, a wheelman for the mob, an FBI agent ditching the riot squad gear and black vest and joining the Castaldi family in order to infiltrate the higher ranks and figure out just what the big guys have planned. With this comes the full package of being a gangster — even though you're an FBI agent, there will be no stopping to save kittens stuck in trees or stopping precious Columbian drug cartels. As far as the cops know, and luckily for you, the mob, you're as shady and unknown as MC Hammer in the audience of the ‘99 Grammy awards.

Your missions come in the form of messages on an answering machine in your apartment. Poor, but somehow greatly amusing stereotypes of every ethnicity on the globe call up and speak your job in ‘70s jive so thick it sometimes needs a pocket translator to decipher. Occasionally, you'll even get a wrong number, with some guy shouting in broken Chinese or some genius calling about your pizza order.

Once your mission is chosen, you're on the road, behind the wheel, and on the run. There is a wide variety of missions through the game, although I thought too many were centered around a simple, "You have two minutes to drive here, and then drive there." Other missions include ramming other cars into submission, delivering explosives (DRIVE SLOWLY), and then there's my personal favorite: a mission where you steal a taxi, pick up a squeamish informer who won't talk and so must make him spew out his guts and, consequently, the information; there's even a fear meter for that one, which goes up by doing 360s, speeding toward walls and making airtime. Even the more repetitive missions don't get old too quickly, as there are four large cities, and a legion of angry and unrestricted cops.

Unlike other games with car chases like Grand Theft Auto, you can forget about these cops starting with simply pulling you over or out of the car. These boys in blue will ram you from the very beginning, with the intent of totaling your car. The game has a felony meter which goes up with violations, and as it increases, the cops become more numerous and begin setting up roadblocks which can be quite formidable to penetrate at times. Though in some situations, like most of San Francisco, simply driving up onto the sidewalk (and scaring the life out of pedestrians) will suffice to avoid the fuzz. The cops are not your only foes, as in some missions rival gangsters will also hunt you down.

Reflections made the decision to use no-name unlicensed cars, but it seems appropriate in Driver, as big companies usually don't like to show their cars breaking the law or taking damage because it'd sort of contradict those government safety tests. I would have liked to see more vehicles available, or some kind of bonus mode where cars can be selected or purchased, but the game leaves only one default car per town, with the occasional specialty vehicle like a pickup truck or taxi, or an ultra fast sports car that would be great if not for the mission requiring it to be delivered without a scratch, meaning you're forced to drive at 30 mph in an auto that could probably top 190.

The handling on the game is a little sluggish in most of the cars at slow speeds, and even the highest speeds attainable don't have a very fast feel to them, but when in the middle of a car chase with three cops on your tail, everything seems to flow fine. Overall the car physics models are well done, although there are a few glaring and hilarious exceptions. For example, San Francisco, true to its real-life counterpart, has a multitude of hills and slopes, and cops tend to forget about them. One of the best place to lose the feds is on these declines, as they continue gunning it and fly right over other cars, and often out of control and into a lamppost or tree. Here's where the claim of "true physics model" gets shot down. Often, when a cop car is in the air, besides going unrealistically high, it will land on another car, only to send it no less than 300 feet in the air. Many a time I've been forced to stare in confusion as a cop flew above the bordering apartment buildings and indistinguishable grocery stores. Admittedly, the occasional lack of gravity adds to it, except when it looks plain ridiculous. And best of all, every tumbling cop car can be seen in an amazing customizable replay mode.

I normally don't give much mind to replays in games, as I'm eager to get back to driving. While Driver left me more than anxious to be behind the wheel again, the replay mode was nothing short of perfect. Director's Mode, as it is named, allows you to set up cameras wherever and whenever you'd like, with little restraint. Cameras can be on the hoods of pursuers, of Tanner's car, on buildings, on tripods located that can be set to chase or stay stationary and on chase cams that can be placed anywhere around the target car. Although I found myself sometimes longing for a pedestrian cam, so I could see what the little polygonal peasants saw as I rammed my car into the table they were sitting at outside the city cafe, I spent much of my time directing and redirecting the perfect car chase movies.

One thing noticeably missing from Driver's otherwise spectacular gameplay was multiplayer. I would have loved to play a game this good online after beating all the single-player missions (which by the way, are partially nonlinear, and you can play through the game many times without seeing all the missions), but fortunately, Reflections included a lot of replay value in the form of driving mini-games. In their own way as equally entertaining as the main story mode, the mini-games include things like Checkpoint, in which you drive from point to point with a time limit; Free Ride, in which you do whatever you feel like; Pursuit, where you chase another car with the intention of destroying it; and my personal favorite, Survival.

All of these except Survival are basically plotless reiterations of the single-player missions, but Survival holds the challenge and intensity of a good first-person shooter. In it, you are placed in an open area with no less than four cops to start inches from your bumper. Unfortunately for you, in Survival, like hard mode, the cops drive faster then you at top speed, and can easily catch up, making the use of driving tactics like 360s and 180s and a generous use of the handbrake the only way to evade them. About Survival only one thing needs be said — if you can survive 45 seconds, consider yourself very good. Other game options include a somewhat useful tutorial in which you drive around dirt tracks avoiding cones and trying to make a good time. The teaching mode is bland, but good enough, and besides, you're better off to go right to Free Ride mode.

Don't expect to be able to go straight into the mission mode however. To qualify to be a driver, you have to show the mob you're not driving Miss Daisy. The test is set in a parking garage, full of other cars of course, and your mission is to pull off a long list of stunts in a small allocation of time. To add a little flavor to the job, you've got a member of the family acting as the backseat driver from hell, screaming, "Hey man, watch the paint!" when you collide into a wall or vehicle, and totally shattering your self-confidence when you fail, saying, "Maybe I give you a call when I need a ride to the grocery store." If you finally pass — and I mean if, for it's harder than most of the real missions and it took me many tries — you'll go to your apartment and pick your first missions.

The missions are often broken up by full-motion video cutscenes, but don't expect anything impressive. The cutscenes seemed unnecessary and poor by most standards today, and they also felt out of place. Some seemed to have no point at all, as there would be FMVs of the phone ringing, Tanner picking it up and talking into the phone. Did Reflections really have to buy huge SGI workstations simply to render a badly modeled man standing still and talking into a phone? In any case, at least the FMV is sparse, and the gameplay is far from, so there's no true problem created since the game does not depend much on the CG. The overall plot of the game seems to be somewhat forced, as the real meat and potatoes are in the mission, and everything else is simply creamed corn. There are some mild plot twists, and a few big hits that do a little to grab your attention, but for the most part, characters are undeveloped and out-of-game events are anticlimactic — but remember, this game is about pure freewheeling fast-paced driving action, and in that, it delivers, with attitude.

Graphically, Driver shines, if only with a good 3D accelerator. At higher resolutions, the car and scenery models look excellent, and little added effects such as a persistent lens flare add to the cinematics. My only complaint is that the cities often look bland, and you'll be seeing the same four or five shops over and over in many stretches of Miami and New York. Still, there are enough landmarks that stand out visually to keep the locales from monotony, and the game does visually create the feeling of a big city fairly well. The cities themselves are abbreviated versions of their real life counterparts, and although the regions and prominent points of the city may not be geographically correct, they are close enough to provide a good setting and satisfy any but residents of the portrayed metropolises (metropoli? metropoliss?). Although some points of certain cities have noticeable boundaries, such as when the Golden Gate Bridge is crossed in San Francisco, and on the other side there is only a small loop, Driver's four cities — the two starting cities, Miami and San Francisco and then LA and New York which much be unlocked — do well in creating a crowded urban atmosphere, just waiting to be torn up and littered with broken cop cars.

The sound and music in Driver is a near-perfect match. Pumping ‘70s tunes crank out while cruising, and pick up into straight out disco tunes that could have been ripped from "’70s Dance Party" when the cops give chase and the action heats up. I have no complaints about the music other than that there could have been a wider variety of it, but the feel really fits the action. The sound effects of engines rumbling and cars crashing is where the audio department sinks to mediocrity. There was nothing outstanding for better or worse about them. The sound category is quickly revived however, with the inclusion of voices. Passengers will, in over-exaggerated accents, shout phrases like, "Hey man, lose the tail!" The sparse cutscene acting seems a little Resident Evilesque, sounding overall cheesy, fueling the argument of many anime subtitle lovers that Americans can't realistically act afraid or scream, but the mission briefing voices are great and diverse, and more than once caused me to laugh, not at how bad they were, but at Reflection's intentional effort to make them funny.

Near the end of the game, Driver gets very frustrating. There are two famous missions, the last and second to last, that when mentioned, will cause anyone who has beaten Driver to relapse into a epileptic flashback state brought about by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but they are not unconquerable, and I can proudly say I succeeded in both thanks to three hundred retries and lots of blind faith in my gaming skills. The challenge in Driver, other than the last two missions which are simply unbalanced and frustrating, is refreshing, and keeps it from being a game that can be beaten in one or two long sittings. Because of it's freewheeling dynamic nature, Driver is also a game with a long shelf-life; you'll find yourself picking it up months after you've moved on to better things, if only to momentarily immerse yourself in the booty-shaking bellbottom-flaunting tunes and the airborne police squads. Although it has its faults, all in all Driver is a title worth its money. The only regret I have from purchasing Reflection's sleeper hit is my newfound urge to floor it every time I see a cop and drive my crap Honda into the ground. If you like racing games, action games, or are a fan of car chase movies, buy Driver. Just remember after you play it, that in reality, there's no reset button if you wind up in jail.