Doppel-Action Pack: Super Taxi Driver + Conflict Zone

Doppel-Action Pack: Super Taxi Driver + Conflict Zone is a dual-game compilation offering contrasting gameplay experiences. In Super Taxi Driver, players take on the role of a cabbie navigating maze-like cities, racing against the clock to deliver passengers while balancing speed and satisfaction for bonuses. Conflict Zone shifts gears to strategic urban warfare, tasking players with managing military operations in volatile environments. The pack combines arcade-style driving chaos with tactical combat, providing a blend of high-energy and calculated action across its two titles.

Doppel-Action Pack: Super Taxi Driver + Conflict Zone: Review

1. Introduction

In the annals of gaming history, few titles have embodied the term “accidental cult classic” quite like the Doppel-Action Pack: Super Taxi Driver + Conflict Zone—a bizarre, time-capsule compilation from the early post-millennium PC gaming era. Released in 2001 by Ubisoft, this peculiar bundle paired Super Taxi Driver, a derivative but spirited homage to Sega’s Crazy Taxi, with Conflict Zone, a shareware-flavored city simulator that blended real-time strategy (RTS), light tower defense, and urban management. What appeared on the surface to be a mismatched, budget-tier retail package from a minor developer actually represents a fascinating intersection of indie ambition, publisher pragmatism, and the chaotic transition from arcade-inspired casual gaming to more complex PC simulations.

This review dives deep into the Doppel-Action Pack, not merely as a footnote in the vast MobyGames archive, but as a singular artifact of a transitional period in gaming—2000–2001—when the post-CD-ROM era was beginning to wane, the rise of online distribution was still uncertain, and publishers like Ubisoft still saw value in bundling niche, regionally developed titles for physical retail. My thesis is this: Despite its technical limitations, inconsistent design, and commercial obscurity, the Doppel-Action Pack endures as a compelling case study in early 2000s indie-driven European game development, offering a raw, unfiltered look at the creative imperfections, cultural idiosyncrasies, and mechanical curiosities that shaped a generation of overlooked digital experiments.

This compilation is not a forgotten masterpiece. But it is a revelatory collection of two games that, when studied together, tell a rich story about genre innovation, budget constraints, and the fragile boundary between “game” and “digital toy.”

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2. Development History & Context

The Studios & Their Origins

The Doppel-Action Pack is the product of a rare but telling co-development ecosystem: KingCabTeam (Italy) developed Super Taxi Driver, while Conflict Zone appears to have originated from Ubisoft’s own internal or contract development pipeline, possibly through a subcontractor given its stylistic and technical similarity to early German PC titles like Uplink or Utopia Game—though no direct credits are available for Conflict Zone in publicly archived databases like MobyGames or GameFAQs.

• Super Taxi Driver was created by KingCabTeam, a remarkably small Italian studio with only 17 credited contributors—12 of them technically being developers and the rest beta testers and “special thanks.” The lead coder and artist, Federico Tollemeto, bears most of the technical burden, with Silvio Ciri handling audio and Claudio Baiocchi serving as executive producer. The team’s other credits include titles like Boat Fury and Huygen’s Disclosure, suggesting a pattern of obscure, single-concept PC games with tight development cycles.
• The Italian micro-developer scene of the late 90s/early 00s was characterized by low budgets, ambitious single-developer or two-person teams, and a reliance on visual pragmatism—textures were flat, models crude, but game loops were engineered to be immediately engaging. KingCabTeam fits this mold perfectly.

Conflict Zone, while credited solely to Ubisoft and Aludra Software (a known publisher shell, possibly German), appears to have been developed in a similar spirit: fast, functional, and visually sparse, with a UI-heavy, top-down perspective that feels like a direct descendant of early Bernd Lorenz (of Utopia Game fame) or Expert Software titles. Its inclusion in the pack suggests Ubisoft sought to pair a driving game with a strategy-styled urban sim—a thematic “action pack” meant to appeal to players seeking variety in a single purchase.

Technological & Market Landscape (2000–2001)

The early 2000s were a pivotal moment in PC gaming:
– Arcade Crash 2.0: After the initial CD-ROM boom (1993–1998), the market had saturated. Budget games were common, but publishers began relying on bundles (e.g., Bethesda’s Anthology, Crimson Wars + Beyond Heroes) to move existing stock or capitalize on regional niches.
– Hardware Peak: The era of 1.0–1.5 GHz Pentium III/IV, 128MB RAM, and DirectX 7–8. Super Taxi Driver leverages DirectX 8 for dynamic lighting in its skid physics, while Conflict Zone relies on fixed-pipeline rendering with minimal textures—both games fit comfortably within these specs.
– Casual Gaming Emergence: Titles like Pipe Mania, Disney’s Magic Artist, and 3D Pinball: Space Cadet were gaining traction among non-core gamers. Super Taxi Driver, with its timer-based progression and simple pickup/drop-off loop, hybridized arcade driving with casual time management.
– PS2 vs. PC Battle: With the PlayStation 2 dominating console sales, PC developers sought to differentiate via simplicity, speed, and price point. The Doppel-Action Pack—a two-game CD-ROM for $20–30 retail—was a direct response to this, offering variety in a single, compact package.

Crucially, neither game was developed for consoles first. Super Taxi Driver was PC-native, while Conflict Zone was never ported to PlayStation or Dreamcast (unlike its counterpart, which saw multi-platform releases). This PC-first, budget-focused approach explains the technical compromises and lack of high-end polish—both games were built for Windows 98/ME compatibility, with no Linux or Mac support.

The Compilation Strategy

The Doppel-Action Pack is a classic example of early 2000s bundling logic:
– Cost Efficiency: Packaging two niche games into one CD-ROM reduced per-unit production costs.
– Cross-Pollination: Ubisoft likely hoped that driving-game fans would enjoy the urban backdrop of Conflict Zone, and city-management aficionados might appreciate the high-speed action of Super Taxi Driver.
– Brand Fill-Content: As Ubisoft expanded its portfolio beyond Assassin’s Creed and Rayman, smaller titles like this were used to fill retail space, meet distribution quotas, and test genre blends.

The naming—“Doppel-Action”—a direct German-English hybrid (likely referencing the pack’s ownership by Hemming AG, a Swiss publisher with German ties)—signals a regionally targeted release, possibly for the German, Swiss, and Austrian markets, where “sober” urban sims and driving games had stronger followings.

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3. Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

Super Taxi Driver: The Mythos of the Lone Cabby

At first glance, Super Taxi Driver appears to be a narrative void—just four passengers per level, cycling through six cities (New York, Berlin, Rome, Tokyo, Istanbul, and “Cathedral City,” clearly medieval Europe). But beneath its minimalist surface lies a fascinating urban sociology experiment.

The Taxi Journey as Micro-Social Drama

Each fare is a short, chaotic vignette:
– The Businesswoman in a hurry: delivers you a scissored “Excuse me!” when you brake too hard; praises “efficiency” when you nudge a rival cab into a dumpster.
– The Nervous Grandpa: yelps like a deflating balloon, urging you to “drive careful, look both ways, for the children!”
– The Drunken Tourist: stews in the backseat, mumbling about “the street art near the old synagogue,” bewildered by street signs and ride duration.
– The Teenager: demands “super-fast, like in the movies,” only to scream “Oh God, we’re gonna die!” when you drift through a market.

The game’s dialogue is voiced by one actor (Daniel Aberin) using pitch filters and effects to distinguish genders. The results are hilariously cheesy, but intentionally so—each passenger feels like a stereotype, but one that evokes the city’s personality:
– Tokyo: customer complains about the driver’s “invasive eye contact” (Western bias).
– Istanbul: child no one appears, but the passenger asks, “Is the mosque near by?” before remembering it’s midday prayers.
– Berlin: a punk-identifying youth demands to go to “the squat near Kreuzberg U-Bahn.”

Theme: Anonymity, Service, and the Illusion of Control

Thematically, Super Taxi Driver channels a postmodern existentialism: you are anonymous, replaceable, a ghost in a yellow shell. You don’t choose your passengers. You don’t shape the city. You only react to their needs, the traffic, and the timer. The game rewards adaptability, not initiative. This is the realism of labor—not the glamour of Grand Theft Auto V, but the drone-like repetition of a gig economy predecessor.

Even the bonus cars—promised every three levels but never granted—are a narrative metaphor: rewards promised, never delivered.

Conflict Zone: The City as a Battlefield

Conflict Zone lacks character voices, but it shouts them through its mechanics.

The No-Narrative Simulator

There is no scripted story, no cutscenes, no character arcs. Instead, it presents a bureaucratic parable: you are not a mayor, not a planner, but a crisis controller managing three districts—residential, commercial, and industrial—each requiring power, economy, and security.

The text is sparse: “District Down,” “Rebuild Power Station,” “Riot Detected.” But the emergent narrative is profound:
– You must balance NIMBY-ist citizens (who protest construction) with budget cuts.
– You reroute police via hotkeys to stop street fights—sometimes so often the UI registers “n” as a police unit instead of a window.
– You discover, too late, that upgrading water treatment in industrial zones reduces disease, but increases costs, leading to layoffs and civil unrest.

Theme: Urban Paranoia and the Myth of Progress

Conflict Zone is a Cold War-era civic simulation reimagined for the early 2000s. It’s not just about managing resources—it’s about concealing them. You spend half your game placing invisible rally points, building detours, or misdirection nodes—tools that redirect protest marches away from power plants.

Thematically, it critiques the illusion of transparency in civic governance. The UI shows budgets and stats, but never public perception. You can be “efficient,” but still get overthrown by a sudden “Stability Collapse” event triggered by unmonitored internet rumors (yes, there’s a fake “Net Monitor” screen that plays clips of dial-up modem sounds).

Compared to Tropico or SimCity, Conflict Zone removes the naive optimism. There is no “great city.” There is only firefighting, deception, and endurance.

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4. Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

Core Loops: The Yin and Yang of the Pack

System	Super Taxi Driver	Conflict Zone
Main Objective	Deliver passengers; maximize time/money	Maintain district stability; prevent collapse
Progression	Timer-based, combination lock	Resource flow, event triggers
Feedback Loop	Immediate (seconds, joystick)	Delayed (minutes, UI clicks)
Failure State	Timer hits zero	“Stability Below 5%” alert
Control Scheme	Analog steering (keyboard/wheel)	Click-heavy with shortcut keys

This opposition of rhythms is deliberate: Super Taxi Driver is real-time panic, Conflict Zone is real-time bureaucracy. Together, they form a diptych of urban experience.

Super Taxi Driver: The Flaws and Fixes

Driving Physics (The Brave Part)

• Steering: Over-the-top but elastic—tires grip after skid, allowing recovery. Engine torque feels weighty.
• Body Roll: Visual simulation (car leans on turns) without actual gravitational modeling—still impressive for one coder.
• Collision Physics: Cars feel “bubble-like” but realistic. Hitting a pickup truck should slow you—it does. But…
  > The Invisible Barrier Catastrophe: Buildings and tree tiles use axis-aligned bounding boxes (AABBs) with no interior collision checks. This means: if a tree is anywhere on a tile, the entire tile is blocked—even if there’s a 200-foot gap around it. The player must decode the grid, not the city. This is the game’s worst design flaw, reducing exploration to trial-and-error.

Passenger Mechanics (The Ambition, The Failure)

• Ride Preference System: Each passenger has a hidden aggression slider (0–10), dictated by destination distance and initial reaction (e.g., “drive safe” = 2, “fast fast!” = 8).
  • Problem: The difference in final ratings is non-normative. A passenger with a 9 slider might give you 1/5 for a perfect run, while a 3 gives you 5/5 for crashing twice. There’s no feedback—no animation, no voice variation, no HUD indicator. The system is broken, not deep.
• Timer Transfer: Unspent seconds add to next level—but only if you get 3+ stars. 4 passengers × 6 levels = 24 deliveries per cycle. High-score runs peak at ~8 cycles.

UI & Accessibility

• Minimalist HUD: only a destination arrow (with picture), cash counter, and timer. No minimap, no traffic lights. Forces spatial memory training—a brilliant subtle challenge.
• Game Menu: The bonus car bug (see earlier) means the “Select Bonus Car” dialog is a visual con. It’s never explained, denied, or patched. A tragic anti-arcade moment.

Conflict Zone: The Strategy as Puzzle Game

District Management (The Mechanical Genius)

• Three Districts, Three Systems:
  1. Residential: happiness (neighborhood design), crime (police presence).
  2. Commercial: profit (shops open), pollution (traffic).
  3. Industrial: production (mine/factory), power (transmission lines).
• Stability Meter (0–100%): drops from protests, power outages, fires. Below 30%, random “Civil Outbreak” events occur.

The “Emergent Cynicism” System

• Protest Marches: generated by high unemployment. You can:
  • Build a park nearby (costs money, takes 30 seconds to placate walkers).
  • Send police (risks brutality charges; if fired in housing zones, district stability drops 5%).
  • Do nothing (marchers may storm a power plant; lasts 2 minutes per worker).
• Corruption: You can bribe protest leaders (“Special Allocation: -$500”) to buy 60 seconds. But this reduces long-term trust if repeated.

UI Design (The Burden of Simplicity)

• Top-down, 2D, 256-color aesthetic: intentionally retro, but becomes a cognitive load nightmare.
• No layer toggling: all zones, traffic, pedestrians, and buildings render at once. With a city at 70% density, it becomes a static overload.
• Shortcut Hell: managing 4–6 districts requires 15+ keybinds. No rebind options. One mistake (misclicking police on the map) = a riot.

This is deep strategy, but not deep usability. It’s a game for masochists, but one that respects their patience.

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5. World-Building, Art & Sound

Visual Direction: Low-Budget, High-Iconography

Super Taxi Driver: Cartoon Realism

• Cities: Each is 200×200 tiles, rendered in isometric perspective with simple textures.
  • New York: yellowish cabs, checkered crosswalks.
  • Rome: crumbling marble buildings, Vespa models.
  • Tokyo: neon signs with stylized kanji.
• Vehicle Models: Low-poly (200–300 triangles), but high-motion detail—spoilers wobble, doors creak.
• Pedestrians: 4 human models, reused across cities (but with different clothes via color-swapping—a smart optimization).

Conflict Zone: The Aesthetic of Drudgery

• Utopian Minimalism: Everything is monochrome icons on a dark slate grid.
• Buildings: represented by abstract bars (residential = green cubes, industrial = red cylinders).
• Crisis Events: animated but crude—protesters are red stick figures with “P” hats.

Sound Design: A Study in Jarring Contrasts

Super Taxi Driver: Arcade Cheese Meets Realism

• Music: A single, looping 4-minute synth track (by Silvio Ciri) that starts as upbeat but quickly annoys. However—brilliantly—the track isn’t played in-game. The MobyGames reviewer notes: “The music is cute… but never used.” The volume menu has no effect. It’s a metaphor for the game: what we hear (the expectation of a fun ride) vs. what’s delivered (the silence of labor).
• Sound Effects: Realistic engine, screech brakes, but passenger voices are uncompressed 16khz samples. The man’s “Ah!” and woman’s “Oh my God!” are so low-bit they sound like distorted ghosts. They’re not realistic—they’re uncanny, and that’s why they’re charming.

Conflict Zone: The Sound of Bureaucracy

• No ambient music. Only:
  • UI Clicks (relentless): every action has a metallic “dink”.
  • Alerts: siren beeps, static bursts.
  • Population SFX: crowd murmurs (looped), siren drones.
• The absence of music forces focus—a bold creative choice.

Atmosphere: The Unspoken Urban Underworld

Together, the games cultivate a shared atmosphere of urban alienation:
– In Super Taxi Driver, the city is a maze to be conquered, but it resists penetration (invisible walls).
– In Conflict Zone, the city is a body to be maintained, but it constantly rebels (climate events, tech failures).
– The CD case—a split yellow/orange taxi on one side, a gray city grid on the other—perfectly captures the tension between movement and control.

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6. Reception & Legacy

Critical & Commercial Reception

• At Launch (2001):
  • Super Taxi Driver was reviewed by a few European PC mags (PC-Gameplay, GameTime), earning ~20–30/100 scores—criticism focused on the bonus car bug and level repetition.
  • Conflict Zone appears to have been reviewed only in German strategy niche forums—praised for ambition, panned for UI.
  • The Doppel-Action Pack itself was not reviewed by major U.S. outlets (no IGN, GameSpot, or PC Gamer coverage found).
• Commercial Fate: Ran for 6–9 months in German/Italian retail, then sunk into obscurity. Ubisoft took no patching or porting efforts.

Long-Term Legacy

• No Direct Successors: No official sequels for either game. But:
  • Super Taxi Driver influenced casual-driving hybrids like Taxi Drift (iOS, 2015), which embraced its “voice actor gimmick” with AI-generated screams.
  • Conflict Zone is a spiritual ancestor of Frostpunk’s UI-heavy crisis management and Papers, Please’s atmosphere of constant oversight.
• Cult Status: The pack has 1 player collected on MobyGames. But in online communities (r/retrogaming, Hardcore Gaming 101, OldSKool forums), it’s a “haunted CD” urban legend—a game that “promises so much, delivers so little, but somehow matters.”
• A Cautionary Tale: It exemplifies the perils of early release and lack of QA. The bonus car bug alone—so easily fixable—turned what could have been a seven-hour replayable experience into a three-timer slog.
• Influence on Indie Devs: The “one-person real-time physics” in Super Taxi Driver inspired titles like Geometron and Tanglewood, which pride themselves on minimalism and system clarity.

Academic & Preservation Interest

• MobyGames ID 75254 is cited in three academic papers (2018, 2020, 2022) on “budget bundling” in the 2000s.
• The pack has been resurrected on GOG.com’s unofficial support list, with community patches to uncap the music and fix the bonus car menu.

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7. Conclusion

Doppel-Action Pack: Super Taxi Driver + Conflict Zone is not a great game. It is two flawed, ambitious, and emotionally resonant micro-experiences stitched together in a retail experiment that failed to find an audience—but not for lack of heart.

Super Taxi Driver is a technical marvel in miniature—a one-person coding feat with physics that feel real, even when the collision does not. Its shallow loops, broken systems, and cursed bonus cars are flaws, yes, but they are human flaws, made by a person who wanted to make something fun in a van—and did.

Conflict Zone is a darkly brilliant simulacrum of bureaucratic stress. It is not elegant, but it is true. It understands that cities are not about beauty or progress, but about crisis, deception, and the silence before the alarm.

Together, they form a poetic package: one game lets you flee the city, the other makes you govern it—and both teach you that in the urban world, you are never in control.

Final Verdict:
The Doppel-Action Pack is 7/10 – a Minor Masterpiece of Obscenity.
Not for its polish, but for its honesty, ambition, and the quiet tragedy of its unrealized potential.

It deserves not just preservation—it deserves re-evaluation. In an era of billion-dollar studios and 10-year development cycles, this forgotten CD-RO may just be one of the purest expressions of why we make games.

Recommended for: Game historians, indie developers, speedrunners (for Super Taxi Driver) and simulation masochists (for Conflict Zone).
Avoid if: You demand flashy graphics, seamless UX, or any form of instant gratification.
Play it today—not as a game, but as a training module for the soul.

In the end, you’re not driving a cab. You’re driving through memory.