Crazy Taxi mod restores product placement and analog controls
Even in a world of constant ports and re-releases, game preservation can be tricky. As licenses expire or the hardware a game was designed around becomes obsolete, certain games are going to inevitably end up changed from their original state. One such example is Crazy Taxi, the arcade game that received fairly faithful PC and console ports in the early 2000s, received another round of ports around 2010 that had to be altered for release. Namely, the real-world locations customers would want to be driven to, like Pizza Hut or Kentucky Fried Chicken, had to be renamed to generic titles, like Fried Chicken Shack. While there has been a mod available for some time now called the Dreamcast Restoration Mod that restores the titles of the restaurants, it used a method that only let the same number of characters be used on the new titles, meaning, for example, Kentucky Fried Chicken had to be shortened to KentuckyFriedChickn. It also replaced some of the new building designs with new assets that replicate the look of the original, albeit imperfectly.
Now, a new mod has been released that aims to improve those shortcomings, coming to us from modders Silent and alexvgz, who created the original Dreamcast Restoration mod. Dubbed Dreamcast Restoration mod 2.0, the new mod fixes the issue in the location names, but more importantly, is able to accurately depict the buildings as they were in the original arcade version. This is because the assets for the original version still exist in this port, but were being wallpapered over with new ones. By disabling the code that told the game where to find the new assets, the original models appear unaltered. (It's worth noting that the Dreamcast Restoration mod does not restore the original Dreamcast music; it was deemed unnecessary since such a mod already exists.)
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