Driver is a series of mission-based action-adventure video games developed by Reflections Interactive (now Ubisoft Reflections), and originally published by GT Interactive and later by Atari. The gameplay consists of a mixture of action-adventure and driving in open world environments. Since the series began in 1999, there have been five main installments released.
http://www.gamespot.com/search/?qs=driver&filter=summaryMy input:
Driver has been my favorite game since the very first game in the series. "Driver 2" for PS1 was so amazing I played it over and over and over and it was first game where you could get out of the car to get into another, you would not be able to shoot though, just walk around. What came after "Driver 2" was a huge disappointment, and I'm talking about Driv3r. It more or less still had the same feel of the previous games, but it just was not the same bad guy chasing, car action packed game. You would get a gun and would be able to blow shit up... completely went to the different direction.
The next game "Parallel Lines" for PS2 still had the same idea of Driv3r, although the developers somehow managed to get things straight and it became my second most favorite Driver game. It still had the shooting part in it, but much less than it had before and it had a really good story. In "Parallel lines" there was an option to modify and tune the cars, that earned some extra awesomeness points for it.
"Driver 76" was a sliced up "Parallel lines" game for PSP and quite frankly it wasn't so bad, but the original was much better.
And then there's "San Francisco", the last game so far that is worth playing in the series. I really enjoyed it and I was happy that they removed the shooting part in the game, but for that they also removed the option to get out of the car. I must admire the developers though, they did a great job at twisting around what they had and still made the game fun to play, because you would jump like a soul from car to car and the conversations are just hilarious. Well to understand wtf I am talking about you should watch the trailer
In general I liked "San Francisco" and it too was just as great as "Parallel lines" and they both had awesome soundtracks
music would really set the mood.
Really a game you should try if you haven't.
EDIT:
You can download the first driver for PC
HERE.