A programmer worked on this project during the winter, and the result deserves applause.
Have we ever considered whether Crazy Taxi is too crazy? Wouldn’t it be nice to explore the beautiful cityscapes of the Dreamcast era at our own pace and almost feel the sun’s rays on our skin as we pass by Pizza Huts, KFCs, and Fila sportswear stores? If so – and even if there was a lot of product placement in this game – we have good news: Will from wretched.computer has taken care of that.
Will’s Crazy Taxi track recreations, which he described as a kind of winter madness project, have made their way onto Noclip, a digital museum dedicated to video game levels launched by graphics programmer Jasper St. Pierre. Alongside Crazy Taxi, Noclip also features Mario Kart 64, Psychonauts, Quake, Counter-Strike, World of Warcraft, and more – and not just rendered in any random way. As Will explains in his blog post, each game is recreated by open-sourcing a faithful reimplementation of its original rendering approach.
Will has previously contributed fly-around versions of Halo and World of Warcraft to the site. The Crazy Taxi project is especially interesting because the file formats still weren’t neatly documented on a community wiki, and there weren’t tools available to view the tracks. Seeing a level from a new perspective – without having to weave between trucks on the highway – is a surreal experience. It lags a bit in denser areas, but it works well, and now we want to be able to fly around the world like this in almost all of our games.
This also helped us better understand the design of the Crazy Taxi world. It’s easy to see how packed the arcade mode map is with landmarks; there are tons of visual cues that help you know where you are at any given moment, and the winding roads strike a good balance between tight corners that demand precise drifting and long straights that let you blow past every oncoming car. There are also more routes in the downtown area than we thought.
With the next AAA Crazy Taxi game still a long way off, this is the most exciting news the taxi gaming community has received in a while.
Source: PCGamer, Wretched.computer, Noclip
