Credit were credit is due... Driver was pretty much the first game that gave us a good feel of a simulated police chase in video games. Inspired by great police films of the 70's and then on, Driver did a great job of delivering what it set out to do. Gotta love that 70's police chase music that borders on sounding like the music you'd expect from classic porn. First and foremost you had the games campaign that strung together some story and increasingly difficult missions over a variety of US based cities, that alone was a lot of fun, and it meant you had something to do when you was on your own. However for me there was SOO much time spent with friends having a turn each of trying to have the most spectacular police chases, and coming up with own unique methods of scoring them, length of time, cops totalled, or navigating specific regions of specific maps that put the favour strongly on the side of the police. It was through these self-set goals that me and friends would impose that led to me once having some amazing replays saved on one of my PS1 memory cards. I couldn't even think to imagine this game without a free roam mode and the replay director mode, because to me that was the meat to my overall experience with Driver. Strangely enough, a sort of sub-game, and interesting memory I have with Driver is that this was on one of the first games in which I actually went looking for glitches. There were plenty to be found if you knew were to look, some were hilarious, some were annoying, but I can't really think of any game before Driver in which I actively sought out glitches. I remember ways in which I could get myself trapped into the building in Miami... or fall through the floor in San Francisco only to somehow end up falling from the sky back into the game map. I went on to get my share of fun out of Driver 2 also, but then the Driver series sort of fell off most people's radars once we got GTAIII, which also gave us great police chases along with a LOT more to do. Still though. I went and played to completion both Driv3r and Driver Parallel Lines, and I'm hoping to have fun again with Driver: San Francisco. I can understand the lack of appreciation the series has had since then, but I've got that sort of "beaten housewife syndrome" with the Driver franchise... because sure, the series hasn't been treating me so well since the early days, but I stick by it anyway. Not the most pleasant of metaphors I've used but it's relevant.

Over the weekend I got into a conversation about Star Trek with a couple of friends, one of whom had only the vaguest knowledge about the franchise. In my attempts to explain the various series and movies I realised that my own knowledge of how they all fit together chronologically was fairly sketchy - a situation that simply couldn't stand! So I went home and knocked up a fairly dodgy infographic to explain it all. It should be fairly self explanatory. I've only included time travel elements from the movies, as trying to plot all the various time jumps, temporal visitations and general futzing around with history that absolutely everyone in the Trek universe seems to get up to when they're bored would take forever. This entire thing is undoubtedly nerdy, but at least I didn't try and make it look like an Okudagram :)