7. Crazy Taxi (SEGA/Hitmaker)
SL: Crazy Taxi is one of the most addictive games of all time. I remember spending hours trying to get 1st place on the high-scores - something I eventually managed with the New York based Crazy Taxi 2. But, its the original that I continue to play to this day. Its still just as exhilarating and fiendishly addictive as it was in 1999. Its been accused of ageing badly, but Crazy Taxi is still crazy after all these years. This sunny aracade score-attack game saw you racing around a caricature version of San Francisco to the sounds of The Offspring and Bad Religion. Horrendous recent ports, which have removed the original licensed music (I refuse to play it without "All I Want" in the background) and loosened up the handling, have made the game seem prematurely aged. Yet the Naomi arcade version - ported perfectly to the Dreamcast - is still a riot, especially with the racing wheel. As with most the other games on this list, the sounds - particularly the customarily strange voice acting of the era - are the first thing I think of when I imagine the game: from the excitable opening "hey, hey, hey, it's time to make some craaaaazy money. Are ya' ready? Here we go!" to the more pedestrian "I wanna go to the baseball stadium". The game just oozes something many of today's title sorely miss: character. In fact, enjoyment of Crazy Taxi relies on you having fun with the game's self-consciously wacky sense of humour just as much as it requires you to enjoy speeding between oncoming cars whilst hurriedly trying to get your fare to KFC as the clock times out. I always found it to be an especially good game for playing with others in a competitive spirit, seeing how many fares you can do in a row and trying to beat the other's score. That's certainly the way it worked between my dad, brother and I back in "the day" and that's how I'd advise you to go about playing it if you want to wring the best out of one of my favourite games.
6. Shenmue (SEGA/AM2)
The sentimental fanboy in me wants this to be #1 and I'm sure many of you thought it would be, but in reality Shenmue is not a perfect game. Or really even a game at all for much of its length. Look at any SEGA promotional material of the time and they even tried to market it as an entirely new genre dubbed FREE (laughably standing for Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment). But I'm sure inventing a whole new genre was the least they were expecting considering the amount that was spent making it. The expensive failure apparently cost $70 million in R&D and didn't even reach number one in the UK Dreamcast chart upon release, beaten to that honour by Marvel vs. Capcom 2. But even if every Dreamcast owner had bought the title it still wouldn't have come close to recouping the costs and it's long been rumoured that the huge sums SEGA paid out on its development account for the lack of any sort of promotional budget for the Dreamcast after the initial launch campaign. Think about it: there really wasn't a single TV ad for this $70 million game was there? But why was it so costly? Well the graphical engine for one thing. It's so detailed, to the point where you can open almost any drawer and cupboard (especially nosy fans will have found the anachronistic SEGA Saturn under Ryo's TV) and lift every ash tray in its immaculately recreated 1980s Japanese town. Never mind the wooden voice acting (I wouldn't swap Corey Marshall for anyone, mind), the facial animations were unlike anything previously seen, as were the changing seasons. You could also play authentic 80s arcade machines running full emulated versions of Suzuki's
Space Harrier and
Hang-On. The citizens of the town were also imbued with incredible detail, each with their own voice, face, name, address and place of work. For those so inclined, you could follow someone from the moment they left their house in the morning to the moment they returned home at night. It was such an excessive undertaking that developer AM2 even went to the trouble of making sure the in-game weather was the same as it historically was on that day in the same region of Japan. I'm honestly not making any of this up. So with all this in mind, is it any wonder Shenmue has such an august reputation among Dreamcast devotees? Such a vocal army of fanatics chanting endlessly for Shenmue 3 to be released (Shenmue 2 ended the series on a huge cliffhanger)? Sadly though the game itself is a glorified pottering-about-a-bit sim with some added QTEs. There is a bit of Virtua Fighter lite combat every three or four hours and a few simple fetch quests to perform, but protagonist Ryo Hazuki spends rather more time collecting toy capsules and feeding stray cats than he does tracking down his father's killer. But for me Shenmue is all about the oddness of the experience. Specifically the lovely, warm mundaneness of it all. It's the only game where I've ever had to get up for work in the morning: undertaking a ten minute walk to the bus stop, looking at the bus timetable, checking my Timex watch and standing patiently whilst public transport takes its sweet time. This was then followed by a bus journey and a day spent at work. Ryo gets a job driving a forklift truck around the local docks ostensibly following a lead in his detective case, but really (one suspects) it's because he can't bare to be at home with the wretched Ine-san a moment longer than he has to be. I adore Shenmue. All out of proportion, like a good Dreamcast fan should. Especially the
music which I genuinely find quite moving. In fact I'm going to re-play the whole darn thing for about the sixth time as soon as this article is done.