Well where to begin. Before you even get to the title screen you first watch a demo of the game. This demo is very well done, it gets you thinking "Wow! Hey, this looks like a really cool game." The graphics in the demo are amazing, same goes for the sound, music and design. When I finally pressed the
start button I hit my first snag with the game. I really despised the voice of the announcer. His voice is low, raspy, and gets to be quite irritating after a while.
Continuing on. The menu is pretty straight forward. It has your basic functions like arcade, original and tool box. The Arcade mode is the same huge level as in the arcade version. The original is a brand new level made just for the dreamcast version of the game. The Tool box is also a lot of fun. You have different missions to cary out in order to unlock new ones. Some are really crazy like the bowling with a car one. The
layout is bright and colourful yet it isn't to radiant where as it blinds you. The background music on the menu is pretty good
it isn't anything spectacular but it gets the job done.
When you finally start to play you have two choices you can play a mode where you have to pick up more customers to play
longer. Or you can take the time mode and play for a certain amount of time. Before I get to the actual playing of the game there is a third mode where you have to preform certain tasks to unlock harder tasks. Finally I get to the actual game play. This game takes place in one single city. You first choose a car
and driver. That is one of the second things I didn't like. You have a choice of about four characters.(only one of which is a girl which is a tad sexist.) No matter what car and driver you choose it is the same. You don't get any special abilities with differnt drivers. Each driver and car are the same, except
in appearance. I would have liked it more if each car had different characteristics, like one is faster or one is more agile. Not to say that nothing changes when you choose different drivers. Some drivers are a tad rude and abnoxious. That is the main difference. The cars you choose from aren't that bad,
the people that designed this game, I think felt that they wanted to have sort of a New York cabby look to the game. They chose
mostly design frames from older cabs.
When you are in the city you have to drive around and find a customer. You can tell customer from pedestrian by the
dollar sign the floats above their heads. The different coloured signs idicate the relative closeness of their destination point. You pick up the customer and get to their destination as fast as you can and preforming as many fantastic tricks as you can to earn more money. When you drop off your customer you then have to pick up another, drop that person off and pick up another,
drop off and pick up, drop off and pick up, drop off and pick up. That is basicly what you do for the entire game. The controls are very easy to get a hang of though but, the people
that designed this had a way to hide the relative pointlessness of the game by putting it to great music. They have some wonderful rock music from the Offspring which I though was one of the best parts of the game. The frame rate is constant throughout the game. It's sharp its fast its really easy to get into,
but you find out that it's garbage once you do.Another bad thing about this game is that your car is practically invincilbe. I drove around a city and I was filping cars that were twice my size and
weight like they were rag dolls.
My final review, is that this game is great if you want to play a game that is easy to get into and humorous. If you want a game
with a thick story line, lots to do then this is definately not the game for you. I highly suggest that you do not get this game if you get bored easily. For those of you that love style type of games and don't get bored easily then you probably will enjoy it. When I rented it I was playing it for about a half an hour then I sat on my bed thinking, "Is that it?". Unfortunatly it was. It also is a bit strayed from it's genre of racing because you don't race to much. You just pick up, drive, drop off, pick up. Compared to some of the other racers around this game fails in comparison. Sega Rally, Monaco Grand Prix, these are some really good racers. And for the amount your pay for, you'd excpect something good but that's not what happens.
From what I've seen in this game, the people that made it do deserve a tip in the speed of the game, but no tip for lastability.
-Sean O'Raw |
