Taxi Racer

Taxi Racer
Stellar Stone's debut of making horrible games.
Genre(s): Racing Platform(s): Microsoft Windows Release: October 22, 2001 Developer(s): Stellar Stone Publisher(s): BestBuys Interactive Country: Ukraine

Taxi Racer is a racing game published by BestBuys Interactive and the first game to be developed by Stellar Stone. It was released for Microsoft Windows in Europe on October 22, 2001.

Gameplay

The gameplay is simple, you pick up a passenger and then drive them to their destination and basically do the same thing over and over again like in Crazy Taxi.

Why It Sucks

1. The controls are bad and stiff because they can be unresponsive at times, and they react with a delay, which can make the game frustrating after all.
2. The car handling is absolutely terrible because the vehicle is oversteering and almost every time you try to turn, it immediately turns sideways, which makes the chances of avoiding a collision almost negligible, so you will often hit the wall when turning.
3. Broken physics: your car can accelerate to ridiculously high speeds if you keep going forward and pressing the brake will make the car come to a dead stop, regardless of factors like speed, weight or acceleration.
4. Glitched collision detection; you can be 10 feet away from a light post and still knock it down. This causes constant ramming noises to be played as you constantly hit light posts, and sometimes hitting buildings will mess the taxi up and give you a black screen, making the game crash. This already gives the impression that the game was made in a very big hurry and without testing and caring about how much you can play the game at all.
5. Because of the way the game handles movements, holding down the key to accelerate while the cab is staying still and cannot move (for example, when loading passengers), will cause it to rocket through the air and warp to a completely different place from where the player originally stopped. While this can be useful to save time, it's far more common to accidentally collide with and glitch inside buildings, with no way to keep playing besides restarting the game. This, together with the terrible controls, driving and broken collision detection, can make you really frustrated with how poorly programmed the game is.
6. The city is poorly designed. In fact, the city looks like a rejected London/Paris mixture literally as if the developers couldn't decide if they wanted the game to be set in London or Paris.
7. Most of the textures are photos that were cut and pasted onto the models which only worsens the graphics and at the same time shows the laziness of the developers and the fact that they did not even want to create their own textures, they took them from other people.
8. The sound effects are poor, for example:
   • The braking noise doesn't change depending on your speed.
   • Every single item you can knock down makes the same metallic noise, even items you wouldn't expect like trees or bushes.
9. Outdated and awful graphics for 2001 standards and looks like a early PSX or N64 game. The textures are incredibly low resolution and look like they were from 1996 and the models are also extremely angular and also look like they were made 5 before the game was released.
10. The time trial mode is near-impossible due to the awful driving model which gives the impression that the developers did not even want to test this game and did it in such a way as to release it as soon as possible.
11. The game feels and plays like a pre-alpha version of Grand Theft Auto III or a rejected Midtown Madness 2 prototype. In fact, GTA 3 and Taxi Racer were released on the same day, and both games is better than this!
12. There are no NPC (non-player character) vehicles besides two other vans that occasionally pass by you. Not to mention, they have no collision detection, so when you came across them, you'll just pass through each other. This is another great example of how lazy developers were because they didn't want to add such a simple thing.
13. London cab textures are ripped from Midtown Madness 2 which was released one year before this game. Needless to mention, the London cab looks worse. This can already be considered a violation of Microsoft's copyright, but not only that, it also shows that the developers were already so lazy that they did not want to create their own textures.
14. False advertisement: As you see in the cover, there is a yellow 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air and an Austin/Carbodies FX4. However Chevrolet is absent from the game in both playable and unplayable forms.

Reception

The game was reviewed by Stanburdman, who stated that the only reason he didn't call this the worst game he ever played was because it wasn't the ugliest in terms of graphics. DXFan619's list of the 20 worst games ever has Taxi Racer at #18.

Download

Don't bother about piracy. This is a broken scam that should have been canceled instead of sold. A fan website provides the download here.

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