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September 12, 2006
Many of life's important questions are answered by Test Drive Unlimited for the Xbox 360. I had no idea that a Hawaiian driving simulation was this deep when it comes to satisfying human curiosity. For example, do you remember in the beginning of the first Men In Black movie, when Will Smith is chasing this alien guy through New York, and the guy blinks two sets of eyelids in a rather inhuman fashion? Would you like to see what that looks like in a computer game? The uncanny, crazy-blinking residents of Oahu are dying to meet you.
More than just next-gen graphic failures await in TDU. You know about NASCAR, right? How they make left turns all day and call it a race? There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but have you ever wondered what it would be like to have a talking GPS for your circuit around Talladega? As in, "At the next intersection, turn left... ... Turn left," repeated four times a lap? It comes standard on even the crappiest Hawaiian Saturn convertible.
But wait, there's more! I'm sure you all love the face scrunching ability of modern games like Oblivion and EVE Online. Well, you can do that in TDU too. You get those sliders like cheek bone depth, eyebrow height and nose width. You can really make a person's face look however you want! At the very end of this long face-sculpting process, what follicle options do they present to top your new rhinoplastied masterpiece? No less than five hair styles and five colors for said hair. And no more than that, sadly. Two types of short hair, two types of long, and one bald flavor in your choice (if you can call it that) of the boring preset black, brown, blond, red, or garishly fake pink hair colors. No custom color picker, no variable length options, no blond compass hairstyle button.
All that said, I'm having a blast; Test Drive Unlimited is easily the best of the Test Drive series in years. Against the embarrassments like Test Drive: Off Road, that's not a difficult achievement, but Atari has done a wonderful job of making you feel like you're retiring early in Hawaii to drive around and see the sights.
One thing I can't believe they got right is the beginning of the game. This is the easiest thing to mess up: getting a player into a car and giving him a tangible objective. In TDU you start in what I'm guessing is the San Francisco International Airport. Eight people are waiting in line to board a plane, each one representing a different ethnic group and gender. You use the digital pad to pick which one you want and that person boards the plane. When you arrive in Oahu you're faced with a choice of six cars... at a rental agency. You actually rent a car to drive to a car dealership. The going rate is about $1,000 for ten minutes. Frankly I'd rather walk, but since they give you $200,000 to start out with (and walking isn't an option), I picked a Mercedes and drove to the dealership in the predetermined straight line - very smart, Atari.
Car dealerships in TDU are well executed. You only get to pick from a few cars, but you can rotate and zoom quite freely, even open and close the doors and fiddle with the windows. Best of all, you can hop in and rev the gas to hear what it sounds like, or even take the car for a two minute test drive. If you look to your right during the short trip, you'll see a car dealership lady in the passenger seat. I wonder if they'll have that option in Grand Theft Auto 4. Hot coffee is so much more fun to go.
Once you get your car, the game instructs you to drive to a real estate office. Yes, you buy a house (or condo) to store your cars and fashionable clothes in. Now, get this: they show you what the place looks like (high rise/forest bungalow), how many cars it can hold, what the cost is, but they actually have a "Virtual Tour" button. Inside this virtual real estate office on this virtual island in this game that only exists in the Xbox 360's temporary memory is the ability to "virtually" walk around your new pad. I wonder if it would have been too much work in the game to just go to the place for real.
I bought a swanky upscale condo with drool-inducing furniture. There's a plasma TV that shows grainy TDU trailers and a walk-in closet that you could probably lose the Ark of the Covenant in. After playing around with the facial sliders for a few minutes I had a character you didn't need to look at through a box with a little hole in it. Went to the garage and hopped in my modest $35,000 car and... uh...
That's where the big problems with TDU begin. It's really a multiplayer racer at heart. Not the traditional kind, where you jump from race to race through an artificial lobby screen, but a whole new kind of Grand Theft Auto meets Gran Turismo online mesh. If you don't have a bunch of online friends to race with (as I don't), then you're not going to find anything resembling an objective in this game after the first thirty minutes. It's all about winning simple races to buy new cars, shop for clothes, and purchase houses to store your rides and threads. I'm having fun driving around, earning $7,000 for a 60 second race and window shopping at Lamborghini dealerships, but I wonder how long it can last.
It might be a while. There's a lot of road to explore.
