Smashing Drive was originally an arcade game. Namco made an absurd decision to port the game to the GameCube -- a decision they probably won’t make again. While Namco has produced some top-quality games, you won’t find a single quality feature in this game.

Smashing Drive is nothing like Crazy Taxi. The only similarity between the two games is you are a taxi driver -- that’s it. In Smashing Drive you do not drive around to find someone to take to their appointed destination. Instead, at the beginning of the race you already have a passenger, and you have to drive through the city, avoiding traffic along the way, and reach the checkpoints before the allotted time runs out. The game is essentially a slow-paced dodging traffic racing game. Throughout the entire “race,” you cannot get the maximum speed most of the time because you must avoid the traffic on the streets, and when you do reach maximum speed you’ll likely notice it is pretty slow. On the positive side, your taxi is a massive defensive piece of metal, so it can pulverize the cars in your way.

A lot of the time the checkpoints may seem like they are nearly impossible to reach before time runs out. The reason is simple: there are quite a lot of shortcuts in the game. Thus, the game often requires you to take shortcuts to get away from the heavy traffic. Some of the shortcuts are decent to take and cut a lot of time. A lot of shortcuts are unique, but overall most of them are pretty difficult to spot. Another way to cut time is by getting the power-ups spread through out the races. There are only a few power-ups to actually find, and generally they play trivial roles to getting the passenger to his or her destination. My favorite power-up was the horn attack, which demolishes everything around your car, clearing your path for the most part.

The best way to describe the game is short, easy, and boring. The game features a few difficulty levels, and all of them seem pretty repetitive (I think they might even be the same levels). Even the hard races are not hard -- all you have to do is race a few times to find the shortcut you need to take, and that may not even be needed. Playing multiplayer -- which is the same thing as single but with two players -- offers about as much fun as watching infomercials at 4 A.M. in the morning.

If the game should have been on any system it should have been the Nintendo 64. The perfect indication of this is simplistic: just look at the game. The cars are blocky and the textures are so below bland that it’s pitiful (possibly painful) to look at on the GameCube. Pedestrians on the street look like paper, something usually not seen except in sports games. The “blockyness” of the graphics really hurts the game -- it must have been a direct port from the arcade.

It’s kind of difficult to say which is worse: graphics or sound. Both are terrible, no doubt, but the sound is just awful. There seems to be like 3 songs in the entire game, and all of them have a similar sound. Don’t even try to follow the lyrics unless you want to burst into laughs. Sound effects are no better -- crashes are nothing fancy and that’s about all the sound effects you’ll be getting besides the horn.

To round things off: what was Namco thinking? The game is awful in all aspects. Smashing Drive offers nothing but poor gameplay, terrible graphics, and bad sound. The game is not worthy of being bought, let alone worth a few quarters in an arcade. The only way this game would be any fun is if I was paid a lot to play it.