Old Game First Impressions: Crazy Taxi (Dreamcast)

This is in a review style rather than a first impressions because by the time I'd played enough of the game to feel comfortable writing, I'd played pretty much all of what the game has to offer.

Broad first impressions: Crazy Taxi is fun, infuriating, and addictive. So it’s exactly the kind if game deserving of discussion. This is especially true when most of the quirks are products of the design, not just age-related limitations. 

The game’s biggest strength from the outset is its sense of style. Visually, everything is bright and colourful, which is a nice change from the subdued colour palette typical of modern game design. This combines with the bouncing punk soundtrack to create a cohesive high-energy atmosphere within the game. This overall style really compliments the fast and frantic gameplay, showing a depth of design elegance belied by the simple, arcade-y game mechanics.

This simplistic gameplay really shows its arcade roots. You pick up passengers, follow the floating arrow and take them to their destination within a given time. The faster you do it the more money (points) you get. That’s it. You can earn extra money for stunts like jumps, near misses, drifts etc, but these are all things you’ll be doing anyway in covering ground as quickly as possible. This simplicity is to the game's credit though, you can jump straight in and start playing immediately. No annoying tutorial or 40 real-time hours of driving lessons followed by a test before you can start having fun.  It's a pick up and play game in the best possible sense.

The game takes place in an open city, but it’s definitely a time-attack racing game at its core, you’re always on the clock so there’s no time for exploration and, honestly, no real point. The fun of the game comes from hammering through traffic to get to a destination as quickly as possible. Any time that you’re not doing that, like when trying to roll up slowly to pick up a fare, the clunkiness of the driving mechanics is suddenly thrust to the fore. 

It doesn’t feel right talking about driving mechanics in a game like this; this isn’t Forza or Gran Turismo. Still, those games however at least have hyper-realistic driving physics to aim towards. Caricatured arcade-y racers almost have a more difficult job, conceptually if not mechanically, as they have to create their own driving model that may have little basis in reality. Arcade racers like this tend to go with a model that minimises inertia and maximises the feeling of grip: cars will turn on a penny at high speed, will accelerate smoothly off the line and pull up to a stop in 20ft from 100mph. Crazy Taxi doesn’t go with this. The cars manage to feel very light and very heavy at the same time. Light, in that your car has no feeling of impact, hitting traffic cars will see you bouncing around like a pinball, with very little movement out of the other vehicle. Heavy, in that the car bogs down when you accelerate from a standstill as if it was made of solid lead. Steering is also weirdly vague; it’s almost as if speed makes no difference to the ability to corner. You can turn more than you would expect once underway, but when trying to (again) slowly manoeuvre the car to pick up a fare the car feels like it has the turning circle of an ocean liner.  

The odd steering, especially at low speeds, is compounded by the braking, or lack thereof. In the usual high speed traffic splitting of the game, the brakes are barely used so their weakness doesn’t really make any difference. However, once again it’s the fare mechanic that highlights the problem. To deposit a passenger you must stop in a marked area. Given the time attack mechanic, you’re usually approaching the box at a fair old lick; this then often leads to trying to press the button down harder to stop quicker as you fail to slow down. Often you just have to resort to using a nearby wall as an emergency brake.

The thing is, despite these issues, you just keep coming back to it. You can play for a set time, or arcade, where you gain extra seconds for each successful fare. It's a great game to put on for a 10 minute blast. You just have to be careful not to get too into it. The compulsion to try to beat your last score can be hard to resist turning a 10 minute blast into an hour long marathon.

Having said that, the other side to this is that the game can get very frustrating when being punted around by traffic messes a good run. That anguished mix of a need to keep playing and desire just to rage quit for being 'cheated' out of a good score. Still, the frustration is never a product of a broken game, just one that is surprisingly unforgiving of a lack of forward planning. Once you adjust to the game's quirks, being aware that you need to factor in a long braking distance or that you need to watch the traffic more than the direction arrow, the problems become much more bearable.They're still there, but the game is great fun in spite of them.

A special mention has to be made for the soundtrack which seems to be quite divisive. There's no question that it fits the tone of the game, but it's going to grate on people who don't like nineties Californian Punk (Bad Religion and The Offspring provide all the songs). On a personal note, as a fan of the genre I have the opposite problem: the songs get cut off before they're done. Damnit I want to listen to Ten in 2010! Still, even though there's a very limited number of songs, which is fairly annoying, nothing compliments the look and the gameplay of Crazy Taxi better than high energy punk.

Additionally, another potential point of irritation is the in-game advertising. There's no getting away from it, especially when you're route goes from KFC to The Original Levi's Store. How much of an issue it is is completely personal preference. The game has no obnoxious ads, just brand named waypoints which, personally, started out as a little amusing and then were just started being ignored.

Crazy Taxi on the Dreamcast is a really conflicting title, especially for one so simple. It can be controller snappingly irritating at times, yet overall it's fun, frantic and compelling. For all of these complications, it's a good game. Equally frustrating and addictive for the self-competing soul, everyone should play it at least once. That way, gaming would be truly universal: everyone would keep coming back. 

Old Game First Impressions: Goldeneye 64 (Single Player)

Goldeneye is a game fondly remembered by a generation of players for its frantic 4 way split screen multiplayer, replete with strategic ghosting (being a screenwatching little turd) and the rush to choose, or embargo on, Oddjob for being the ultimate in cheap. For this reason I'm going to cover the multiplayer component separately to the much less nostalgia-hyped single player campaign. Well that, and the fact I don't have multiple controllers yet so can't test it out. 

Gaze into the face of fear!

Coming to Goldeneye from a modern perspective, one thing is immediately obvious: it looks like shite. The character models are pretty basic, bearing about as much resemblance to actual humans as the stick figures in an exercise book margin do. Added to this are dodgy animations, though the pointless sidewards roll being rocked by most of the disposable flunkies  is a sight to behold. To round out the visuals, are the hallmarks of this era of 3D games: muddy textures and a draw distance that, though familiar to myopics such as myself, can make it difficult to deal with enemies that are lost in the very fog used to "hide" the draw distance issues, for  particular reference see the Severnaya surface missions.

The most amazing thing about the truly horrifying graphics (again, this is by modern standards) is that after 10 minutes I'd stopped caring. After another 20 it was only in the really open areas, (Severnaya I'm looking at you... again), that I was even noticing, and that was only because of the draw distance/fog allowing guys to shoot me before I could see them. The only crime that Goldeneye 64 really commits graphically is being a product of its time. Whilst, in my opinion, 16 bit sprite graphics are fairly timeless, and cel shaded 3D (Wind Waker, Jet Set Radio, Borderlands...ish) holds up long after contemporary "realistic" 3D looks dated, early the polygonal graphics of the Playstation and N64 generation have aged the worst of any mainstream graphical style. The ambitions of the designers very much outstripped the capabilities of the hardware, leading to the aforementioned low quality textures, iffy models and persistent fog over every outdoor area. Still, the graphics aren't so bad as to hinder enjoyment, and there is genuine fun to be had, not as a nostalgia trip (I didn't have an N64 growing up, and never played singleplayer at friend's houses) but as a real solid gaming experience.

Mmmm, muddy.

Speaking of the gameplay, one thing that immediately shocked me was how well suited to the console controls this game was. Until I played Halo 3 on XBox 360, I had never come across a first person shooter that really worked well on a controller. Timesplitters 2 on PS2 was fun for instance, but I never got on with the controls, same with Metroid Prime on the Gamecube. In the case of the latter, I really tried hard to get enjoy it out of respect for the series but never could get past the limitation of the controls. Well, after playing Goldeneye, its clear that I should have been looking backwards to the N64 for an FPS experience that worked properly on a console. Rare seem to have truly looked at the strengths and weaknesses of the input method and have tailored the game to it rather than attempting to cram a PC-like shooter experience onto a pad. This is best achieved through the implementation of a reasonably high amount of autoaim, overcoming the issue of the difficulty of fine aim with a controller, especially the N64 controller, as opposed to a mouse. Manual aim is possible, and needed for certain set pieces such as shooting locks, but it only serves to highlight how right Rare were in making the decision of marginalising manual aim as a game mechanic. Seeing as shooting is a big part of any first person shooter, getting this key mechanic right goes a great distance toward creating a spectacular feeling game experience.

Sadly, its not all great. Interior levels may overcome the fog issue (that's your drinking game kids!) but they can have a tendency toward being labyrinthine and this leads to walking around in circles looking for the illusive door, key, or item that will allow you to progress. Objectives too can be rather obtuse, but this is often as rewarding as it is confusing, as you have to think about what you are doing and make a decision on what the game is asking. An example that stands out is an objective to sever a bunker's communication links. If you merely interact with the communications array, then you will activate it and fail the objective, something that is counter-intuitive both to modern by-the-numbers shooter objectives and even to interaction based objectives in the game up to that point. However, if you think about it, the instructions were clear, "sever" the link; not activate or play with it. Instead, what you do is fill the communications unit full of lead. Still, it was annoying to fail the objective the first time around. In spite of these minor gripes, the gameplay is solid with the good really outweighing the niggling details.

The sound design deserves special mention, particularly the music, which is pretty good for what seem to be 90 second loops (which would not be surprising given the storage limitations of the N64 Carts). The music works well in generating an appropriate atmosphere and manages to be unobtrusive without being boring and repetitive without being annoying, both difficult tricks of pull off. 

The sound effects in the game are, unfortunately, a little weaker, whilst the western-esque ricochet noises are a nice touch, the guns themselves can "feel" a little  anemic thanks to sounding just a little light. Not quite as bad as the Aliens pulse rifle (oh yeah, I went there) but still, sound is a big part in giving an in game gun a feeling of impact, and in Goldeneye's case this seems to be lacking. 

So, overall impressions (based upon about 4-5 hours of play for reference) are really quite good. The game is slick, controls well, and is a tight, cohesive package. Of course it isn't perfect, but many of my gripes with it are indicative of games of the period, and as much as people love to moan on the internet, there have been advances in game design since 1997. Nevertheless, I will be playing Goldeneye to completion because it isn't just a milestone in FPS history, it's also a damn good game.