Emergency: Call Ambulance

Sega’s 1999 Emergency Call Ambulance is a perfect footnote for what the arcade would become. Released alongside Crazy Taxi that same year, it has the same basic gameplay: Drive very fast under a time limit-in this case to get the patient to the hospital as quickly as possible. Looking at it and Crazy Taxi (which was reviewed much more positively) shows the obsolescence of arcade machines by this point: By now consoles could deliver effectively the same experience at home, so arcades had to sell elaborate experiences unrelated to the actual game.

This is something I’d still have spent money on to pass time. But it’s one of those ‘post-1945 propeller fighters’ that had the problem of simply being too late. Besides, it has a pet Dalmatian that accompanies one patient and gives a subtitled thank-you speech in dog. How can you not like that.