Introduction

NorCal crew represent!

Driver: San Francisco is a 2011 game developed and published by Ubisoft, and while it's technically the fifth in the Driver series you really don't need to know any of the backstory to jump right in here. Short version: you play John Tanner, a hardboiled cop with nothing to lose. Your nemesis is Charles Jericho, a master criminal who you've finally put away, until (SPOILER FOR FIRST FIVE MINUTES OF VIDEO) he breaks out again! Oh no! This is a problem whose only solution is: drive really fast.

In fact, Driver:SF has you rocketing around a scale model (it's not quite 1:1) of the City by the Bay, doing stunts and helping out citizens through an original and startlingly engaging "shift" mechanic, through which you can at any time jump out of your car and into any other vehicle in the city. You can also buy and customize cars in your garage, as is de rigeur for this sort of game (more on that below).

What really brings the game home, though, is its incredibly polished sense of style. It's got solid voice acting, astonishingly well-rendered cutscenes, and an overall aesthetic that evokes the great buddy-cop TV shows of the 1970s (despite being set in the present day). We will not be in any way surprised if a number of people see this LP and decide they need to play the game for themselves. This game is fun.

I'm doing this with my friend Mott514, who will (once again) be in the driver's seat. For my part, I have not actually seen the game before, so I will be going in mostly blind: although we're doing commentary in post, our recording sessions will be the first time I see each video. Now, I know there's not really a whole lot of plot or anything going on here, but I would still like to request that nothing from the "Story Mode" be spoiled in the thread. We'll definitely be doing every City Mission and Tanner Mission, so try to maintain the surprise.

However, if there are particular stunts you want to see, or individual Dares or Activities you really want shown off, feel free to bring those up! We will be doing several videos just for screwing around and such, so we will probably get to most of your favorites, but I'm not worried about being spoiled for them. The only caveat I will add is that, if your request involves a particularly surprising result (I'm thinking like in Crackdown where backing two ramp trucks into each other sends them flying into space), please do not spoil the surprising bit. Just say, you know, "Try backing two ramp trucks into each other!"

One other note on thread participation: if there's a particular car you want to see, absolutely say so and we'll try to work it in to a screwing-around video. However, a) neither of us is sufficiently into cars to get excited about them ourselves, and b) the main story missions have you shifting so often that there's no point in trying to bring something custom into them.

As for the LP itself, it will be generally conversational as opposed to informative, and our goal will be to update every Wednesday and Saturday. We'll be doing one video for each of the 9 main storyline chapters, plus a couple extra bonus videos as previously mentioned.