YANOGA REVIEW

FINAL:

62 / 100

LET'S GO GET SOME CRAYZAY MONEY

Crazy Taxi

A Priceless Antique

About This Game

Storyline

Gameplay Mechanics

• E: Accelerate.
• Q: Brake.
• W: Horn.
• A: Confirm Destination.
• S: Reverse Gear.
• D: Drive Gear.
• Arrow Keys: Steering.

• The money you earn has no actual value. They just act as your run’s score. You can’t buy anything with it.
• You can play as one of the four available characters. Each of them has different voice lines & taxis. Apart from the visual and aural differences, they don’t affect the gameplay in any way.
• You can register up to 4 Names. These names are similar to save profiles. In this game, the only things you can save are the scores & records from your Crazy Box gameplays. This is useful if more than one person plays the game on the same computer.
• The game allows you to change the starting time for the arcade mode, the difficulty of the traffic & the time difficulty in the game’s settings. You are free to make the game as easy or as hard as you want! This is an interesting feature as it’s different from the difficulty modes approach modern games take.

Visuals & Audio

Pros

• Simple yet crazy gameplay.
• A very nostalgic game.
• High replayability rate.
• The game is pretty challenging if you choose the right difficulty settings.
• Pretty customizable difficulty settings.
• Crazy soundtracks!

Cons

• Outdated graphics.
• Awkward KBM controls.
• You can’t rebind the default keybinds.
• The voice acting is a bit too cringe.

Conclusion

Crazy Taxi is a mediocre port of a great game. If you can put up with it's flaws it's still worth playing.

• The analog controls don't work properly without a fan patch. But even then they are still extremely sensitive. Far more than the OG Dreamcast version. So on the one hand it can be a lot harder to control than that version, but also feel more responsive.Analog control is a must though. Without it, some of the harder things are too hard to pull off.
• Even with the analog controls renabled, the throttle still doesn't feel right. Making boosts almost impossible to pull off with the right timing. Set the throttle to R1/RB instead and it's far easier.
• All UI assets are stretched in 16:9. (Not really all that noticeable tbh or bothersome)
4:3 support is still there, so you can play in a 4:3 resolution and not get stretched assets if you like.
• Game is extremely sensitive to programs running in the background. Even on a modern PC. I have to make sure almost nothing is running in the background or there is a lot of performance drops and stuttering. (CPU related)
• You need to limit the framerate externally as the built in 60FPS cap is extremely poor, resulting in frame pacing all over the map.
• Draw distances are actually improved over the DC version. Which is nice.
• The big killer is that the game suffers from some kind of bug in the limiter or in the animation code that causes skipped frames frequently. You can bet getting a flat perfect 60FPS with no drops and still get visible stutters due to this. I tried every combination under the sun but no matter what it seems to happen. Easiest way to see it is start Arcade mode, but don't move just watch the cars drive by. You'll notice the rotating icons above passengers rotate smoothly without stutter. But watch the cars pass by instead. Eventually you will start to see some if not all skip frames here and there. Causing the motion of the car to jump forward by 2 frames instead of 1. I was able to capture footage of the game with a frame counter and observe this.
Here are still images of 5 sequential frames (Notice the frame counter up top?) http://u.cubeupload.com/MrBonk/frame926.png http://u.cubeupload.com/MrBonk/frame927.png http://u.cubeupload.com/MrBonk/frame928.png http://u.cubeupload.com/MrBonk/frame929.png http://u.cubeupload.com/MrBonk/frame930noticelargej.png Notice how on frame 930 the car on the left jumps forward as if it should by frame 931. Another way to see this is is in Crazy box 1-1. Jump the car off the ramp and notice how the camera movement will be jerky and stutter every few seconds as it flies off to hit the ground. The same thing is happening, the camera is skipping a single frame and moving by 2 frames instead. It doesn't always happen consistently, but you can notice it from time to time pretty easily. I was able to confirm that neither of these things happen in the original Dreamcast version. The animation and camera are smooth without skipping frames.
• The audio quality is lower than other versions of the game and voices are always almost inaudbile with no way to adjust it.
And if you care about it, of course the original soundtrack isn't here. The new songs are honestly not bad at all. And I like quite a few of them. You can find mods to change this if you want.
• The built in Anti Aliasing is inadequate , you can force all forms of AA with an Nvidia card and the flag [0x000000C1] https://www.screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/5643

9/10