Lately I came upon a nice JavaScript experiment, called “GoogleDrive”, made by Samuel Birch – he likes to develop plugins for the MooTools-framework. In GoogleDrive you can actually load a map of a city of your choice and drive through this city with a small car. You simply control the movement of the car by cursor keys. The authentic thing about it is, that it has some simple kind of collision detection: you can drive on streets, but not on buildings. It is a very basic implementation and one-way streets for example are completely ignored, as well as other things. You can also drive down from bridges and this sort of things. At least, it’s an experiment, not a finished game. Unfortunately it is not possible to turn on the satellite-picture mode. It should be no problem at all, except if the collision uses the ground color to detect the buildings.

Driving with GoogleDrive through Tokyo.

If I look at the Google drive experiment, than I strongly have to think of a very classic top-down-view map implementation, where you drive a “bicycle” with your keys: the level-connecting mini-maps of the Amiga-game Bad Cat. In fact the bicycle at Bad Cat is only a dot and besides a counter, that sets a time limit, there is almost no real gameplay at all. Maybe the colors are to mention. Dark, rough, moody, autumn-like and a little bit dirty. A vintage Amiga-color palette, I’ve never seen something like this for years. In opposition the concept of connecting a game world through maps is used more often. Just remember games like Super Mario or Ghost’n’Goblins. I almost always enjoyed the maps (just a) a little bit more like the game itself…

The Bad Cad map, a game from 1988.