SPACE TAXI - R-Type

A lovely loading screen

Seventeen years ago I wrote a review of Wizard Of Wor, a ZX Spectrum conversion of the C64 version of the arcade hit.  I commented on the fact that it was a well loved C64 game, and this version finally plugged a gap in the Speccy line-up that the Commodorks had been teasing us about since 1983.

I expected Space Taxi to be the same.  There's an ugly but loved C64 game of this name, and it doesn't seem out of the realms of possibility that the Spectrum could handle a version.  There was a different game for the ZX81 called Space Taxi - which is very CCSCGC material, being a type in from the book Not Only 30 Programs for the Sinclair ZX81 1K.[1]

Space Taxi, by Dave Hughes isn't related to any of the previous Space Taxi games.

I'll let Dave explain the plot.

The game fills the screen with stars to avoid, then populates it with planets and your destination.  The first sign of pending crapness is the uncomfortable wait for the stars to be drawn...

Get used to this view

Then, you'll be guiding your pixel (it's winking, so you know where it is) to the green/white flashing square using good old Q,A,O and P.

Avoid the obstacles, avoid your trail.  So far so light cycle.

Once you get there, it's onto the next level.  More stars, more planets, a new name.  And it's all 'Proc-gen' (as the cool kids say), or Random with a defined random number seed (as no-one says).

But as the title page reminded us Speccy RND ain't very random.[2]

... so by the time you reach level 12, you're starting to see the patterns in The Matrix...

My god, it's full of stars! [3]

The actual game-proper is entertaining enough, with your pixel-craft beeping its way though the firmament.  The line you leave behind is probably a chem-trail, and that's why you can't crash into it safely.  The destination you must get to FLASHes Green/White.  And is square.  So it's probably a Borg Cube with its hazard lights going, illegally parked whilst squashing some futile resistance.

Elafris Nero.  It's Space Taxi's Lave [4].

Upon reaching your destination another moment of crapness rears its head.  Or it might.  For there is an off-by-one error in the programming, and rather than needing to get to the Borg ship, you actually have to get to the one pixel up from the Borg ship, and crashing into the lowest pixel of the green flashing square doesn't count.  Meaning you can do this...

I skimmed the edge of the Borg, and didn't drop of my Taxi customer.

But eventually we get to our destination, or we crash and try again.  With infinite levels, it'll certainly take you a fair while to see them all.  Though by level 100 it's taking an age to draw the star field, and it's very ... stripey.

 Space, is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is.

In its favour, Space Taxi is very slick.  It responds well to the QAOP keys.  It error traps for you entering a pilot name that's too long.  It even has one UDG, that I won't spoil here; it's used in the transition from the intro screen to the game proper.  I enjoyed the absurdity of that being the place the one bit of graphical prettiness is used.

But on the crap-side of the scale is the fact that it's basically Snake without the end of the tail moving.  It's Tron Light Cycles.  It's not far from an Etch-a-Sketch.

TAXI DRIVER

Like Boxcar Bertha is to Scorsese, this also
probably isn't Dave Hughes's crowning glory.

BIG YELLOW TAXI

For no good reason Space Taxi is still
 quite likeable, even if it's more Amy Grant
than Joni.

TAXI [5]

Like the cast, the ideas here have done
better and bigger things elsewhere.

SPECIAL AWARD FOR MAKING ME MOVE A PIXEL FROM ONE PLACE TO ANOTHER PLACE

SUMMING UP

Space Taxi is likeable despite itself.  It's painfully simple, and doesn't even quite do what it's trying to do perfectly... but there's a strange pleasure in seeing what name it spits out on each level, repeatedly performing a very simple task and the comedically long wait for the sky to populate.  Somehow it is all weirdly charming and rather hypnotic.

Download it here.

[1] I bought this book when it was released - as I only had a lowly 1K ZX81.  (Though I did borrowed a 16K Rampack for a weekend, once.)  It's a great book, and there are some neat tricks to write very svelte BASIC, as well as other tips and routines.  Published by Melbourne House when they used to do that kind of thing.  If they'd just put out the educational books, Hobbit, Exploding Fist, Starion, Sherlock and Wham! Music Box they'd have been the best software publishing house ever.  Unfortunately their actual roster is far more diluted with 'meh' titles.  

[2] The ZX Spectrum BASIC manual has my favourite illustration of this in chapter 16:  

Run this program

  10 POKE 22527+RND*704, RND*127

  20 GO TO 10

Never mind how this works; it is changing the colours of squares on the television screen and the RNDs should ensure that this happens randomly. The diagonal stripes that you eventually see are a manifestation of the hidden pattern in RND - the pattern that makes it pseudorandom instead of truly random. 

I love 'Never mind how this works' as a sentence in a manual.  It's a great mantra whenever you've solved a problem, but can't quite figure out why.  I'm also a fan of the phrase 'the hidden pattern in RND' evokes this really early XKCD post, or Carl Sagan's Contact. 

[3] Famously a line that's not actually in the film version of 2001.  And in this game the title screen says that the full stops are stars, so the single pixels are ... quarters of stars?  What's a quarter of a star?  The diameter of the sun is just less than 1.4 million Km, apparently the diameter of the pulsar with the catchy name PSR B0943+10 is just 5.2Km.  I walked more than that yesterday.  And the NHS reckon I could learn to run that far in just 9 weeks.  Admittedly the 2000 light years to get to the star would be a little more challenging. 

[4] Lave, the starting planet in Elite.  I've spent far too long reading about the procedurally generated name stuff in Elite, which is why this review is so behind schedule.  When I was playing Elite back in 1985 I pronounced it as the rather pretentious Lar-vay, and it always made me think of the French verb 'to wash'... And now I'm thinking about Alan Tudyk's character in Firefly.  Of course Firefly on the ZX Spectrum was a technical marvel, but obviously unrelated to the telly series 14 years later, but if there had been a ZX Spectrum game of the series, it'd basically have been Elite, but you'd start with the legal status 'Offender' rather than 'Clean'.  And a beepy rendition of the country music theme song. 

[5] I mean the telly series with Christopher Lloyd, Danny DeVito and Andy Kaufman.  And others.  I don't remember it very well, but good grief its theme tune [6] was utterly amazing. There was also the French film Taxi (1998) which I have on DVD but haven't watched yet.  Care to list some of your favourite French Films, Andy?  Why yes!  Yes I would.  Amelie, Delicatessen, I Lost My Body, The Big Blue, OSS117 Cairo: Nest Of Spies, Jour De Fete, Mon Oncle, Playtime, Monsier Hulot's Holiday, The Artist.  Arguably the last five are not very language dependent really.  Do watch The Artist with intertitles in a language you can understand though.  I accidentally bought the French DVD not considering this point.

[6] 'Angela' by Bob James.  He's currently 84 and still great.  This is from earlier this year.  Bob, like Humphrey Bogart, Rod Serling and Annie Lennox was born on Christmas Day.  And about 1/365 of the population of the world.