For all the excitement from fans over Sega resurrecting Dreamcast games in HD, the results so far have been questionable. I was skeptical after seeing Sonic Adventure, a buggy game (complete with bloated, ugly textures and comparatively rudimentary modeling) that even in its debut iteration became heartrendingly worse as you went on. Now with the release of Crazy Taxi I think it may be time to re-evaluate Sega’s plans to cash in on our early-’00s nostalgia. At least Sonic had his name to fall back on, and Sonic Adventure had some decent moments…at least when the camera wasn’t running you into a proverbial (or literal) wall. Crazy Taxi’s singular design has a more limited appeal, as would be expected for any arcade port.
Simply put, by today’s gameplay standards Crazy Taxi is a mess. The controls are sloppy and often unresponsive, the physics are wonky (even for the arcade), and the once-novel concept of weaving through traffic like a drunk driver to get passengers to their destination as fast as possible has long since gone through its own process of natural selection: the staid mechanic has been duplicated and imitated in countless other games, and now it’s hardly used at all. That’s not to say you can’t still have a little bit of fun with Crazy Taxi, but just try to quickly leave a grassy area from a dead stop or quickly move away from a stationary obstacle and see how long you’ll want to continue playing. Given how far arcade-style design has advanced in the past decade, problems like these, not to mention the simplistic gameplay in general, automatically relegate Crazy Taxi’s status to little more than a throwaway novelty.
