Test Drive 5
- January 01, 2000 00:00 AM PST
Computer racing games increasingly make me think of Hot Wheels tracks. The cars dash down a trough no wider than, say, the average golf-course fairway. The frame rate soars, but the off-track worlds tend to be shallow.
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Accolade once had a wider, more worldly vision for this popular franchise, and I'm still pleasantly haunted by it. In the early '90s, Test Drive 3 gave us wide-open spaces and a governing get-there-your-way principle that was (and still is) unlike anything else on the market. Even Carmageddon, while imbued with a similar conceit, keeps its drivers generally on track with a system of timed stages.
Unfortunately, TD3 didn't sell as well as its predecessors, and the publisher embraced the trough in Test Drive 4. For Test Drive 5, it's a bit wider. The tracks now branch. You'll be zipping through the 17 real-world courses (as many of eight of which are accessible at the start) in one of the game's 28 muscular cars-when you'll discover that an alternate route is staring you in the face.
Maybe it's a shortcut. Maybe it's a longcut. Maybe it's about the same length as the main route and was included just for scenery. In any case, the very presence of these side roads encouraged me to look at the tracks differently. Everything-every gap in the fence, every tunnel portal, every intersection-suddenly became a potential branch. I'd drive the tracks to race, and then I'd drive them just to look. It's still a far cry from roaming free and easy, but anything that makes you think about route is a plus.
Even without branching, TD5 has a lot going for it. The graphics are bright and pleasant, whether you're bouncing off the facade of an ancient church in Scotland or passing an ancient temple in a Jordanian canyon.
It's enjoyably tough: The time-limited stages-under which you must complete a leg before the clock runs out or the race ends-are particularly challenging, and I'm embarrassed to admit that I couldn't get through the opening track (Moscow) in this mode.
That's only one of several racing modes, and the docs cryptically promise surprises for graduates of the various championship circuits. It has a lush replay mode that recalls the brilliant Grand Turismo for the Sony PlayStation. And it's got a twist on NFSIII's police theme by allowing you to play traffic cop-though I'd argue that being chased is more exciting than doing the chasing. The drag-racing mode doesn't do much for me, though.
I only ran into two glitches: The game occasionally seemed to pause briefly during races. And when I increased the depth of view to maximum (a feature that more games should offer) graphics glitches began to appear-both when I was using a RIVA TNT-based Diamond Viper 550 and Voodoo II-based Obsidian2.
On the other hand, TD5 doesn't have Internet play. (Multiplay is limited to LAN and two-player split-screen, which is a gas.)
Nor, in single player, does it have the visceral appeal of its closest competitor: Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit. While that game has a wonderful gritty sense of being attached to the road, I had the sense of hovering slightly above it in TD5. And the stylized 3D collisions-the car semi-airborne and spinning slowly on its axis-look more like dances than accidents.
Fortunately, you can turn them off, and I did. Without them, TD5 is still narrow, but it's a bit more down to earth.
