Comparing Driver 3's Nice to Real Life

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I’ve long wanted to do this with some game. But most games are set in or based on cities in the USA, and I’ve not really been there. Recently I want to Nice in France, so here’s my chance to dig up a 15 year old game and do some comparing. Apologies for the quality of some of the pics and comparisons, I’m doing this for me as much as anyone else

Kinja won’t allow me to put text between the pictures because it’s a fucking terrible piece of software. So I’ll use captions or something.

In all of these, the Driver screenshot will come first. Note that I did visit all of these places, but I don’t always have good pics for comparison. So I relied on google streetview a bit.

The famous Negresco hotel, realized in surprising detail! I guess they really went for this one given its fame. Note they left off the “Le” on the writing up top.

Illustration for article titled Comparing Driver 3s Nice to Real Life

This is just a nice little park, down the south-west end of the boulevard de anglais, on the way to the airport. It is featured in the game, and in fact its hills make for plenty of jumpy fun

Russian Orthodox Cathedral. It’s pretty low detail in game, but you can see the resemblance, particularly those green bulbs up top.
In the game a “Timmy Vermicelli” is here waiting to kill you.
In real life I didn’t get that close as it’s nowhere near as open as in the game. — Russian Orthodox Cathedral. It’s pretty low detail in game, but you can see the resemblance, particularly those green bulbs up top.

In the game a “Timmy Vermicelli” is here waiting to kill you.

In real life I didn’t get that close as it’s nowhere near as open as in the game.

Gare de Nice-Ville, the main train station. You can see the shape of the roof, the color of the bricks is the same. Ish

The courthouse, the Palais du Justice, with obvious similarities. The real one has a fountain off to the left that the game lacked.

A view of Castle Hill from the East side. Not a great pic from real life, but you can tell they’ve tried to make it similar particularly in some of the buildings.I drove up there in the game, when you’re there it lacks a *lot* of the detail from real life. The waterfall, the castle ruins, etc.

WWII monument to those Nicois who died, just under Castle Hill. Definitely similar.

This is facing the wrong direction compared to the real life shot. But the point is that the big fountain that’s at the end of this wide road is completely absent in game.

This is a shot of the hotel Le Regina. I did quite a large walk on my last day to visit this one, pleased to see it made an appearance in game.

Two very poor shots of the beach-facing seats Nice is famous for. Definitely in the game, not a coincidence.

A word of warning. This game is old. The physics are pretty robust, but sort of flakey at the same time. I fell through the ground once and died. Thankfully that didn’t happen to me in real life Nice.