Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars is a 2007 racing video game developed by Sniper Studios and Black Hole Entertainment, and part of the Crazy Taxi series. A compilation of Crazy Taxi (1999) and Crazy Taxi 2 (2001), Black Hole Entertainment ported the original games from the Dreamcast to the PlayStation Portable, while Sniper Studios added a new multiplayer mode. A new single-player campaign was foregone due to budget and time constraints. In the multiplayer, players compete against one another for customers and fare money. While Crazy Taxi received numerous ports, Fare Wars gained notoriety as the sole po
Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars is a 2007 racing video game developed by Sniper Studios and Black Hole Entertainment, and part of the Crazy Taxi series. A compilation of Crazy Taxi (1999) and Crazy Taxi 2 (2001), Black Hole Entertainment ported the original games from the Dreamcast to the PlayStation Portable, while Sniper Studios added a new multiplayer mode. A new single-player campaign was foregone due to budget and time constraints. In the multiplayer, players compete against one another for customers and fare money. While Crazy Taxi received numerous ports, Fare Wars gained notoriety as the sole po
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Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars is a 2007 racing video game developed by Sniper Studios and Black Hole Entertainment, and part of the Crazy Taxi series. A compilation of Crazy Taxi (1999) and Crazy Taxi 2 (2001), Black Hole Entertainment ported the original games from the Dreamcast to the PlayStation Portable, while Sniper Studios added a new multiplayer mode. A new single-player campaign was foregone due to budget and time constraints. In the multiplayer, players compete against one another for customers and fare money. While Crazy Taxi received numerous ports, Fare Wars gained notoriety as the sole port of Crazy Taxi 2 outside of the Dreamcast version. It was released in North America, Australia, and Europe in August and September 2007, followed by a Japanese release in August 2008.
The game received mixed reviews from critics, who praised the gameplay of the original games, while calling it dated, as well as the new multiplayer mode. However, they criticized compromises made to bring the two Dreamcast games to the less powerful PlayStation Portable, such as lower frame rate and longer loading times, the removal of the original games' licensed soundtracks, and control issues. The game's developers noted that they had difficulty in porting the games to such limiting hardware.
Gameplay
Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars combines the games Crazy Taxi and Crazy Taxi 2, leaving their respective original gameplay intact. In the single-player mode, the player, controlling one of several yellow cab drivers, each with their own unique cab, must drive around the city, picking up passengers and racing recklessly to get them to where they need to go in the fastest time. When each passenger is dropped off, the player earns a fare and extra time on the limited countdown clock, while extra money can be earned by performing stunts.
The ports also carry over the games' minigame modes, Crazy Box and Crazy Pyramid. In the former, players can access nine minigames, including bowling and bursting balloons with their taxi. The latter, while similar, includes minigames that utilize the "Crazy Hop" feature included in the sequel, which allows the taxi to leap through the use of hydraulics.
Fare Wars adds three new multiplayer modes. In Time Trials mode, players can use ad-hoc multiplayer to compete to see who earns the most money within a certain time limit. In C-R-A-Z-Y mode, one player attempts to beat the other player's score for an individual fare, while in the final mode, Head to Head, two players compete to win on the same map. If one player hits the opponent's car, they can steal the passenger from their opponent.
Crazy Taxi: Fare Wars was developed through the collaboration of the respective development teams at Sega of America in San Francisco, Sniper Studios in Redwood City, California, and Black Hole Entertainment in Budapest, Hungary. While Sniper Studios handled the multiplayer aspect of the game, the porting was performed by Black Hole. Sniper initially chose to work on Crazy Taxi because it believed the series had "near-perfect gameplay", and wanted to make a true port. As such, they spoke to contacts at Sega, who were looking to bring games from their catalog to PlayStation Portable, and got permission to port the series, believing that it would make "a lot of sense". It also considered multiplayer something that would give the game a new feel. Adding a single-player campaign was considered, but would have cost too much money and been too time-consuming to implement.
The game's developers used the Dreamcast version of the game, running on its original system, for reference purposes. While they initially considered buying an original Crazy Taxi arcade machine from eBay instead, high shipping fees ultimately scuttled the plan.
The creation of the multiplayer mode was considered a challenge, as it required the original games' artificial intelligence (AI) to be modified to support two independently controlled cabs in the same space. This was further hindered by the fact that the AI was only designed to support single-player gameplay, and the developers decided to work around that rather than change it significantly. The developers were ultimately forced to lower the amount of AI traffic in multiplayer as compared to single-player, due to a lack of memory on the PlayStation Portable. While the multiplayer mode was also initially planned to be accessible from the main menu, this resulted in long load times because the single-player mode had to be loaded first from the Universal Media Disc (UMD). Therefore, the multiplayer mode was moved to the in-game menu of the single-player mode.
Load times for the game turned out to be overly long, and frame rate too low, because the development team was not able to test how quickly it loaded off UMD discs until late into the development due to a tight development schedule. They noted that streaming data off a Memory Stick results in a performance increase. Since the custom music player automatically streams data off the Memory Stick, the seek times for the rest of the game improved when using it. Hardware restrictions also meant that, unlike the other versions of the games, which ran at 60 frames per second (FPS), Fare Wars only runs at a maximum of 30 FPS.
The wireless communication for the games was made more robust than normal, as testers had sent feedback about connection interruptions the developers could not reproduce. The development of the game went 13% over the original budget estimate, attributed to attempting to estimate the development cost based on source code that had not been seen yet. Ultimately, while the Crazy Taxi source code was implemented on schedule, the team ran into problems attempting to implement the source code of Crazy Taxi 2. Another difficulty in development was that bugs were not distinctly single-player or multiplayer, due to one's dependence on the other to work.
Many of the real-world stores in the game, including Pizza Hut, Tower Records, and KFC, had their n
