Does anybody know what caused this oddity?

4 years ago I was playing my PS2 copy of SHAR in level 2. I was near the tunnel when a taxi spawned with it's headlights on. Soon every second Taxi in level 2 spawned like this. I assume 2 taxis are spawned in the level at any given time so that's why sometimes they appeared without headlights on.


I know the image quality is kinda bad since I took this using my phone. But that is a taxi with it's headlights on in L2 near the stadium if I remember correctly.

On a different note, did anyone else with a PS2 copy ever call a car from a phonebooth and have it spawn with glitched textures? My disc was pretty scratched up since I've had my copy from I was around the age of 7 so maybe that's why.

That's highly unusual and interesting. I don't think that's supposed to be able to happen; as far as I'm aware head/tail lights are hardcodedly either enabled or disabled for every vehicle at a time in any given level, and certainly disabled in Level 2. It would make sense to me that the game might store localised "enabled" variables for both sets of lights for every currently active vehicle even if they'd never be used individually (just as part of the vehicle management system), however I've no idea how that variable would end up modified during gameplay without hacks. Perhaps there's an obscure bug or detail, potentially only within some versions of the game even. I'd love to know.

On a different note, did anyone else with a PS2 copy ever call a car from a phonebooth and have it spawn with glitched textures? My disc was pretty scratched up since I've had my copy from I was around the age of 7 so maybe that's why.

I believe that's indeed a known issue with PlayStation 2 copies of the game played via aging/damaged discs. I've seen screenshots of such before, but never the same for the GameCube or Xbox versions. The PlayStation 2's disc reading process and slow timing is known to have caused Radical a large amount of trouble during the production of their The Simpsons games, and Hit & Run in particular has to contend with a lot of "dynamic" loading of assets whenever they're needed, such as Phone Booth player vehicles. It's possible that on PlayStation 2 their loading system is optimised for speed in a way that sacrifices some accuracy or verification when reading the data, sometimes resulting in corrupted textures (given how vehicles are stored I think it would make sense, if optimising the load process at all, to compromise specifically on image quality/verification and nothing else, at least by the standards held back then).

For context, when a car disappears from your POV, it just gets teleported (and repaired/recolored if needed) somewhere in front of you. You can see this happening if you give the nuclear waste barrel to a traffic car in L7's later missions.

I have a very unbased answer on this & I believe the car might've done that right as it swerved & flashed it's lights, causing the lights to stay on when it teleported.

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Ooh that actually would make alot of sense. Never considered that.

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Oh interesting. I wasn't aware other people knew about the corrupt looking car textures in the PS2 version. I usually get it to occur by calling the same car repeatedly from the phone booth. I used to think this glitch was so cool as a kid lol

If it was an obscure detail with the taxis then maybe it was a remnant of a partially unused idea where car headlights would turn on when going through the tunnel by the stadium in L2. Though maybe this isn't the case. I've been playing the PS2 version of SHAR since I was really young and I don't recall seeing this ever happening any other time.