Game #856: Crazy Taxi - Fare Wars

  As crazy as the PSP allowed.

 Y'know what the PSP was missing? Crazy Taxi! With Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars Sega brought the first two games into the tiniest handheld. This is interesting, because this is pretty much the only port of Crazy Taxi 2 outside the Dreamcast original.

 Both games are pretty... humble as far as the graphics go. I wasn't expecting it too look as sharp as the Arcade original, but the visual downgrade does take a bit away from the overall experience. Sometimes, rarely to be honest,  you can even see environment ahead of you pop into existence as you drive forward.

 The game includes a few extra challenges for both games, completing these will nab you a few goodies, such as playing as Crazy Taxi 1's drivers in Crazy Taxi 2's maps.

 The music playlist feels a bit scarce. There might be 10 tracks top divided between both games, and while the music tracks are good, it does get a bit repetitive after a while. CT2 has a song that starts with a lot of silence which isn't a good fit, since you'll be driving with no music for a few seconds. To compensate for this and some of the missing songs(No Offspring!) there's a custom OST feature you can use, which is admittedly a pretty neat addition.

 As much as I enjoy Arcade games in general and Crazy Taxi, these games have an extremely basic gameplay loop: Get a passenger, get them to their destination as fast as possible before the time limit expires. The only difference between both games is that in CT 2 you can jump at will and you can get passenger crowds of up to four people. This means that if you swap games after you get burned out from one of them... boy, do I have bad news for you...

 All four maps are very samey. They have unique locations and what not, but if you told someone that all four maps were identical you could probably get away with it for a while. I think this might have a lot to do with how the visual downgrade makes everything feel more uniform. Kinda like the Metro 2033 collection I played earlier this year, since they remade the first Metro using the engine from the second one it wound up feeling like two parts of the same whole, same deal here.

 Crazy Taxi doesn't have the most long lasting appeal ever, but the game is fun to revisit in bursts, y'know? If you pick it up every now and then for a few sessions then you'll probably have a lot fun every time, however, it's not a game built to be played for hours on end because the premise just can't cut it.

6.5