Played Crazy Taxi again. The original map, as usual, not the circular arcade map, which is far harder, has more choke points.
2021, Steam:
Today, Dreamcast emulation:
Played in 4:3. It's fine. You see everything you need to. I like how the creators worked around the absence of a second analog stick by circling the cab with the camera when the driver drops off the passenger, allowing them to see other customers that might be around. Your right thumb is way too busy putting the car in reverse and drive (for various tricks) for a camera anyway. Even for a while after the second analog became common, developers understood the problem and worked around it. Now almost every game has you working both sticks so much that those actions that were once activated with your thumbs are now activated with your index fingers. For what? Two buttons instead of four, and one of them (the trigger) depresses too much to replace what the face buttons used to do. Great.
Bored of the same map. I've known the two maps for 24 years or so (though there was a very long period between the loss of the Dreamcast and my playing the game on a computer). Would have been such an easy series to franchise, had Sega only not been morons with 2 and 3. Sequels should have other punk rock songs from the 1980s and '90s, not the same ones. Crazy Hop was lame, made the cars wobble up and down all the time and let you get up to places that should have been accessible only with ramps. Made it easier to avoid crashes. Sega must have looked at how much players were crashing and wanted to give them an easy button. There was a nice balance to the original: use boost and lose some control or drive slower and steer carefully between traffic for extra money. Fairs with multiple customers complicated the formula, like the police cars in the new game definitely will.
Can't imagine why arcade wouldn't sell anymore. That's what I keep hearing. Not like lack of quarter deposits prevented these games from being released on like ten systems. If you want rankings, just make that online and tie a replay to every score (The first game already remembered your highlights during the credits. Replay would take up very little space because it would remember where the characters and objects were and then render them again, just like a racing game replay.) so that other players can make sure the person didn't cheat.
Add good physics, three maps to start, then make more content over time.
Making the new game some massive multiplayer always online thing spells failure. That market is already dominated by a few shooters that players won't want to leave for taxis. The most that I might have added is a versus mode in which no more than two players compete for customers. But even that might have been too chaotic.
Maps shouldn't be massive. I ignore the arrow a lot of the time because I know better how to get to the destinations. I won't remember destinations if the map is massive.
