Weekend Rant is a non-regularly occurring weekend mini-editorial. In layman’s terms that basically means that if a staff member has something they want to rant about they can do so on any given weekend.
If you’re a regular follower of the site and listener of our podcast you know I’m the racing/car guy of the bunch. That being said it probably comes as no surprise that Crazy Taxi was a day one purchase for me. But after getting back into the game I picked up Crazy Taxi 3 for my original Xbox. Now I’m annoyed. Crazy Taxi 3 featured almost everything from the original game, content from Crazy Taxi 2 plus a new city and drivers. Why didn’t they port this instead of the original? The obvious answer is that Crazy Taxi is the game that people remember, but here’s a quick bullet list rundown of why CT3 would have been better:
- Locales: CT3 had three cities, including one from the original game, one from CT2, and one completely new city. All that was missing was the alternate city from Crazy Taxi 1. It’s all the same game engine, so adding that extra city would have been simple.
- Drivers: There are four unique drivers for each location. That’s 12 total. If they made a few tweaks that could mean 12 drivers in all the locations.
- Multiple pickups: Crazy Taxi 2 introduced the ability to pick up multiple passengers. Both it and CT3 went back and added these multi-pickup locations in each locale.
- Better effects and UI: While the engine is basically the same across all three games Crazy Taxi 3 had the best layout for the user interface and had the cool flame burnouts and drifts. Don’t like it? They could have added a Classic option that turns these changes (and the multiple pickups) off.
- Could have demanded a higher price: That sounds counter intuitive, doesn’t it? Here’s the kicker–if they had put a 1200 MSP package together with all this content it could have easily made the sales to have included the one huge complaint people have: the missing original soundtrack. The value would have increased potential sales, meaning they could have contracted with The Offspring and others to bring the original tunes back to the game.
I love Crazy Taxi, but as a writer and avid video game modder I often get the opportunity to see what a game could have been with a bit more effort. Crazy Taxi Arcade (as I would title it) could have been the definitive version that covered anything and everything a fan could want. Oh well, guess I should be happy with what I have, right?
