Brilliant arcade taxi racing and loud punk rock music in an unforgettable mash-up.

Story

A new trend is making waves around the city called the Crazy Taxi trend. It involves skilled taxi cabbies competing to make the most money from taxi customers in the least time. Not only does this result in lots of controversial driving techniques, but it seems the customers love every minute of it!

The Game

Crazy Taxi is an arcade racing game where you play as a cabby competing to make ‘crazy money’ within a specific set of time. The goal of the game is to make money and this is done through transporting the most customers, in the most stylish way, before time runs out.
Customers all over the city are waiting to be picked up and as a cabby you are free to choose whomever you want – the longer the destination, the more time and money you get. Once you have a customer, they will tell you where they want to go and it’s up to you to get there as fast as possible. You need to learn the layout of the city and it’s shortcuts. You can jump over other cars and make drifts through tight street corners, all of which earns you extra tip money. For each customer you deliver, you are given some extra time to find the next customer.

The more stunts you pull off and the more flawless your driving, the more money will you make. Customers will pay extra tips depending on how you pleased them – and they love sitting in the backseat as you make daring stunts, be it zigzagging between cars on the highway, jumping off of ramps, drifting or even driving on two wheels!
When performing tricks like this in a heavily trafficked city there’s always the risk of crashing into something – and while Crazy Taxi doesn’t care about damages to the car you’re pretty much free to live out your craziest stunts. Crashing will however break your stunt combos though, because the customers don’t like a cab that crashes. If you mess up seriously and fail to drop off the customer within the set time, they will quite literally tell you that “You suck!” and leave your cab without paying – and you certainly don’t want that to happen.

Content

You can play Crazy Taxi in a few different game modes. Arcade mode is where you play in the same city as seen in the original arcade version of the game. Original mode allows you to play in a brand new city specially designed for the Dreamcast version. Last but not least is the Crazy Box mode where you practice your driving skills in a series of mini games – there are nine different mini games to start you off and additional ones become unlocked when you reach a specific criteria. You can also set and save records in each of the mini games and compete on a high score table.

It should also be mentioned that the Arcade and Original modes can be played with some different rule sets, namely the original arcade rules where you are given some extra time for each customer you deliver, or you can choose to work for either 3, 5 or 10 minutes. Each mode has its own high score table, so no matter how you play, you get to compare your efforts and see your personal best scores.
On top of all these game modes you can also adjust some other options, like difficulty level and the amount of traffic present on the streets.

The Crazy Box mini games are a fun addition and really offers the game some extra lasting ability. They cover most aspects of crazy driving you need to master to reach the highest fares. Some of the mini games that are available are Crazy Jump where you try to make the longest possible jump from a huge ramp, Crazy Bound where you race on a peer, trying to not fall into the ocean and Crazy Jam where you must make your way through a crossing street at rush hour.

Before you start racing to earn money you get to select which driver you want to play. These are the four different characters you can choose to play as;

• Axel – a young wild guy best known for his cool attitude, band and skills in extreme sports.
• B.D Joe – an awesome drummer, but thinks that taxi driving is the ultimate way to please people.
• Gena – known as the cool and sexy chick who has the strongest passion for racing on traffic laden streets.
• Gus – best described as a 42-year-old gambler who enjoys life. He’s the one who started the whole Crazy Taxi trend.

The four drivers have their own custom-built taxi cabs, but the difference between how they play is if anything only subtle. To utilize the capacity of these fantastic vehicles you can perform some tricks like ‘Crazy Dash’ and ‘Crazy Drift’. These are special moves executed with various button combinations of the accelerator, brake and drive/reverse shifter. You would need to refer to the manual on how to execute them, and your success depends on your ability to be able to execute them consistently when needed. Luckily the special mini games in the Crazy Box mode are designed to practice and perfect these moves.

You aren’t completely left out in the dry when it comes to orienting through the city because as soon as you pick up a customer, you’ll get see a 3D arrow pointing towards the destination. This arrow, as helpful as it is doesn’t show you any shortcuts and can sometimes even be misleading. It doesn’t point to the destination ‘as the crow flies’, instead it shows the shortest legal road.
With all the high-speed racing and busy streets, you need to have quick reactions or you’ll be wasting precious time while recovering from a head-on crash.

The more you play the game, the better will you learn to the city layout. Soon enough you’ll be able to find your own way to the most common destinations, and that will save you many precious seconds. This basically makes your first few games futile to say the least, but that’s the challenge in this game. It should be said that this is a very hard game – you need to be very fast at what you’re doing if you want to become a real crazy driver.

Crazy Taxi has one of the coolest score counters I have ever seen. It looks like an old taxi fare meter, and shows your current earnings and your customer’s current fare. You’ll see your earnings being tallied to the fare in real-time as you make stunts and combos.
It’s also extra cool that after your game is over you are being rated on how well you did, and you’re also given a class license, rated from the worst ‘F’ to the best ‘S’. If you reach the S class, you’re considered to have beat the game and are rewarded an extra ending scene with a bonus song and a replay of highlights from your game together with the rolling credits. From here on out it’s about perfecting your high score and pushing your limits.

When playing this game, you’re guaranteed to witness some very insane stunts, but also some entirely weird happenings – for example when crashing hard into another car, you might see that it flips over, or your taxi might get stuck for a short while between two buildings (which in fact gives you lots of stunt bonus money!). These are minor bugs and shouldn’t break the game by any means.

Graphics

What really sets the visual style in Crazy Taxi is its incredibly fast frame rate and colorful scenery. The game is really fast and renders busy street traffic like we have never seen before.
There are some minor frame rate drops here and there, but generally the Dreamcast is pushing this heavy load with no problems. You’ll be driving through piles of boxes, through parks filled with pedestrians while dodging light poles and so on. The city is detailed and complete with beaches, trams, shops, restaurants, pavement cafés, suburbs, railroads, highway connections, subways, train tracks and so on. There’s much to explore if you want to find the fastest possible routes around the two cities that are featured in the game.

Sound

The soundtrack in Crazy Taxi is comprised of Bad Religion and The Offspring songs, and they fit into the game just perfectly. The song selection is nothing but perfect and certainly sets the tone of the game. If you are a fan of said bands, you’re sure to enjoy it even more – but either way it is an instant appeal. The sound effects are sweet too, and the voice acting can make anyone smile. You’ll also be treated with the customers feedback on how you drive – they’ll make exclamations and cheer you on, depending on the situation and while they can be a bit uncalled for they’re still nice to hear. It’s also cool to hear them say where they want to go, for example “Can you take me to the Kentucky Fried Chicken?”

Summary

Crazy Taxi is a fun, intense and refreshing arcade experience. It certainly lives up to its name and I absolutely recommend you to play it. It’s great to see that creative minds can mix something mundane as taxi driving with this extreme sports attitude and thus make a very original concept for a driving game. It’s fast paced and certainly not a Sunday school trip. The game has inspired a few sequels, but the original game still stands strong. This is one title on the Dreamcast that is simply too cool to miss.

Developed By: Hitmaker
Published By: Sega
Version Reviewed: Dreamcast
Genre: Racing
Players: 1
Also Available On: Arcade, Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Playstation Portable, Game Boy Advance, Game Cube, Wii, Xbox, Xbox 360, Windows PC
Released: 2000-02-25