Driver: Parallel Lines

Driver: Parallel Lines is an open-world action game in which the player, as a young getaway driver, gets caught up in a murder in New York in 1978, then returns twenty-eight years later from prison wanting revenge on the people who betrayed him back then and the police who set him up. The game thus offers two distinct time periods with their own cars, music, and city atmosphere, and continues the Driver action series by combining wild car chases with shootouts after stepping out of the vehicle. The 2006 original for PlayStation 2 and Xbox was developed by the British studio Reflections and published by Atari, which at the time still held the rights to the Driver brand before Ubisoft later took them over.

A year later, a Wii version came out, published this time under Ubisoft's wing, and it substantially reworked the game for motion controls. The shooting segments lost auto-aim - the player has to aim the Wii Remote directly at the screen and manually shoot at targets, while the Nunchuk controls character movement and driving, which makes the shootouts feel more like a first-person shooter than the original third-person action. The camera during on-foot sequences also changed to an over-the-shoulder view, and the user interface was reworked too, with curved speed and wanted-level gauges replaced by simpler star icons symbolizing the degree of police attention. Content-wise, it's the same story, the same cities, and the same missions as on PS2 and Xbox around the same time the PC version also came out, but due to the reworked controls, camera, and interface, the game plays noticeably differently on Wii than on the other platforms.

Why play it: The Wii version makes sense for players tempted to try Driver: Parallel Lines' chases and shootouts with Wii Remote and Nunchuk motion controls and curious how the same story changes once shooting shifts from auto-aim to manual aiming by pointing at the screen - it's a distinctly different feel than the PS2, Xbox, or PC versions.