| | | CT3 seems like a pretty good bargain for those in love with driving at ridiculous speeds around city courses, smashing into things right and left while backseat drivers yell at you. And I count myself one of those people.
High Roller contains the drivers and the main cities from Crazy Taxi 1 (see entry 764) and Crazy Taxi 2, plus a new Las Vegasish city, and a "Crazy X" minigame challenge mode similar to CT1's "Crazy Box" and CT2's "Crazy Pyramid"; in fact some of the minigames in Crazy X are semi-recycled from the earlier games. For instance, X has a bowling one like Box, but in X they added in the Crazy Jump, so you have to hop up a ledge right before knocking down the pins. Not the most creative one, perhaps.
I would've been more impressed with the package as a whole, though, if they had included straight ports of the first two games, with both cities from each and each of their challenge modes. Also, they messed with the cities. The west coast city from CT1, for instance, has all kinds of side areas now, and groups of passengers, CT2-style, rather than individuals. This means that you have to learn the course all over again, and it doesn't seem quite as polished. Also the Crazy Jump from CT2 is available on the CT1 course, so that makes it play differently as well. This is good for those who already have CT1 and want something kinda new, I suppose, but it isn't quite the same, so don't throw that CT1 disc away just yet.
The graphics get tarted up and I guess look nicer, but really the CT1 city doesn't look all that much nicer. The cars are shinier. The new city has all kinds of neon light blur effects and stuff, but it also has some slowdown (not as much as the second city in CT1 though!). Your wheels leave silly flaming tracks behind when you Crazy Dash. I don't much like the new HUD, which takes up more space and is harder to read than the original one, without improving upon it in any way. Oh, and the CT2 city is at night now, to show off the light blur effects I suppose, but it makes it a little harder to see.
The music isn't as good; for whatever reason they didn't get Offspring again, and instead got what seems to be a mix of various less-famous artists doing Offspringish tracks. I'm not really an Offspring fan, but overall effect is less impressive and cohesive than the body of music in the earlier games.
I'm also told that they didn't get all the licenses that they had before, so what was Pizza Hut in CT1 is now just the generic "Pizza Store" or something, for instance. I'm hardly a proponent of product placement, but this is an indication of the falloff that the series has taken, and it's a shame.
I can't say much about the layout of the CT3 city, since I didn't see much of it, but the parts I saw were pretty flat and squarish--downtown, I guess, with big casinos around. I also saw a twisty road going off somewhere outside the city, so maybe the whole thing is pretty big. |
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