All Games You Need: Test Drive Unlimited - DVD - Full

Late last year, Atari and developer Eden Studios released Test Drive Unlimited for the Xbox 360. Purportedly the first "massively open online racing" game, Unlimited provided you with a wide-open setting (the Hawaiian island of Oahu), a myriad of slick rides, tons of different races to take part in, and an online mode that actually let you occupy the same basic driving space as other online players and challenge them in competition. Not everything the game did on the 360 worked brilliantly, but it was an inventive and unique piece of technology that was impressive in its own right. Now the game has come to the PC, and for all intents and purposes, this version is nearly identical to the 360 game. It's a little rougher around the edges than its 360 counterpart, but if you never played the 360 version and think the idea of racing around Hawaii while bumping up against other online players sounds like fun, this version's worth a look.

You start by picking a basic character model to represent yourself, and you're whisked away to fabulous Hawaii to buy a car and a house, do a lot of random racing, and drive hitchhikers and models around the island for some reason. That's about all there is to the premise. While it's not shocking that a racing game wouldn't have a major, in-depth storyline, the way the game introduces itself and the open-ended nature of the game world give you the impression that there might be some kind of plot to tie everything you do together. There isn't. The lack of a cohesive thread to the missions and races does make Test Drive seem a bit pointless, but after a while, you cease to care and find yourself oddly engaged by this scattershot series of objectives. It helps that there is quite a lot to do on the island. The objectives themselves don't extend beyond races, time trials, speed challenges, and some basic delivery missions, but there are enough of them to keep you going as you explore the massive island of Oahu.

Test Drive Unlimited Download Minimum System Requirements

Windows 2000/XP
2.4 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent AMD Athlon
512 MB RAM (1 GB recommended)
8 GB free hard disk space
ATI Radeon 9800 w/ 256 MB VRAM or NVIDIA GeForce 6600GT w/ 256 MB VRAM (video cards with Pixel/Vertex Shader 2.0 support recommended)
DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
DirectX 9.0c (included)
Broadband Internet connection recommended for online multiplayer