Welcome to the C.A.V.E.

Excuse the mess while I’m reimagining and rebuilding this site. C.A.V.E. is a place for me and some friends to be amateur video game journalists, researchers and historians. Apart from quite a few game critiques, you will also find other interesting, in-depth articles. All C.A.V.E. authors have been addicted to electronic gaming for many years, feel passionate about this hobby of theirs and know their way around it.

There are countless videogame websites and magazines on the web. You’ll find that C.A.V.E.‘s views and writing differ considerably from most other sites, professional and amateur alike, in several ways.

• We target a mature audience. Sounds hackneyed and maybe a bit stuck-up, but most mainstream publications and sites tend to focus on shortlived trends, the latest graphics demo to show off with, and macho orgies of violence and gore. All of which you probably don’t really care about unless you’re a pubescent boy.
• We don’t consider games to be a purely feature-driven product. Sure, a game should be competently produced. But what really decides whether you will grow to love a game are its story, characters, game world, atmosphere, visual style, soundtrack, and emotional impact. Technical aspects should matter only insofar as they support these elements.
• That’s also why we don’t give out ultra-fine-grained ratings, or pit and rank games against each other. This isn’t comparing toasters. Games are independent works of art that cater to different tastes. Journalists intuitively understand this for music, films or books—why not games?
• We don’t really care about the age or popularity of games. Their true qualities are timeless. Most C.A.V.E. authors are even particularly interested in old and underrated titles. In fact, you will probably have found us because we wrote about a game almost no one else did. Frankly, we think this makes us a more interesting read. There are more than enough sites covering all the latest, overhyped AAA releases.

C.A.V.E. is part underdog review site, part Abandonware museum (without the illegal downloads), part tribute to all the gems and duds of electronic gaming history. But much of what it’ll be will yet have to emerge and evolve. I hope it turns out to be something you’ll enjoy reading.

Crazy Taxi (1999)

[THIS IS A PLACEHOLDER ARTICLE] By the mid to late 1990s, the arcade game industry was in a deep crisis. In the face of increased competition from the home computer and console markets, manufacturers mostly stuck to well-known and trusted recipes for lightgun shooters, rhythm, fighting, and racing games. Meanwhile in 1998, Sega turned its in-house development studios into wholly-owned subsidiaries. This new independence made for greater creative liberty, which allowed Sega studios to bring something entirely unexpected to the arcade market: new ideas. One of them, Crazy Taxi, not only brought new life into the driving game genre and high-score-chasing arcade gameplay itself. Its style makes it one of the last true crossover success stories in arcade videogames, and its design had a noticeable impact on what came after.