Free Fun: Space Taxi 2

It’s been a busy weekend, so I’m just catching up with my posting.

I have to admit, though, that one of the things that kept me busy over the weekend was Space Taxi 2, a worthy sequel to the original Commodore 64 action game that came out in 1984. In a fit of nostalgia for some of the games I remembered playing in my teens—games that don’t seem to fit neatly into a single category—I Googled Space Taxi and discovered that Twilight Games has made a shareware version available for download.

The Commodore 64 was a wonderful platform for innovative computer games in the 80s, and the original Space Taxi was a prime example of why. Sure, the graphics look horribly dated, now, but I remember being impressed that the passengers actually talked in the game.

More importantly, the gameplay was a pleasant challenge. You piloted a thruster-powered taxi, ferrying passengers from platform to platform while avoiding obstacles. Using thrusters, which accelerated you only gradually, made the game feel very different from just about anything else (except maybe Lunar Lander) in terms of control. I think the top speed of the car was limited by the size of the level (hitting the edge was fatal) rather than the power of the thrusters. Gravity behaved realistically, too. Stop giving occasional up-thrusts, and your cab would start to sink toward the bottom of the screen%mdash;or wherever the gravity source for a particular level was located.

The challenge wasn’t in being super-fast or mashing your joystick button. Sure, your fuel gradually depleted and you earned less money per trip if you took too long. But surviving without crashing and making deft, gentle landings made for a better chance of success than mindless speed.

I’ve just described Space Taxi in detail in a review about Space Taxi 2 because the latter is pretty much exactly the same game. The graphics are significantly updated, the physics feels a bit more realistic, and the possibility of mouse-based control has been added, but the gameplay, down to some exact mission layouts, is identical. When I started playing, even though it’s been twenty-three years since I last played, I knew exactly what to do and how to do it.

I have only one real complaint: you can’t see the whole level at a time. The screen scrolls as you fly toward the edge. I experimented with windowed and full-screen mode, and neither seemed to allow me to avoid this. On levels with lots of obstacles, it becomes almost impossible to negotiate some tricky paths without having failed them once before. Seems to me it would have been a simple matter to shrink everything down just a bit so the entire level could be viewable at once.

I asked my wife to give the game a try. She’s a gamer (now), but she’d never played or even heard of Space Taxi. She gave it one try—and we both had some good laughs watching her cab careen wildly about the screen as she got a feel for the controls—and then declared she’d had enough. Her number one complaint was that her fingers hurt from using the arrow keys (I asked her not to use the mouse so she’d have to use the landing gear, an added dimension to gameplay that’s eliminated in the mouse-based version). Perhaps if we’d used a real keyboard instead of the laptops, this wouldn’t have been a problem.

She, too, disliked being unable to see the entire level at once, and in the end decided that as it got more and more difficult, she’d find it less and less fun. I disagree; I think as she got a better feel for the cab she’d find that the game favors finesse. The game has thrills, but they’re the thrill of successful and diligent navigation, not near-impossible button mashing.

Twilight Games has a free and very enjoyable demo available for Windows (nothing native for Mac, I’m afraid). You have to shell out twenty bucks for the full version. Seems a bit pricey to me, but since this game (more a remake than a sequel) updates the game without ruining what made it fun, I may just be tempted.

Add comment July 30th, 2007