Driver San Francisco

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In 2011, Reflections (now Ubisoft Reflections) took another shot at the series with Driver San Francisco, the first game in the series for the Play Station 3 and Xbox360. Returning to the first three games' continuity and, like Parallel Lines, taking place entirely in one city (guess which one it is), San Francisco goes the supernatural/Mind Screw route by taking place while Tanner is in a coma... and giving him "shifting" powers that allow him to possess other drivers on the road.

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Tropes:

• Arc Words:"Your eyes on the city".
• AcCENT Upon the Wrong SylLABle: No one in the game can properly pronounce "Marin".
• Badass Beard
• Badass Driver
• Battle in the Center of the Mind: The entire game.
• Car Chase: The series' bread and butter.
• Car Fu: Half the time will be spent driving semis into oncoming traffic to stop a street race.
  • In the game's climax Big Bad Jericho will throw cars at Tanner. Since it's All Just a Dream, Tanner can, too.
  • Team Race being a hard one to win? Just smash the opponents into retirement. To be fair, opponents in these races are (almost) Made of Indestructium and sometimes even a Haulier might not stop one.
  • BUSSIN Brutally Unfair Strategy Showcases Ingenuity Nicely. A title that would make the title writer of KND proud.
• Cool Car: Tanner's Dodge Challenger in San Francisco. This also applies to some of the 139 other vehicles
  • Such as The DeLorean DMC-12, a 1970 Ford Mustang Fastback, Pontiac Trans Am, Lamborghini Countach etc. Pretty much every Cool Car used in a chase scene shows up.
• Cowboy Cop: Tanner, to the hilt.
• Dramatic Irony: Throughout San Francisco, the player is aware of Tanner's coma, but Tanner himself isn't.
• The Driver: Of course.
• Dueling Games: With Grand Theft Auto starting in 2001, but less so in this game.
• Dying Dream: San Francisco takes place mostly within Tanner's coma dream.
• Easter Egg: Driving the 1983 DeLorean DMC-12 at 88 mph unlocks the garage training level from the first Driver game as a special mission. (This particular car was the time machine in Back to The Future, and the special mission is appropriately named "Blast from the Past.
• Eleventh-Hour Superpower: The ability to throw cars at Jericho's RAM SRT-10 during the climax.
• Fragile Speedster: Any of the sports cars in the game are easily (nearly) totaled at high speed, but the most fragile example can be the Alfa Romeo Guilia TZ2.
• Improbably Cool Car: You can find some incredibly rare cars just casually cruising the streets of SF, including 1960s Italian racing cars with production runs barely out of single digits.
  • Then there are the cars that are in the single digits. Pagani Zonda Cinque anyone?
  • Then again, most of the game takes place in his coma dream an there isn't any rare cars during the first few tasks and chase and during the very last chase in the game.
• Joke Character: Cars with low stats all around like the AMC Pacer, VW Beetle (especially the old one) and the Camper, as well as the Chevrolet Volt among some others.
• Your Mom: Tanner to someone during It's For Charity.

Passenger: "This car is worth cash money!" Tanner: "Your mom's cash money."

• Mighty Glacier: Anything that's a Van Dourn, Dykemann, Camion and Caisson would count. Pick ups like Ford F-150/350's also count but to a lesser extent.
• Mind Control: Tanner's "shifting" powers basically amount to this.
• New Game+: Which allows you to still fully explore San Francisco with no red barriers (aside from a certain mission which was meant to stop due to a boundry at that point), keep unlocks, abilities and WP points after the start of chapter 1 (which skipped the introduction to garages, dares and challenges).
• New York City Cops: Tanner is an NYPD detective.
• Noodle Incident: Several...

Tanner: "Have you ever had an out-of-body experience?" Jones: "You been eating moldy waffles again? I told you about cleaning out your fridge." Tanner: "Hey! We agreed never to mention what happened on 'weird Tuesday' -you promised."

Tanner: "Let's go grab a cup of coffee, there's something I need to talk to you about." Jones: "You're not pregnant again are you?" Tanner: "Trust me, with this (shifting) thing I got going on, it makes just as much sense."

• Retro Universe: Despite being set in the present day, the game feels very '70s.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: In-universe example, the reason the events in the game's coma dream match what happens in reality after The Reveal, is because the television in the hospital room was on the news station, subconcioussly feeding Tanner information of what was happening in real life (which can be very subtly heard if you shift and fly up to the maximum height, along with the heartbeat and heartbeat monitor).
• Reality Ensues: Since the final chase takes place in reality, there's no shifting, boosting or ramming.
• Rubber Band AI: (?) If a cop falls far enough behind you, it goes into what fans call "doublespeed", gaining double the normal top speed in order to catch up.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right: Two cops, one of them you control, smash over 10,000 dollars worth of fake medication despite not having a warrent to do so, thus becoming vigilante's once they lose their badges. Tanner prefers "freelance crime fighters" better.
• Shout-Out: The tutorial in the first game is lifted directly from a similar scene in The Driver, where the main character proves his skills to some gangsters in a parking garage. Which was then ported as a special challenge in this game.
  • Same goes for the "Movie Challenges", special missions, that closely resemble famous movie chase scenes.
  • In one mission, Tanner has to catch two lowlifes who stole a church collection box. His reaction? He's always wanted to say that he's on a mission from God
    • The secret Nintendo Hard Nostalgia Level is unlocked by driving 88 Mph in a De Lorean.
• Wide Open Sandbox: Of the supernatural variety, even.
• X Meets Y : San Francisco is probably the illegitimate child of Life On Mars and Bullitt, with some input from Quantum Leap.