Night Driver (Widescreen)

I have found that in my attempts to embellish these 2600 games, that my reasearch has taken me across a wide variety of subjects to find appropriate source images. Night Driver is no different in that regard. The cars shown in the box art are fashioned closely after the 1975 BMW 3.0 CSL. The arcade version car, however, is modeled after the 1975 Alpha Romeo 33 TT12 formula one car. The car image in my artwork is taken from a Google Sketchup 3D model screencapture. That way I could try to match the perspective that the observer should have of the car. The courses, however, I mapped myself playing them over and over. Now, the points system actually has meaning. Even the manual didn't spell that one out. If only there was a mechanism within MESS to create a score based course progress argument for a lamp object, so that players could see their current position illuminated as a moving dot behind the map. Anyways, this game gets a bad rap because of the comparatively large paddle saturation zone, no spring-loaded centering, as well as the lack of any kind of visual cue that the steering input is not centered. There is, however, an audio cue. Anytime you hear the wheels squealing on a straightaway, you know that the car is about to slam to one side or another because the car is trying to turn. It also doesn't help that the course access road at the start of the race keeps the car centered despite non-centered steering input, only to slam the player once the first checkpoint is crossed. Despite these issues, Night driver is quite an accomplishment for its time.