Driver: San Francisco's MOT

It's difficult. This game is not the sort where you can easily present one mission to someone. This game is about what happens to Tanner and how he gets himself into that situation. Without giving away half of the game you just can't [convey] that in a demo.

And Shift itself is something that, again, doesn't come from nowhere. You have to play through the story to understand where it came from, why he has it, what its power is, how it becomes stronger, why it becomes stronger, what happens in real-life that is affecting his coma, what he's thinking about in his coma that influences what happens when he comes out of his coma. We just can't think of any way of doing that easily - here's a bad guy, here's a good guy, have a chase, have a crash and that's it. It's got more to it than that. We always knew it was a very tricky one. We tried to choose missions that were giving a little bit of a taste of it.

The multiplayer demo was a lot easier for us as a proposition, because you know what the rules are; there's Shift, it's Tag mode, get on with it. Story doesn't come into it.

Most people that play the game think the actual function of Shift is good fun and bringing something different. There are reviews that get the story, they understand it, they see how Shift came and how it develops. They also recognise that we're showing Tanner's schizophrenia deliberately. One minute he's doing a police investigation and the next minute doing something completely crazy with a bunch of Japanese street racers or a learner driver.

And this is by design - it's an intentional thing. One or two of the reviews just go, "Oh this story is completely ludicrous." You need to stop for a minute and think why have we done it this way. This is why: because he thinks he's having a mental breakdown. I don't think they've thought about it carefully enough. What we have done is, very deliberately, treat it with a light touch. Jones, for example, his partner, is constantly taking the piss out of him. And this is because it's such a ludicrous situation. All the time we're being very, very deliberate about this. Tanner has to basically convince Jones, and he starts to think very quickly that things are not quite as they seem.

There are matters of taste: handling, for example. The way I view handling is, first of all, handling is very much back to the roots of the first game, that physics-based handling model. The disadvantage is that it can be trickier to do simple things like get around a bend by just steering. You have to do things like use the handbrake, you have to get the back-end out, you have to be drifting, you have to temper your throttle.

You can't be on the throttle 100 per cent of the time like you can in some video games. That can be tricky for the first few minutes until you get the hang of it. The advantages are that you eventually get used to the subtleties of how it behaves and it allows you to nail this perfect drift around a bend. That, for me, is far more rewarding than the handling model that has a button for drift sort of thing. It also means you can exploit the handling as you get used to it. There aren't too many video games that go into that sort of depth.

The reason why we put that in is that Tanner is in a strange state of mind. If you imagine you're driving a car and you have this urge and want it to go faster, be stronger... This is the thing that has been lost in some reviews, that it is not nitrous, not a nitrous boost. This is Tanner concentrating. It's like a kid in a sweetie shop kind of thing: if I could do anything with a car, what could I do? And that's one of the things people would love to do with a car. And you'll notice that he doesn't have boost before he has the big crash. You'll also notice that any time he's not in a coma he doesn't have boost.

I'm not sure I agree with that. We've got Downtown, we've got Russian Hills, we've got Marin County, Golden Gate Park, Sutro - we've picked the juiciest areas. If you look at a map of hot-spots, heat-spots, of where all the missions are, they are spread across the entire city in a variety of environments. There are not too many driving games that have big, off-road dirt tracks, which we do, with big hills for the jumps; massive, sweeping, almost F1 circuit courses.

That's the one thing that when I read in a review I can't understand where they're coming from. But that is probably the only one where I have nothing to say other than I just don't understand what they mean.