The Closeout Warrior

I bought Crazy Taxi before I had a Dreamcast. And when I finally got my hands on the system, right before it was discontinued, it came with two (yes, two!) pack-in games: Sonic Adventure and Sonic Shuffle.

Sonic Shuffle is a rip… er… clone of Mario Party. You take your characters around various game boards and play mini-games to earn currency, and whoever gets the most wins! Only instead of Mario and Friends it’s Sonic and Friends, and instead of collecting coins you collect rings, and instead of being fun and exciting the game is boring and tedious.

I could only stomach playing this game one half of a time. I tossed it in the old Dreamcast mostly because it was free and I was hungry for something new to play. And it just didn’t do anything for me. All I could think of was how similar this game was to Mario Party, all the way down to the sound effects and the effects of the different spaces. And since I had already played that game to death I was just kind of done with the experience. And I kind of wonder, would I have liked this game better if I hadn’t already spent several dozen hours with a game that was mostly identical?

The original Crazy Taxi is one of my all-time favorite arcade games. I spent a ridiculous amount of time playing it, and although I can’t be considered a pro at it by any stretch, I consider myself to be competent at it. So when a (direct to home console) sequel came out, I was compelled to give it a try.

The sequel plays a lot like the first game with a couple of minor differences: the city is New York instead of San Francisco, the cabbies are different (although the original 4 can be unlocked), the car can jump, and you can pick up multiple people at once.

What hasn’t changed in this version is the arrow that is supposed to show you where your next destination is. It ends up, more often than not, pointing directly at the place you have to stop, rather than the best route to take, so you’ll encounter the arrow pointing an an impassable building, with your stop directly on the other side.

I’ll admit that I didn’t really put as much time into this game as I did the original. In order to get really good at the game, you have to commit the city layout to memory, since the arrow isn’t as helpful as it could be. That was something that I didn’t take the time to do. What I did do, and where I spent most of my time, was to complete the ‘Crazy Pyramid’ mode, which is a series of drills designed to make you a better player. Though, I do admit, I only did it to unlock the weird baby carriage… thing. Yep, you get to travel around the city at breakneck speed, delivering people to their destinations in a giant baby carriage. Try to tell me that’s not awesome.

It is not physically possible for me to walk by a game that costs less than a dollar and not get it. Especially if it’s new and I don’t already have a copy. There are days where I do wish that I didn’t have this problem, though. The day I bought a game based on the band KISS was one of those days.

What this game is about, I have no earthly idea. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. But there are these guys, not actually band members, who have to run around generic scummy city areas, killing aliens and collecting pieces of KISS armor (those outfits that the band members wear on stage). Other than playing dress-up with your guy, what does KISS have to do with this game? Well, if you walk up to a jukebox you can hear a few seconds of one of the band’s songs.

This game is so bland, so boring, and so empty that after the initial action, I wandered around after about two hours before I finally found the stupid piece of armor that I was looking for. So I never managed to figure out what was going on in this game or why I should care, so I quit caring and excised this thing from my Dreamcast for good.

Leave it to those wacky folks at Sega to take an innocent pastime like skating and using spray paint to vandalize private property and turn it into a video game involving kidnapping, the military, and eventually demons.

No fooling.

Jet Grind Radio (a.k.a. Jet Set Radio just about everywhere else in the world) starts out with a guy (Beat) who has a burning desire to start his own inline-skate gang. He quickly recruits a couple of folks hanging out on the street (Tab and Gum), and gets to work carving out a niche for his fledgling group.

He does this by skating around the different parts of the city (Tokyo-to, the names in this game are very creative), using the spraypaint scattered everywhere to tag a certain amount of objects. “Tagging” in this game is “street” for “putting your gang’s logo on it”. Tag enough things in a rival gang’s territory, and two things will happen:

1. The local police force will send out increasingly-deadly means to stop you, one detective → squads of cops in riot gear → helicopters → tanks and heavy artillery. It seems a bit excessive to me, but I’ve never been in charge of ridding the streets of rampant graffiti activities.
2. Your group will challenge another group to a race of sorts. You skate around a circuit with three members of the rival gang. Your goal is to catch up with them and tag them in the back with your gang’s logo. Then you get to control their area of town, somehow.

Central to all of this is the pirate radio station, run by Professor K. He does the exposition between acts and is supposedly the one feeding the music into the gigantic headphones that some of the characters wear.

The actual story of the game is completely indecipherable. It involves pieces of an evil record, a corrupt organization, and demons in a shape that roughly resembles a hippopotamus.

No kidding.

Rhythm games just seem to get weirder and weirder. Case in point: Space Channel 5. This is a game about ratings. You play the part of eye-candy reporter Ulala as she investigates some weird alien phenomenon that is forcing people to mindlessly dance. How does she combat this? Why, with the power of dance, of course!

Each stage has a distinctive sound track that plays throughout. As you make your way through the stage, you will be stopped periodically by people and aliens that will do a few dance moves. You have to mimic these moves to set the hypnotized people free and defeat the aliens. You also have an approval rating that is based on how well you dance (you work for a TV Station, remember?). Miss too many steps (lose too many viewers) and you have the plug pulled on your show.

If you do play this game, be sure to keep a look out for ‘Space Michael’. Some famous singer/dancer/songwriter managed to record some ‘Woo’s and a ‘Thank you, Ulala!’ specifically for this game.