I feel like this was only made because Crazy Taxi was popular and this movie has taxi in the title. It even features an arrow at the top of the screen like Crazy Taxi!

Anyways, according to the intro FMV, this game is directed by Luc Besson himself so I guess this is him introducing himself to the games industry. So let's check out how his first attempt went!

Well, for starters, it was a really interesting decision to put in sub-Sega CD FMVs of the movie. I feel like lots of game directors would think that putting in terrible FMVs will distract from the game, but you see, Luc Besson wears his filmmaking background on his sleeve. Seeing these scenes in such low quality is supposed to turn you off. If you are a respectable person, you will seek something better, which will lead you to the film. Not only is this an effective motivator to watch the film, it is also a test. If you do not care about quality, you will not seek anything better, and thus your life will be less rich than those who watch Taxi 2 properly.

The controls of your car in this game are also a bold departure from other games in the genre. In most driving games like this, your car will slow down a little when you scrape a wall. However, in this game, it will completely turn around, gain 50mph, and clip through a wall into an alleyway that you can't back out of. Again, it tests your will to play. Can you make it out of the alleyway? Only pro players are allowed clearance to the next cutscene. Taxi 2 also features a life bar, like F-Zero. That's all.

Lastly, the choice of making the game look like a shitty 3DO tech demo and every song be a slight variation on monster truck music was a brilliant way to subvert the audience's expectations. You expect the game to look and sound like Crazy Taxi, which this game is clearly based on, but it slaps you in the face. If you want to appreciate this game, you have to abandon your expectations and embrace it for the genius that it is.

Because this game is truly genius. Everything from the game over screen to the game over screen is brilliant. I think we should all give Luc Besson a round of applause. We're looking at the next great game director right here. Congratulations.

I was just playing The Adventures of Batman and Robin on the Genesis earlier. I've been chipping away at the game for a while now. For those not familiar with that game, it's fucking awesome. It's an insane run-and-gun with intense action that will bring you to your knees. The music is badass. It, along with the moody graphics, creates a really oppressive atmosphere. It challenges you, taunts you, makes you want to come back for more. You also wanna keep playing to see what kind of amazing special effects the game will show off next. Bottom line, the game is awesome, and you gotta play it if you're up to the challenge.

Anyways, I was having a lot of fun with the game but wanted to play something a bit easier so I chose another Batman game. "Oh look, Batman Forever. It was released around the same time so it might be like the other game. Let's check it out."

This game is horrendous. I wasn't aware that this was the same game as the Super Nintendo one, so I was legitimately shocked. This is one of if not the absolute worst side scrolling beat em up I've played. Given the weirdo controls, I thought this might be a cinematic platformer like Another World, but instead it's like a really, REALLY shitty fighting game where you progress in a level.

There's these hints scattered around but I don't know why since there isn't any puzzles to speak of, outside of wrapping your brain around what combination of buttons will do the right thing to progress. You have to jump down to a lower platform several times in this game and for the life of me I still don't know how to do it. You can't just press down, no no no no no, you have to like do a short jump and then press down and C. I think.

This game looks like puke. Like, actual puke. I guess Mortal Kombat was the hot thing around the time so they wanted to put digitized actors in the game, but even compared to other efforts around the same time like Street Fighter The Movie (the video game based on the movie) it looks shockingly bad. Like, if this game thinks it's a puzzle game or cinematic platformer-ey game, it's pretty awful at that. Every background asset blends in to a mess of black and gray barf, you couldn't make out any specific details if your life depended on it.

The real reason this game is so fascinating to me is that there are tons of other Batman games and all of the ones that I've played are pretty good or even great. The NES one is fun, the Genesis one is decent and has amazing music, both the Genesis and SNES versions of The Adventures of Batman and Robin are fun, the PC Engine one is weird but fine enough, the Game Boy game is pretty good even though Batman shoots people with a gun, the Sega CD version of Batman Returns has awesome super-scaler racing stages. All of these games are fine. So how does something else based on the same IP turn out like this? Why did both Nintendo and Sega agree to let this game release, when their other games based on the same franchise made their systems look much better? This is just horrendous and far and away the worst game I've played on the Genesis. Holy crap.

Great little puzzle game! The game is full of personality and the vibe it gives off makes you want to experiment and solve problems in unconventional ways. It can get tough sometimes and it will probably piss you off, but it'll piss you off in a way that makes you want to keep playing. It's the type of game where you'll get stumped for a while so you go to take a nasty dump and while you're wiping your ass the solution to the level comes to your mind. Then you hurry back and do it and it feels awesome.

High recommendation, especially for puzzle game fans.

This game has a cool aesthetic and is functionally sound but was kinda soul-crushing to play. In the past year or so I've played SO many great shoot-em-ups. It's been pretty transformative, honestly. The way I've thought about games in general has changed so much since I started getting into this stuff. And so playing this feels like such a waste for me at this point. I probably would've thought it was pretty cool if I hadn't played other games that did all of these things better. This is what I used to think these kinds of games are like. Before I, like, started to actually play them.

I have to imagine the sleek style was the main reason the developer felt compelled to make this because otherwise it's so disposable. Why would I want to play this over another shooter? Well, I don't. I feel like the main goal of shoot-em-ups, especially ridiculous bullet hell ones, is to communicate a specific emotion with every little bullet pattern. They have such a natural ebb and flow. Moments of tension and relief are dispersed expertly in a way that other games can't match up to. When I think about a really good shoot-em-up, I think of the intensity and satisfaction of a certain situation more than the context. And that's why it's so difficult to explain why this game makes me feel empty! Maybe like a stage-by-stage commentary could illustrate it better but just explaining in words the difference between this and other shoot-em-ups is very difficult.

It's an indescribable feeling, where you're seeing a million bullets and lasers fly by and yet it all feels so hollow. It makes you want to stop playing games like this at all because it feels so pointless. I finish a level and it doesn't even register that the boss blew up. It just keeps going.

ok fellow Backloggders it's time we fought back against the powers that stand in opposition to the gamers. We are pleased to announce the formation of the Formal Anti Real Terrorists (codename F.A.R.T.) Association. Our goal? Become elite Outtrigger players. The future of humanity depends on your Outtriggering abilities.

it's a really fun game! I'm a loser who didn't spend my childhood fragging mofos in the goldeneyes so I'm pretty new to the whole idea of an immediate arcade-like multiplayer shooter like this. I always associated shooters with either in-depth immersive boundary-pushing single player games or worthless McDonalds call of duty stuff for people who are too lame to play a game with a soul in it. So, like, I don't know man it's just been novel discovering games like this or Quake 3 where the goal is just shooting a bunch of dudes in a room. There's a purity to this sort-of game that I really would have latched on to if I played it when I was a wee lad. I actually feel kinda bad for not giving first person shooters the time of day they deserve in general. I always kinda lumped them together and saw them as disposable junk food and yeah it is partially because I became an cool gamer guy in a time where every game was brown and gray and had an angry guy with a gun on the cover but the older I get the more I discover why they began to dominate and I'm really trying to appreciate them for what they are.

anyways outtrigger is really good.

What is the point of a rhythm game where the gameplay is completely unrelated to the music? Isn't the fun of this sort-of game the fact that you are performing music? They could have just as well put the crazy bus soundtrack in the background and it wouldn't change a thing. It's a shame too because some of the music is really good but even then most of it is just lifted from older Puyo Puyo or Madou Monogatari albums. Maybe a game like this could work if the music was actually designed around the game but, well, it isn't. Oh well. The character designs are cute, at least.

A fun surprise! I hear this game described as a metroidvania which isn't exactly accurate. Every level is completely separate, but each one is designed kinda like those metroidvanias with backtracking to unlock inaccessible areas using newfound abilities. I really like how you carve out every level like this, it makes it feel like you've really conquered the area and fully understand it.

The real star is the player character who's lots of fun to control. She interacts with the environment and enemies very naturally, it's fun to go through the game and chain together all the moves super smoothly. It has a level of polish and fluidity in the intersection and animation that you'd expect from a bigger game. Yeah, that's a good way to describe this game: polished. It has that Nintendo level of polish and imagination that pushes it over the edge.

High recommendation.

How does this get made and released? The year was 2006, hadn't we figured out what was required for a AAA release by that point? There's so many things in this game that were perfectly fine in Sonic Adventure, which came out 8 years earlier. This game feels like it came out before Sonic Adventure. What the fuck happened? They already had a good foundation to build from! In theory this game is very similar to Sonic Adventure but it's just a little bit... off. Why are the hub areas so massive when they weren't that way in Sonic Adventure? Why does Sonic awkwardly preserve all his momentum when he changes direction during a jump, even though Sonic Adventure did it correctly? Why don't enemies die when I jump on them like in Sonic Adventure? Why am I forced to play as other characters even though I fucking selected Sonic, when that isn't the case in Sonic Adventure? In that game, if I wanted to play as Tails, I'd fucking choose Tails from the menu. I don't want to play as Tails, I want to play as Sonic. This isn't complicated! Sonic 06 is full of things that make you go wonder why they were chosen, why they had to happen.

I suppose the real question is why I chose to play it... and I really don't know. It was five bucks on the Xbox store so I figured there isn't much to lose. Don't make my mistake, just leave the game alone.