If you’ve played one Test Drive game, you really haven’t played the others, because there is so much variety in the series.  You have standard street racing games, off road games, rally games, and more serious racing games.  Test Drive: Eve of Destruction released by Atari in 2004 takes low budget, small town dirt track racing, and turns it into a very fun game.

I don’t care how much a complete, and mint copy of this game goes for on Ebay, I’ll never get rid of this classic.

The career mode tends to be like Gran Turismo.  You start off with a small amount of money in which you buy a small car.  By winning races you can upgrade your car, or buy a faster one.  Instead of going through boring menus, you drive your car to the garage, or car dealership, or race track.  The race types are absolutely wild, and I would really love to see some of them in real life.  They’re all setup for maximum mayhem.  Some tracks have jumps, and some are in a figure-8 layout.  Others have half the cars going clockwise, and the other half going the opposite direction.  The Gauntlet race has one person trying to complete a race in a hearse, while the other drivers try to take him out.  Another one has one player driving a school bus, and tries to take out the other drivers.  There is your standard demolition derby event.  The Push Off has cars trying to push one another off a hill.  Other races have you towing a trailer, or have you chained to another car.  There are others race types as well, but just too many to type them all here.  All of these events are just as fun as they sound.

My favourite way to play this game is split screen with four friends.  It is always a great time, and it’s a popular choice for when my friends and I get together for a game night.  This game is not only backwards compatible with the Xbox 360, but it upscales the graphics to high definition.  This means that even in the four way split screen mode, the graphics look good.  The framerate for the four way split screen is also very smooth.  The soundtrack is early 2000’s rock music such as Rob Zombie and Sum 41.  The engine sound effects, and crashing sound effects sound great, as does the track announcer.  I’ve noticed that this game sells for a lot of money on Ebay.  As of this writing the cheapest price I see before shipping charges is $35, and that is for the disc only.  I guess the reason is that there really isn’t another game out there like this.  If this game sounds fun, and you see it for a reasonable price, then pick it up immediately.