Admit it, even if you're the type of San Franciscan who would rather brush your teeth with gasoline than own a car, you've still fantasized about doing 120 mph at crest of one of the city's famous hills and catching some serious air.
(SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO)
Maybe it's Steve McQueen's fault for forever cementing the linkage in our collective imaginations, but the combination of San Francisco and car chases are American as apple pie and semi-automatic weapons.
There are two problems with this: One, your Prius doesn't go 120 mph. Two, even if it did, driving it that fast would land you in the slammer.
Luckily, if you have a PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 or a Windows PC, you'll soon be able to live out all your childhood dreams of driving as fast as possible the wrong way up the twisty part of Lombard Street. Made by San Francisco-based game developer Ubisoft, Driver San Francisco gives players 208 miles of realistically recreated San Francisco, Oakland and Marin County to explore and crash Ferraris into.
WATCH (story continues below):
Unlike most driving games, where the plot is about at complex as "maybe try to go a little faster the other guys," the Driver San Francisco's story is a little more in-depth.
A sequel to the popular Driv3r, Driver San Francisco puts gamers in the shoes of Detective John Tanner, who is currently in a coma after being pushed in front of a tractor-trailer. Much like in real life, Tanner then gains the ability to astral project himself into the consciousness of various people, an ability he uses to speed all over San Francisco, doing all sorts of insane stunts and property damage.
In a review of the game, IGN reveals all of the possibilities afforded by this premise:
Driver takes full advantage of its premise, never holding back from ridiculous set pieces. There are chase missions where you're inside cop cars, escort or tailing missions where you have to stick with the same vehicle, missions where you have to contrive insane crashes to help out a camera crew for America's Most Insane Car Chases 4, missions where you're helping earnest Japanese boys to become street-racing heroes and fund their college education, and much more. It has more variety than any other racer I can name.
Driver San Francisco isn't the first time gamers have had the ability to play in an open-ended sandbox version of the city by the bay. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas gave players the opportunity go on a one-man crime spree in the computer-generated city of San Fierro, which is meant to simulate San Francisco. While that game got San Francisco's general feel more or less right, the layout was pure invention. Driver San Francisco's world looks like it adheres much closer to reality.
While Atari's San Francisco Rush: Extreme Racing predates both games, but comparing it to Driver San Francisco would be like comparing apples and blurry, pixelated, 64-bit apples.
The console version of Driver San Francisco will be released on September 6th and the Windows version is slated for the end of the month.