TGS 06: The Taxi 2 Hands-On

TOKYO--Earlier today, during a visit to D3's Tokyo Game Show booth, we spent a little time test-driving a near-finished version of The Taxi 2 for the PlayStation 2. Predictably, the imaginatively titled driving game will see you assuming the role of a cab driver, and as far as we can tell, your only goal in the game is to make money.

When it's released in Japan next month, The Taxi 2--like other games in D3's "Simple 2000" series--will carry a budget price tag. The old adage that you get what you pay for appears to be true on this occasion, not because the game is broken in any way, but simply because there doesn't seem to be a lot to it. The city environment that we were driving our yellow cab around was very small, there was very little traffic to contend with, and none of the passengers that we picked up during our time with the game needed to ride with us for more than 45 seconds or so. It's conceivable that the game will become bigger and more challenging later on, of course, but it's unlikely that the game would improve dramatically as a result.

To give you some idea of what The Taxi 2 has to offer, we spent our time with the game driving aimlessly around the small city area looking for people in need of a ride, which took longer than you might think because the sidewalks were completely devoid of human life for the most part. When we did manage to find pedestrians in the market for a cab, we had to pull up alongside them and then press the L2 button--this made a large red circle appear around our car, and when we stopped close enough to the customers that they were inside the circle, they'd climb into the car. At this point, an arrow appeared on the screen showing us the general direction of our passenger's destination, and we were given an extremely generous time limit in which to reach it. The game occasionally mixed things up a little by having us pick up two passengers simultaneously or tasking us with taking a passenger to multiple destinations, but even that got old within a couple of minutes.

The most intriguing feature of The Taxi 2, largely because we're unsure what purpose it serves, is that you can see 3D models of the passengers in your cab sitting in the lower left corner of the screen. They get thrown around if your driving is erratic, and we can't help but wonder if later in the game they might get angry and climb out of your cab without paying or something. Given how generous the time limits were for each journey, it's also possible that we were supposed to squeeze as much money out of the passengers as possible by taking a scenic route rather than the quickest route to their destination, perhaps using their behavior in the corner of the screen as a barometer for how much longer they'd put up with our antics. This is all speculation, though, and The Taxi 2 isn't a particularly exciting prospect either way.