Driving games

Driving games

Neither of the two driving games gives you a steering wheel. That is the first thing worth knowing, because the label suggests a wheel, pedals and a road unrolling ahead, and what you actually get is a question about timing asked from two opposite positions. In one you are inside a car looking at traffic that will not stop for you. In the other you are above a street deciding when traffic moves at all. Same subject, opposite chairs.

Inside the car: Traffic

The screen stands upright. Four grey bands lie across it like shelves, each one a road, and each road carries a white circle with a number in it — 130 on the top band, 60 on the next, 20 further down — plus a small triangle at one end showing which way that road runs. A ladder of zebra stripes marks the point where the roads meet the dirt track that runs vertically through the grass, and at the bottom of that track sits your car: a stubby red-and-blue thing about the size of a thumbnail, with two large round buttons beneath it, a down arrow on the left and an up arrow on the right.

You press up and drive into the first band. The numbers in those circles are the whole game. The 130 road will close a gap that looked generous while your bonnet is still crossing the paint; the 20 road forgives nearly anything you do to it. Learn to glance at the circle before you look at the cars, and the game changes character completely.

Above the street: Traffic Command

Now the camera lifts and tilts. A seaside boulevard runs diagonally across the frame — parasols and deckchairs on the sand, a sailboat on turquoise water, a hotel with a vertical red sign, a souvenir shop, a perfume shop, a restaurant awning, a yellow bus waiting at the kerb. Two zebra crossings cut the tarmac, each with a pedestrian signal glowing red. You are those signals.

Four numbers to read before you touch anything

The bar across the top of Traffic Command holds four things and each one changes how you should play:

• A car icon with 10 next to it. The quota for the level. You are not surviving, you are delivering.
• A stopwatch reading 00:59. The round is time-boxed. Standing everything still is not a strategy; it is a slow loss.
• A heart with X3. Three mistakes, not one. This single detail rules out the cautious style the game seems to invite.
• A dollar counter. Sitting at zero until traffic actually moves.

Put those together and the correct play is neither timid nor reckless: you have a minute, a quota and three chances, so the shape of a good round is a steady release with two crossings held back rather than a nervous drip of one car at a time.

Why this is not filed under racing

Nothing here has a lap, a rival, a gearbox or a finish line, and no title on this shelf lets you point a car in a direction of your choosing. Racing is where steering lives; this is where waiting lives. The two shelves would bury each other if we merged them, and the person who wants the quiet one would never find it again.

Questions from the two screens above

Do I ever actually steer?

No. In Traffic your car only moves forward and back along one dirt track; in Traffic Command you never touch a vehicle at all. The controls you get are two arrows and a set of lights respectively.

What do the numbers in the grey bands mean?

The speed of the road you are about to enter, written in the middle of each band. They differ from lane to lane inside the same attempt, which is why gaps that look identical are not.

How many mistakes does one round allow?

Traffic Command shows three hearts, so the run continues after contact. In Traffic we could not find a life counter anywhere on the screen, and every attempt we made ended on the first touch — treat it as one mistake per attempt until something on the screen tells you otherwise.

Does either round have a fixed length?

Traffic Command's stopwatch starts just under a minute and counts down; Traffic gives no clock at all. So one of them is a small, timed exercise you can repeat while a kettle boils, and the other lasts exactly as long as you stay lucky.