Way back in June of 1999, a Newcastle-developer called ‘Reflections Interactive’ brought out a game called ‘Driver’, which was received with critical acclaim. You could avoid police, drive one car but anywhere you wanted across four cities, it was ahead of its time.
Driver 2 was released a year after, touting other locations, but the series ultimately ended due to Dr3ver in 2003, mainly because of it being bug-ridden and full of slow frame rates.
But communities in 2020 still surprise, as they have been able to take ‘Driver 2’, once exclusive to only the original PlayStation, manually decompile the code, and port it to PC.
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Whart you get is the full experience, in wide-screen, no slowdowns, and gamepad support, all native on PC, called ‘ReDriver 2’.
ReDriver 2 Lives!
As their GitHub link describes, their aims was to compile a native PC port of the sequel, to fix the bugs, performance issues, and have it playable from start to finish.
This project began in March of 2019, and 21 months later, they seem to have achieved it.
You need to own the original Driver 2 in order to get it working, but it’s a simple matter of dragging and dropping the files into the directory that ‘ReDriver 2’ creates, and you’re good to go.
As the screenshots below show, I was able to play the game as normal on my 1440p monitor, with my DualShock 4. It’s an incredible feat, as everything works. From the missions to the pedestrians moving out of the way, and leaving the car, everything feels right.
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Is it Fully Playable?
Not only is it fully playable, but recent updates are also restoring cut content, such as a ‘monorail’ from the Las Vegas cityscape.
There’s also support for texture and model replacement, so there may be a Delorean coming into the game one day.
It’s simply incredible that a game like Driver 2 has been restored in this way. Certain names in the credits have previously helped with porting other games, such as ‘Tomb Raider 2: The Golden Mask’, which was an exclusive expansion to the PC, now playable on PS1 thanks to them.
This only raises the question of what other games could be decompiled in this way, and natively run on a PC. There’s far too many PS1-exclusive games to count, but ones that jump to mind are ‘MediEvil’, ‘Rosco McQueen’, ‘G-Police’, ‘Gex’.
The possibilities here are endless, and as there is now support for texture replacements, one can’t help but wonder if there may be an online-mode coming to ‘ReDriver 2’ soon.
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