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Xbox Crazy Taxi: High Roller Developer: Hitmaker | Publisher: Sega
Rating: BEveryoneMechDeus
Type: Action Players: 1
Difficulty: Intermediate Released: 7-23-02

The third installment of Sega’s insane taxi series has arrived, and, for better or worse, is more of the same with almost nothing new to gameplay. A new city has been brought in as well as four new drivers, and Crazy Taxi 3 also serves as the best game in the series for newcomers as well. Whereas the previous two CT games were a single city each (CT2 had a smaller version as well), this one brings both of those cities into the mix as well as the new one, basically giving you all three games in one package. Luckily, this slides right into giving you all the old music as well as new songs, so it also sports the biggest soundtrack of the series yet.

The new characters are about as generic as the older ones are; they’re just placeholders that don’t really do anything. The cars, however, sport a lot of style and look rather cool (and “TRICKED OUT,” going by Hitmakers expressive love of that word). Venus’ modified pickup truck looks very odd next to the predominantly low-rider and classic cars, seeing as how it is twice the height of the others, but it does not seem to affect the driving too much. A staple that seems to persist throughout the series is the lack of any real control difference between the cars. The changes are there, each car excels at something different, but it still seems very slight and doesn’t actually affect the gameplay very much. However, one of the unlockables is the return of the odd extra vehicles, like the bicycle and baby carriage, along with a brand new funky one. These control much differently, offering a faster way to play but offset by looser controls.

By and large, the controls and gameplay remain exactly the same. You quickly shift through gears to get speed boosts and to perform hairpin turns at any time, and you have various special tricks that can be formed while jumping. Among those the most useful is coming to a dead stop in mid-air, great for perfect placement into a destination. The controls respond quickly and beautifully, but the continuous switching back and forth can really wear on your fingers. After playing a few games, your left thumb will probably hate you for rolling up and down the pad across the buttons for however long you manage to last. Of course, without perfecting the skills of movement that won’t be very long, and here is offered yet another collection of mini-games which are both a great distraction from the regular game and help you to really learn how to get things done.

This time we have the Crazy X, composed of 25 funky courses with odd goals. You’ll encounter weird objectives like hitting a giant baseball with your car to try and score a homerun to dodging cars on a football field in an attempt for a touchdown. The more obvious skill teachers are in here as well, learning to slide back and forth across platforms, dropping off a set number of customers within a specific timeframe, and so on. These mini-games aren’t just for fun and learning, as completing them also unlocks the game’s extras.

Unfortunately, even all this can not hide that the new city is not terribly great. Glitter Oasis is our new addition, composed of Las Vegas and some huge canyons, it presents both some of the series best and worst in terms of graphics. First off, Hitmaker has added all sorts of effects to the game, and to all the cities, not just Glitter Oasis. They now sport more lighting effects and filters for the water and lights to give them a more realistic blur. It works in that the game looks much better, but it also creates huge amounts of slowdown at times, though it’s pretty much regulated to just Oasis. Within our new area, in the city itself, popup is much more prominent then it was in either of the first two cities, and there are so many filters being tossed around that slowdown often drops the game almost to a crawl. Outside of the city, the framerate and draw distance is perfectly fine, as it is in Small Apple and West Coast. There are occasionally touches of slowdown in Small Apple, but these are brief and probably won’t be noticed by many.

This is such a huge disappointment because the game is not that graphically impressive in the first place. Unlike something like SkyGunner, which has slowdown but is insanely beautiful to begin with, CT3 seems to still be running off the same engine the first two games did, but with minor additions. All the insane clipping and low-polygon count models look just like they did when Crazy Taxi came out on Dreamcast a few years ago, and that includes the new city. I suspect it was to allow them to add the older games in faster or maybe even just so that the graphics would all flow together, but it is extremely disappointing on the Xbox or for any of the current-gen systems. With this game looking the way it does, the amount of slowdown that occurs is inexcusable; we all know what this system is capable of, which is far more then this.

Going hand-in-hand with the graphical problems is the city layout. The original Crazy Taxi had a great layout which flowed well, was easy to memorize, and had shortcuts that made sense. In the second game, the layout was pretty terrible, it was insanely hard to memorize, and the shortcuts were often in very odd, hard-to-find locations. Unfortunately, Glitter Oasis borrows more from New York then it does from West Coast, but is still fun to play, mostly due to the canyon drop-offs and the city itself. Overall, it’s too jumbled together with odd streets to raise it to the level of the original, but Hitmaker is getting closer then they were with New York.

The additions of the older cities is definitely a good thing, giving you a complete package of all three games, with all the drivers and allowing you to pick from any of the music sets for each city, or simply have all the music play. Oddly, I encountered a couple of problems every once in a while when I had the music set to “Shuffle,” and it would stop after a track and not play any more music, or one time when the music began skipping madly. I did not encounter this at all when playing with the regular setup, so I can only guess it’s a small problem that’s fairly rare. The music selection from before includes Bad Religion, Offspring, and Methods of Mayhem which I feel fits the game perfectly, despite not normally liking any of these. New groups and songs have been added for Glitter Oasis, bringing us Silver Bullit and Brian Setzer ’68 Comeback Special. Seemingly odd at first and not fitting in with the previous music, they grew on me fairly quickly and I have come to love them even more than the older stuff. If only there were the ability to use the Xbox custom soundtrack it would have been perfect. Driving/racing games are the best games to allow custom soundtracks.

The Small Apple seems almost completely untouched, aside from the ability to now drive it at night. This adds in the lighting filters which in turn add to the small amounts of slowdown that occasionally pop up in this city, but it is primarily what came before, which isn’t too great. However, the original West Coast has been included with tons of extra stuff especially noticeable to those of us who played it to death in the original. They have now added in the jump and multiple passenger pickup which by themselves would change the way it plays, but Hitmaker went the extra mile to add in new drop-off locations and new shortcuts around the buildings that can only be accessed by jumping. This alone makes the game worth it to me; the West Coast is primarily what draws me back time and time again and learning all the new paths is more fun then Glitter Oasis.

Bottom Line: If you have grown sick of Crazy Taxi or didn’t care for it in the first place, this game will do nothing at all to sway you. However, if you loved the first and maybe even second one and simply can’t get enough, this game will add plenty to tide you over for quite some time. Based on the age-old arcade style of always improving your score, there’s no way to “beat” the game and so there is always a challenge awaiting you: yourself.

· · · MechDeus


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Rating: BMechDeus
Graphics: 5 Sound: 8
Gameplay: 9 Replay: 9
  © 2002 The Next Level