Retro Game Friday: Crazy Taxi

This week for Retro Game Friday I’m covering a game I swore I had already covered, but apparently I never have. It’s Crazy Taxi!

Gameplay: The gameplay is quite fun with you controlling your taxi through a busy and hilly city as you ferry customers to and from their destinations. It could really get hectic, especially if you played on the lower time limitation settings. The main goal of the game was to be as fast as you could getting to the destination while performing “tricks” like barely missing cars by going on the wrong side of the street to earn you even more points. Honestly if this happened in real life, no one would ever take a cab, which might not be a bad thing? The only problem I had with the game was the time limitations seeming to be too short, but that’s just me.

Art: The art is very dated, but was awesome for the time.

Music: It was just as frenetic as the gameplay, which was kind of the point.

Overall: if you’ve never played or at least watched someone play Crazy Taxi you ought to give a shot.

For those who like: Driving Games, Crazy Drivers, Time Limitations.

Not for those who don’t like: Any of the above.

Retro Game Friday: Red Faction Guerilla

This week for Retro Game Friday I’m covering a game I got for free! It’s Red Faction Guerilla!

Plot Synopsis: Alec Mason, a mining engineer, arrives on Mars Tharsis Region to reunite with his brother Dan and begin a new life. While on work detail, Dan testifies about the Earth Defense Force’s (EDF) cruelty to the Martian people and asks Alec to join the Red Faction, of which Dan is a member. Dan is soon after gunned down by air support from an EDF assault team. Alec is rescued by Red Faction guerrillas and reluctantly becomes a freedom fighter.

Plot: The plot isn’t super amazing, but it’s pretty good. That being said the real draw of the game was it’s gameplay.

Characters: They were fairly bland, even Alec isn’t that interesting and that’s always a bad sign for a story.

Gameplay: The gameplay however was quite fun and allowed the player to destroy any building they pleased including bridges or catwalks, which could lead to lots of fun. While the story mode isn’t super interesting it did have an open world that allowed the player to go around destroying any building they wanted. The Nanite Rifle in particular was an amazingly fun gun to use, although ammo was very scarce unless you cheated and enabled infinite ammo.

Art: Not amazing, but not too bad compared to Gamecube or Nintendo 64 era games in terms of aging.

Music: Sorry don’t remember a thing about the music.

Overall: If you can get this game cheap, you definitely ought to try it out for a few laughs.

For those who like: Third Person Shooters, Open Worlds, Destroying Everything.

Not for those who don’t like: Any of the above.

Video Game Tuesday: Watch_Dogs and what didn’t work

 

This week I’m going to talk about what didn’t work well in Watch_Dogs.

Driving: For a game in such a vast city and such importance on being able to escape from the police or other enemies, controlling your vehicle was way too hard. If you wanted an easy way to escape you got on a Motorcycle and weaved through traffic with ease, but if you hit anything that wasn’t destructible you would go flying off the bike. Driving felt like you were sliding on Ice in a platforming game like Mario 64.  I really hope for the inevitable sequel that the driving gets improved vastly so that everything handles much better, and that I don’t feel punished for not using my Sayonara motorcycle or dying mid mission and losing the bike I parked outside the mission area to escape.

Money: I have at least a couple billion in my wallet right now in Watch_Dogs, because I took the time to get all the cash hack upgrades and now I never worry about money anymore. There is a fine line between having way too much money and not enough that you feel like you need to grind for it. Watch_Dogs took the easy way out and decided to give you millions at your fingertip at any time. In fact after about an hour into the game I never worried about money ever again.

Combat: I actually enjoy the combat in Watch_Dogs, but I felt that after unlocking the Spec Ops SMG and Assault Rifle that I was able to blaze through every mission with little difficulty because I could take out enemies with my silenced weapons way too easily.

Side Quests: I loved the side quests in Watch_Dogs, but I really wish that they would give us the Far Cry 3 treatment and give us the option to reset each of the gang hideouts and ctOS mainframe server locations. Update: On August 23rd they added the ability to reset certain sidequests, but not the ability to reset the ctOS mainframes.

Aiden: Look Aiden sounded like a really great character prior to release, but dammit I hate the way he turned out. You made him a gruff Batman wannabe and while I love his look with the long leather coat, I really wish that he wasn’t so shallow. He was so caught up in revenge that he ruined his entire life for it. I hope we get a new main character in the sequel, someone like Jordi, who was my favorite character with T-Bone close behind.

Multiplayer: I loved the multiplayer, in fact currently I’m in the top 1% percentile of players worldwide in Multiplayer. That being said I wish that you had random NPC’s driving on motorcycles around the city. If you spotted someone else on a motorcycle they were always another player and you were obliged to gun them down.

Overall: The game was great, but it doesn’t have the longevity that GTA does, partly because GTA Online is updated so often and people can do so many different things.