The Arcade version of Crazy Taxi was so incredibly addictive that it sucked up a frightening amount of my hard-loaned cash, and indeed my social life, during my hazy student days. Fun, but really not worth flagging down even on budget. Also, it's a direct port from the Xbox, so witnessing graphical pop-ups and other glitches isn't acceptable on PC nowadays.
The third in the series basically takes what was good in Crazy Taxi 1 & Crazy Taxi 2 (San Francisco and New York-style cities, tons of mini-challenges, the Crazy Hop jump, multiple passenger drop-offs) and throws in four new characters plus a brand-new Vegas-at-night level called Glitter Oasis, packed with outrageous architecture soaked in neon glitz.Ĭrazy Taxi 3 is enjoyable fare (sorry), but if you've already hammered the first two games, there's not much reason to splash out on a game that Crazy Drifts along a well-worn highway - Grand Theft Auto 3 includes taxi missions as a mini-game, for goodness sake. It's Sega at its colourful and silly best, producing a beautifully-playable arcade racer with a simple but addictive premise - pick up and deliver various eccentric passengers to their chosen destination as quickly and spectacularly as you can, pulling off ker-razy stunts and short-cuts along the way. Virtually the same experience bar a Crazy Hop or two.Ĭrazy Taxi has to be one of our favourite coin-ops of all time. (You'll soon tire of popping balloons and jumping logs in arenas nicked from CT 1 and 2.) This is especially true when W you consider that CT virgins can pick up the superb original for less than a tenner, which offers Stuffing in four new cars, with all-too-similar drive physics, along with a few basic Crazy X challenges isn't good enough. But the game hasn't really moved up a gear from Crazy Taxi 2 to justify yet another purchase. Yes, the new Vegas level is splendid, and the graphics for all three stages have been overhauled with reflections, motion blur, night-time driving and simple flame effects. Where To, Buddy?īut there's something important missing from this, the third game in the series. Crazy connoisseurs will find plenty of opportunity to 'Hop' between hotels and 'Drift' across Ihe dusty canyon roads. A main strip of Vegas-like themed hotels at its centre is linked via a freeway to the miniaturised Grand Canyon and Hoover Dam. The new landscape, like its West Coast (San Fran) and Small Apple (New York) counterparts is ibrimming with detail. will have gone into designing and play-testing the single Glitter Oasis level than Basingstoke's Festival Place Shopping Centre another good example of ill-fitting polygons. This is a Sega game, where 'one new course' I means a hand-crafted and painfully detailed toy shop of fantasy architecture, soaked in prismatic lighting, with short cut and unlockable secrets at every turn. Well, pull over here and stop that meter ticking for a second, because when we say 'one new course', we're not simply talking a teeny-tiny extra level of glitchy, overlapping polygons here. The new game is identical to its predecessors, in that you pick up and drop off as many passengers as fast as possible, in standard (arcade), three, five j or ten-minute bursts.
There are four new drivers (12 in total), and 25 'Crazy X' mini-challenge stages. The third incarnation of Crazy Taxi follows the formula, packing all previous content along with one whole new course, the Las Vegas-inspired Glitter Oasis.
The second game introduced the Crazy Hop move, which catapults cabs 20ft or more into the air.
Sega's proven formula of explosive visuals married to fun periphery -steering wheel and gear lever to select Crazy moves - was designed to blow your senses for a pound, in 30-second bursts, or two minutes max if you were any good.Ī pixel-perfect arcade conversion arrived on PC via the ill-fated Dreamcast toy in 2000, followed by Crazy Taxi 2, a competent if unambitious follow-up from Sega's Hitmaker team, offering an approximation of New York along with the original San Francisco-styled level. You probably know that Crazy Taxi started out as an eardrumperforating, retina-searing arcade cabinet. Life's good when you can hop from Everquest to Microsoft Flight Sim, then back to an arcade classic at the click of a mouse, isn't it? Ker-Razy Cabinets And such is the case with Crazy Taxi 3, a game 'exclusively for Xbox' which is also mysteriously available on the most multi-faceted gaming platform in the universe.