Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller

When I spoke with Rich Briggs (senior product manager for Crazy Taxi 3) a few weeks ago, he said that the old West Coast course would have some new shortcuts.  What an understatement!  Shortcuts are generally well-hidden and very short.  But the new areas in Crazy Taxi 3 are much more than that.  The freeway has been greatly expanded, featuring a couple of new passages, including an incomplete road that you must jump across to pass (similar to the awesome freeway jump scene in the movie Speed).  If the freeway isn't your cup of tea, you can now jump off of it and explore a small area below.  Along the way you'll find yet another new addition -- an amusement park!  These are just the new additions in that part of town.  In the busier parts of the city, you'll find more customers, expanded roads, additional buildings, etc.  It's like a special edition, or even a director's cut of Crazy Taxi.  It was great (and close to perfection) before, but now Sega has made it even better.

I haven't played Crazy Taxi 2 very much, so I don't know what's old and what's new in the Small Apple course, but I love it just the same.  One thing that I am certain is new is the time of day the game takes place: night.  This minor, but cool change adds a ton of bright, blinding headlights, nice blur effects and other tiny graphical additions.

The new course, Glitter Oasis, is huge.  Not huge like Crazy Taxi 1, huge like Grand Theft Auto 3!  Well, maybe not quite that large, but you get the point.  There is so much to see and do that you could spend several weeks, maybe even several months exploring Glitter Oasis and not find everything.  The roads are big and very wide-open, complete with several lanes of traffic going both ways.  Upon exiting the busy, neon light-filled parts of the city, you'll find several mountainous areas to explore.  If you jump off a cliff at just the right speed, you can land on top of a light tower (which has three customers impatiently awaiting your arrival).  There are several "hidden" customers like this, some of which are pretty easy to find (check the lake), while others have been placed in areas that aren't so obvious.  I don't want to give away too many of the surprises, so just take my word for it and play the game yourself.

The Crazy X (previously referred to as Crazy Box) games are both old and new.  The old ones aren't entirely old though; they've been reworked to increase the amount of hair that you pull out of your head before conquering them.  Crazy Bowling is a blast, but if I hadn't gotten lucky and finally succeeded on that one fateful night, I'd still be sitting in front of my TV playing the game right now!  It was after midnight when I started playing, and after seven AM when I went to bed!  I wasn't playing Crazy Bowling the whole time, but that is ultimately the mini-game that kept me playing the longest that particular night.  Two days later, it was Crazy Hopper and Crazy Zig Zag, both of which require extremely fast and efficient driving with little to zero mistakes.  Both of them have a time limit under sixty seconds, but it could take you sixty minutes or more to complete them!  Crazy Bowling is the exact same mini-game from CT1, except that now there are several platforms involved.  Believe it or not, this does make it harder. 

Crazy Taxi 3's controls are better than ever.  The button layout is exactly the same as in the Dreamcast versions, but some of the moves have been altered, and the steering has been slightly improved.  The Crazy Back Dash move (the same as the Crazy Dash, which gives you a quick burst of speed, only this one is in reverse) is easier to perform thanks to the simplified execution technique.  In the Dreamcast version of Crazy Taxi, you had to quickly press Drive, Gas and Reverse.  It sounds easy, but it wasn't.  Now all you have to do is press Gas and Reverse simultaneously to perform a Crazy Back Dash.  The Crazy Hop feels more natural, too.

Graphically, Crazy Taxi 3 is both good and bad.  Glitter Oasis looks beautiful.  The cars are more detailed; the lighting is terrific; the special effects are good and the backgrounds look realistic.  But it's only a few steps up from the first Crazy Taxi.  Sega chose not use an entirely new engine to develop this game, which allowed the developers to work fast and release the game sooner.  They did rework the engine of the first game though, and they greatly enhanced it for the brand-new course, Glitter Oasis.  I'm not disappointed by the game's visuals, but when I look at some of the other Xbox games released earlier this year, I wish that CT3 was just as gorgeous.

I recommend Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller to every gamer except for those who didn't like the first game.  That's not to say that CT3 couldn't make you a fan, but if you're not a fan already, you probably never will be.  Sad but true, not every gamer can appreciate Crazy Taxi's greatness.  I know that there are quite a few gamers out there who have never played Crazy Taxi before, but believe me, this is not a game that deserves skepticism.  If my review hasn't convinced you to buy it, then rent it.  I remember the first time I heard about Crazy Taxi.  I wasn't sure what to think of it, but once I started playing, I couldn't stop.  Chances are you'll feel the same way.

Still not convinced?  Man, you sure are a hard sell!  Then read this: I have never met anyone who didn't like Crazy Taxi.  Everyone I know who's played it -- casual gamers, hardcore gamers and even female gamers -- love it.  People used to flock to the first game at arcades, and it really helped boost Dreamcast's sales before and after it was released.  Crazy Taxi was one of the main reasons why I got that console.  Very few games have as much replay value as the Crazy Taxi series.  If you own an Xbox, do yourself a favor and play this game.  It's worth every single dollar you'll spend to buy it. 

Gameplay: 9
Now here is a great example of a sequel that gives us exactly what we want: more of everything!  The first Crazy Taxi was amazing, and the bonus course was pretty cool, but I always wanted more.  Crazy Taxi 3 gives you both courses from the first two games, as well as a brand-new Las Vegas-style course called Glitter Oasis.  I wish it had all of the Crazy X [Box] games, but other than an online multiplayer mode (which I'm almost certain will be featured in Crazy Taxi 4), there is nothing more that this game truly needs.

Graphics: 7
CT3 looks nice and all, but why in the world is there slowdown in Glitter Oasis?  Slowdown would be justifiable in the first two courses, given the fact that they were originally developed using fairly weak hardware.  But Glitter Oasis was developed on Xbox from the ground up.

Sound: 6
Crazy Taxi 3 includes music from The Offspring, Bad Religion, Methods of Mayhem, Citizen Bird and the Brian Setzer '68 Comeback Special.  If you said "cool" when I listed the first two artists, and then began scratching your head when I listed the others, you're not alone.  The Offspring is a decent band, and Bad Religion is okay, but most, if not all of their songs from CT3 were featured in the first two games.  I didn't mind hearing them a thousand times before, but now it's getting old.  The other music stinks.  If they wanted to use Big Band-style music, they could have gone with the slightly more modern Cherry Poppin' Daddies.  Really though, the only way to satisfy everyone's musical tastes is to include a soundtrack creation feature.  Most Xbox driving/racing games have it, but this one does not.

Difficulty: Medium
The Crazy X games will drive you insane!  But the rest of the game is only as challenging as you want it to be.  You can increase/decrease the amount of time you start out with, the amount of traffic, etc., via the options menu.  Even on its low default setting, CT3 is a challenging game.

Concept: 8 
Trilogies, collections and other game "packages" have been released for years.  They hardly have any new content though, and if they do, it's not very satisfying.  That's where Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller is different.  It includes the West Coast and Small Apple levels, but the third level -- Glitter Oasis -- is completely different.

Overall: 8.7
Rarely do developers give you so much so early into a game's career.  The Crazy Taxi series is still pretty young (it was born in 1999), yet we already have a nice collection of three hits crammed into one game.  This isn't just a rehash of old goods though.  Crazy Taxi 3 is a full-fledged sequel that just happens to feature most of the goodies from the first two games.  I never had the chance to buy Crazy Taxi 2, so for me, this was a chance to play two new games at once.