I recently made an exciting discovery: there's a 3DS branch of the Simple 2000 Series! Well, I already knew it existed, but for ages, I thought it was limited to a small selection of escape room games. Turns out, there's a whole bunch of the Simple Series' trademark weirdness to be found on the most-modded handheld. This game is even developed by Z-game studio extraordinaires Tamsoft! I'm sure you can imagine how excited I was to find this.
The most succinct way of describing the game is "Sane Taxi". At a basic conceptual level, it's a lot like SEGA's arcade classic Crazy Taxi, in that oyu drive around a small city, picking up passengers, and dropping them off, being paid a bonus based on how quickly you get your charges to their destination. The difference being that there's very little in the way of craziness present this time around.
You drive at a normal speed, there's no expectation that you perform stunts, or even any opportunity to do so, and the whole city seems to be built on completely flat ground. It's also structured in a more joblike manner, with each stage representing a day's shift, starting at 8AM and ending at 1PM, with a quota of fares to bring in by the day's end. I played eight days, and though the quota increases every day, it's still possible at the point I reached to fill it in about half your alloted time. I'd hoped that maybe after a week, the game might give you a new map to drive around, but nope: it's the same map, with a slight increase in quota every day. Maybe there are more cities later on, but the game's worn my patience out by asking me to drive around the same map eight times in a row.
It is a Simple game, and there's plenty of Simple tropes on display, to please those cultured connoisseurs among you. As I already mentioned, it's developed by Tamsoft, and it also takes place in a comfy, mild-weathered low-poly representation of modern-day urban Japan. Furthermore, despite being about a car instead of a person, there's a whole bunch of costume parts to unlock, including normal things like paint colours and custom licenseplates (including one that has a picture of old-school Japanese internet meme Monar!), and less normal things like a giant viking helmet, a bumper shaped like a piano keyboard, and so on.
The Taxi: Boku wa Charisma Utenshu is far from being a great game, or even a good one. But it's not really fair to call it a bad one, either. It is a nice, comfy thing to keep you occupied while watching tv for an hour or so, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to play it for any longer than that.
No comments:
Post a Comment