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Is it any good ?

The last racing game I played was Midtown Madness 2 (that I loved for its "cruise mode", the for-the-day impressive urban environment and the fact it was easily moddable to receive new cars), which is to say I haven't played a racing game in approximately 7-8 years (I don't count Trackmania Nations that I played only because it was free). The basic gameplay seems to be based on car chases, which has the potential to be fun if well executed and if the AI isn't terribad (I don't often play online with real people, so it has the potential to ruin the game for me).

As the game is part of a franchise, I'm also curious to know about the previous iterations.

Basically : tell my all about Driver San Francisco and its predecessors.

You're a strange person if you think you need to know about previous games. It's a fucking driving game; all you need to know is 'in the old games the cops chased you for speeding and running red lights'.

SF is pretty awful; the gimmick isn't too bad, but the car handling is horrible 70s action movie stuff where any turn produces 15m of lateral movement. The car 'combat' is terrible because rather than being physics-based like Burnout Paradise, it's hitpoint based; so you can't make them crash, you have to wear down their hitpoints. If they get stopped (by you driving into their face with another car for instance) it actually makes it harder to hurt them, because speeds are reduced.

They also try got get you to play events to unlock story progress, which gets a bit tiresome the 15th time you have to escape from cops. Burnout Paradise also did that better.

In short buy Burnout it's like $10. Even Hot Pursuit was inferior.

It is pretty simple really. If you just want a good racing/crashing game without worrying about plot, get Burnout. It is probably the best thing out there right now for arcadey car gaming.

Driver SF however has this cool slick 70's cop shows feeling, Starsky&Hutch style. The driving itself is quite alright for an arcade game (yes, it is styled for 120 meter tail end 70's style skids, so what?). Car combat is, as Stark said, really awful though. Apart from hitpoints issue, the cars are really durable. In the original Driver a head on with anyone meant totaling the car. Here you can have a head-on with a bloody truck at 120 mph without any consequences. Which means that the "kewl drift3y handling" that needed to be mastered in the original Driver and gave so much satisfaction, here is just an unnecessary gimmick because it doesn't matter anyway if you crash into the wall going sideways.

The setting however is quite innovative, as everything happens in your... dream.

So if you just want to drive some cars, get Burnout and forget about Driver SF. However if you are a sucker for 70's

I also agree on the rest of Stark's post. "Side quests" can be endured because there is always some kind of funny dialogue going on. Events are bloody tiresome, because there is a lot of them and if you want to drive some of the better cars, you have to run from the cops so many times it becomes a nuisance. And unlocking cars doesn't matter anyways since main quests are almost always in a Challenger and side quests also have predefined cars. So basically you play annoying events to unlock cars so you can play more annoying events in cars you have unlocked. Excellent job Reflections!

The only reason the driftastic handling is bad is that the game often requires sharp, precision turns at short notice. Now I'm pretty crap at driving games, but when I miss a turn by sliding sideways cross six lanes, that's not very cool.

Burnout (as always) had different kinds of cars with different overall handling, and I generally preferred the stiffer understeering cars to the drift machines.

I was actually pretty disappointed with the setting; within the story there is no mystery or amazement, it's just 'have you seen Life on Mars? That's you' and 'spooky crows'. At least the tutorial phase isn't very long.

Stark, the key to succesful drifting/skidding/cornering however you call it is entering a slide before the corner, pointing the car just before the apex of the curve. With enough practice you can actually precisely navigate any corner even in a 70's loose suspension vehicle. It also requires careful planning of each turn. Too bad the game never explains that properly, this is the knowledge that passed on to me by several rallying drivers that I practiced with back in my rally days.

Thanks for the infos, guys.

Yeah, I see Burnout Paradise on Steam and from the trailer it already seems more like what I'm searching. Plus, it's far cheaper than D:SF (€15 vs €50) and it's two years old, which means that it had time to be debugged & patched. I'll give it a shot. I just hope it's relatively easy to play with a 360's pad, 'cause my old PC "steering wheel + pedals" combo hasn't aged well in the decade I owned it, and I don't think I'm going to invest €100 in a new one for just one game...

Paradise originally came out on consoles, so it'll work well with the 360 pad. I found using the controller easier for the PS3 version than using a wheel and pedals, actually.