A smooth, crazy, next-generation ride. (Crazy Taxi (DC))

Member Name: johnpaul

Product:	Crazy Taxi (DC)
Date:	18/07/00 (10 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great, super smooth graphics and gameplay.

Disadvantages: Dodgy American 'rock' soundtrack.

Sega's coin-op conversion to Dreamcast is arcade perfect, as expected being orignally based on Naomi.

Taking control of one of four taxi-drivers, you shoot across a huge city, ferrying a variety of customers to their destinations, designated by a large green arrow above your classic, banana-yellow taxi.

This has to be the brightest, sunniest, most immediately playable game I've ever come across. The sheer speed and detail of the city is breathtaking, a real next generation driving title.
The more you play it, and as you master the special techniques like crazy drift (powerslide) and Crazy boost, the whole game get's to dizzying heights of speed. There are other play modes on offer, but nothing can beat the appeal of the Arcade mode, where you can ALWAYS try and make more money. Play this with a friend and you'll be trying to beat each other for weeks.

The size of the city (as well as a new city specially created for Dreamcast) is so impressive, you'll be seeing new parts of it for quite a while, and offer varied locations, like parks, car parks, grassy hills, a freeway with huge trucks bearing down on you, trains, tunnels, and a downtown, city area. The frame rate rarely drops below a super-smooth 60fps.

Pedestrians scatter as you mount kerbs, take to the air over steep, San Francisco style streets, and crash into trams and cars.

There is one, glaring problem though, and that's the Soundtrack. Provided by the likes of 'Offspring' it's a revolting mix of the worst sort of American creaky 'rock'. To me it's a shame that Sega couldn't have used different music for each driver, with the radio tuning through stations in a 'Grand Theft Auto' manner. Still, you can turn the music volume down in the options menu, and you most probably will.

Don't believe what you hear about this game only lasting a couple of days, I've been playing it for weeks, and
as I said before, you find yourself repeatedly coming back to try and better your score, and there's always more fares out there on the sunny, Crazy Taxi streets.

Summary: