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    Crazy Taxi

    Game » consists of 14 releases. Released 1999

    A high-octane taxicab driving game for arcades. Instead of racing other opponents, the cabbies must race the clock and dodge traffic to deliver their patrons to their destinations as fast as they can.

    arbayer2's Crazy Taxi (PC) review

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    arbayer2 Reviews: Crazy Taxi (PC)

    Crazy Taxi is a timeless classic. Its novel use of fare- and stunt-based challenges in what was otherwise basically a technical showcase of a racing game for the Dreamcast inspired numerous knockoffs and created a franchise that spanned a multitude of platforms. It's become a landmark standard of arcade quality for Sega and has, since its introduction, become a mascot franchise for Sega, along with numerous others including the Sonic franchise.

    This port does not do it justice.

    There doesn't seem to be much general consensus about this port of Crazy Taxi to Steam that I can ascertain, so I mainly have only the reviews and the small number of discussion forums on the game for reference. I've seen complaints ranging from outdated/strange screen resolution options to terrible framerate issues to the outright replacement of the original soundtrack and real-world in-game locations with generic substitutes. A lack of analog support seemed commonly reported on, although it seems the latest patch from Sega about a year ago fixed this.

    To be fair, I've also seen a lot of positive reviews about this version of the game! I'm personally a gaming history buff as well as a bit of a Sega fan, so this really put a lot of pressure on me to play the game and see for myself.

    As for my personal experience?

    The framerate is god-awful. I'm talking, on average, 3-5 FPS at 1080p60 in Arcade Mode, maybe 10 in Crazy Box 1-1. It's absolutely unplayable. Since I'm using a hand-built gaming PC which uses a GTX660Ti as its main GPU, this should objectively not be happening and is evidence of terrible optimization on the PC version, or maybe compatibility issues that aren't apparent. Changing resolutions does not matter; the lowest resolution available, 480p, still runs at virtually the same framerate.

    Of course, strangely enough, I also read reviews in which people can play it at 60fps, so I'm still going to say that given how subjective performance must be with this port, that it is not optimized to the level necessary to be playable on a wide range of hardware. I know the game's a decade-and-a-half old, but seriously. It's a PC port. Optimization is one of the most substantial and important parts of PC porting. The fact that I can run Crysis at a higher framerate than a game which probably doesn't have pixel shaders should raise alarm bells.

    Aside from that, the replaced music is... alright, I guess, considering I've only heard the same song over and over again and have to quit due to poor performance before it ends. It still isn't The Offspring, though. I haven't traveled far enough in the map to be able to reach Pizza Hut's former location, so I cannot confirm or deny the removal of real-world locations, but given how old the game is I'm sure licensing issues probably convinced Sega to do this. Same thing happened to Rockstar with the PC version of GTA: San Andreas recently with THEIR soundtrack.

    The analog support many hoped for does exist in the version I'm playing as of today, but without a decent framerate it's pretty difficult to get down a sense for how it feels.

    Overall, I'd not recommend this port to you. As awesome as it'd be to have Crazy Taxi alongside all the other Sega ports in the Dreamcast Collection on Steam, I can say with confidence that this is the least playable Sega game I've ever played on Steam. Do yourself a favor and buy either the original Dreamcast classic (with the Dreamcast in tow -- seriously, it's worth the cost and effort) or one of the many console ports out there.

    NOTE: This review subject to change depending on whether or not I can actually get Crazy Taxi on Steam running at more than 15fps consistently. Somehow I doubt this will happen any time soon if a GTX660Ti can't handle it at 640x480.

    Originally written April 1, 2015 on Steam, edited for repost

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