(Review) Crazy Taxi for the Sega Dreamcast

It never ceases to amaze me how certain video games can sound absolutely awful on paper, yet manage to be something truly fun through a unique approach. Hey kids, want to drive around in San Francisco traffic picking up taxi passengers? No? I can assure you that you’ll want to once you realize it’s a Crazy Taxi. Mundanity can be solved by sprinkling the right amount of “extreme” over a boring idea and refining it into something new, and that’s exactly what Sega did with this 1999 arcade masterpiece. Crazy Taxi puts you behind the driver seat of a high-octane yellow death machine that is seemingly street legal AND made from rubber, and everyone in town can’t get enough of it. In the year 2000, Crazy Taxi came home via the nearly perfect Sega Dreamcast port which went on to be one of the best-selling games of all time for the console.

Crazy Taxi often gets called a “racing” or “score attack” game when it’s really a genre onto itself: Taxi game. Sure, there are four wheels and a timer but that’s where any genre similarities come to an end. The game play loop is simple: you’re one of four unique taxi drivers trying to collect as much fare from customers as possible within the set time limit. Though the game presents itself as a car ride from point A to point B, it quickly reveals itself to be much deeper and chaotic than any cab ride across town should be. As soon as you start a round, you’ll be presented with a countdown timer for your overall game session. When you pick up a customer, a second timer immediately starts running down and that’s how long you have before your customer ditches the ride. What is tricky about these two separate clocks is that you’re only given just enough time to get to the customer to the destination. If you drop off the person super quickly, you will get a time bonus that adds to the overall session timer. You’re usually started with 3 minutes as your initial game time, but it’s essential that you keep stacking on more bonus time to keep the game going. Speed isn’t the only objective in this game, as you’re also being judged by how much money you’ve made once your game clock runs out. In Crazy Taxi, money acts the way points would in other games. The flat cash rates from destination A to B won’t yield enough cash to leave a mark on the scoreboard, so you’re tasked with pulling off crazy stunts that will increase the tip multiplier and ultimately pay out more towards your total.

The stunt system presents a fantastic risk/reward scenario where you could totally screw up your multiplier or your run altogether, but your stunt can also be the shortcut that puts your run above the rest. For example, you can use a hill to launch yourself in the air, but you might not know what is waiting for you at the bottom of the hill, and you better hope it isn’t one of San Francisco’s iconic cable cars. To get the multiplier going, you’ll find yourself drifting around corners, narrowly avoiding traffic, and jumping over other cars. You can string your stunts together in a combo to increase the final tip amount, but your combo will reset if you strike another vehicle. This may sound like a lot to balance at once, but it all happens so fast that you’ll hardly realize that you’re multitasking. The people you pick up in your cab are all adrenaline junkies, as they’ll be cheering and encouraging your insane behavior on from the back seat when they aren’t shouting at you from the street. Not all cab rides are created equal, as there are long trips, medium trips, and short trips. Potential customers will have a colored circle around them that indicates how far away their destination is and you can plan your routes and strategies accordingly. On top of all of the chaos going on, your car and the other cars on the road aren’t really capable of getting in to car wrecks. You can (and will) crash into other people, but you sort of bounce instead of crumble like in other games, making for an almost pinball-like experience at times. Crazy Taxi demands that the player balances all these tiny, codependent systems together in order to achieve a high score, but also remains casual enough that you can have a total blast not knowing the mechanics very well. Crazy taxi manages to be one of the few arcade games that is respectful of your time while also being super approachable, understandable, and fair.

(Gus has good taste in wheels, and he knows it)

So, Crazy Taxi is a very technically sound game but what else makes it special? The cartoonish yet realistic approach to gameplay. I think that Crazy Taxi perfects an odd balance between realism and cartoon action in a way that isn’t usually seen in vehicle-based games. Each of the drivers have a “taxified” classic car based off real vehicles like Gus’s 1949 Mercury Eight, or Gena’s ’65 For Mustang. These cars are realistic in the sense that they look the part and will handle relatively like you’d expect them to in real life, yet you’re able to pull off cartoonish stunts like drifting in to a KFC’s front door on purpose for a time bonus. Yes, that is correct: KFC is a prominent destination in this game as well as other real-life businesses such as Pizza Hut and the Levi’s Jean store. There are cartoonishly insane stunts in this game, but you must find a somewhat realistic means to pull them off. For example, you can’t find a ramp that just happens to be in the road like you’d expect from a video game, you must instead find a tow truck with its bed angled upwards to launch yourself. If you can’t find a ramp, a staircase might do or even flinging yourself down a San Francisco hill will work even better. It seems odd at first that an outwardly “crazy” game would think of such seemingly benign details, but I think that they are very important to the strategy and overall design of the game. Crazy Taxi seems to have a soft rule of “if you can see it, you can drive to it” in the game, which encourages exploration for those who might be curious. With games of this era, you’d never assume that you could drive through subway tunnels or in the ocean because those are usually flat features set at the end of a map, but crazy taxi allows you to do these things. Driving through a subway tunnel is one of the higher risk/reward shortcuts in this game because you never know what’s coming towards you at the end of a dark tunnel, but it can also be very beneficial if you know what you’re doing. The game lets you do insane things but wants the insanity to feel like it’s a natural element within San Francisco’s landscape and I think this game pulled it off perfectly.  

Further boosting this games charm factor is the map design, representing a fictionalized San Francisco. This city is the perfect choice to base the map on because it’s naturally such a crazy city with its nearly 38 notoriously steep hills mixed in with other urban geography staples. Never is there a dead end or an area where traffic bottlenecks, making the map layout flow together so perfectly. Any cabbie worth their salt would have their city memorized down to an inch, and this game expects you to do the same. Memorizing the map seems daunting at first, but you’ll have plenty of help via a large arrow above your vehicle that acts as a compass pointing to where you need to go. This arrow is often useful when you’re first starting off but can occasionally glitch out on you if you’re going fast or have gone off road. The arrow is a tool that should only be used at first, because it tends to do more harm than good with how often it can glitch. The arrow can be used in a pinch if you just need a general direction, but you’re better off just memorizing the map if you play more than casually.

While you find yourself speeding around town, you’ll be accompanied by a soundtrack featuring songs from Bad Religion and The Offspring which are two high energy Punk bands that perfectly fit the tone of the action. These are loud, fast bands which is the perfect choice for a game like this, but I do think they should’ve picked songs with different lyrical themes. Look, almost nobody is sitting there with a pen and paper trying to list the lyrics, but the songs are super unfitting thematically. Listen closely to hear the most depressing topics ever covered such as: Generational trauma, global overpopulation, alcoholism, and teenage pregnancy…oh boy! I often wonder if there was originally different plans for the games soundtrack, as the announcer in this game is clearly doing an impression of famous US radio DJ Wolfman Jack. Wolfman Jack’s voice was synonymous with 60’s-80’s Classic Rock radio, yet the music and overall theming for this game is very modern to the time of creation. Were they originally going to have classic rock, but thought that it wasn’t exciting or fast enough for the games speed? Were radio broadcasts supposed to be a feature in this game originally? This combination makes about as much sense as having Henry Rollins show up to a 60’s nostalgia diner to cut the opening ribbon. This Wolfman Jack knock-off isn’t really a mark against the game, it’s just kind of a head scratcher as to why it’s there in the first place.

Unique to the Dreamcast version of Crazy Taxi are two new modes that provide a great deal of replay value: Crazy Box and Original mode. Crazy box is a series of challenges that require you to master the games deeper mechanics such as drifting, boosting, and sudden breaking in order to complete the task at hand. Crazy Box abandons any sense of realism that the game had before on purpose to provide the challenges with as much fun as possible. One example of this is the bowling challenge, where you must knock over a dozen sets of giant pins using only drifting…and you must get a strike every time. Other challenges are deceptive, as they might seem way too easy but end up being challenging. One Crazy Box mission that people struggle the most with is trying to jump over 150 yards in one leap from a giant ramp. This mission would seem easy enough, but you’ll have no shot unless you’re very familiar with the games boosting mechanics and individual vehicle strengths. Crazy Box acts as this game’s tutorial in many ways, as it allows you to explore the games driving and stunt mechanics in environments specifically tailored around those mechanics.

Original mode plays the same way as arcade mode in terms of objectives but introduces a new map that is loosely based on the arcade map. If Crazy Box is the mode where they upped the cartoonish fun, it seems that Original mode would be the exact opposite: the attempt at more realism within the CT universe. Original mode features the same gameplay from arcade mode, but presents it in a different map. This time around, the map is longer but also seems less populated with buildings and obstacles, making for a lot of time spent just driving straight. I had trouble finding any jump-trucks in this mode, whereas they are everywhere in arcade mode. The original mode map is noticeably bigger than the arcade map, but it’s a bit lackluster on detail and features whereas there seems to be something interesting to see or do around every corner in arcade mode. Crazy Taxi is a game built on rapid fire excitement, so I am confused as to what the intentions behind original mode were if the slower pace was intentional. Unfortunately, you can tell everything is falling apart at the seams in original mode, as it just doesn’t perform well on the Dreamcast despite being designed specifically for the Dreamcast. Arcade mode has occasional graphical pop in when looking ahead to the horizon, but it’s hardly noticeable so it’s easy to ignore whereas original mode has such bad graphical pop-in that it ruins the experience of a high-speed trip. While playing original mode, you might find yourself driving in a straight line only for a building, tunnel, or more traffic to load in suddenly before your eyes. If you don’t have the original map memorized, this pop in really screws you up as the game will only display the distant ocean, potentially leading the player to assume that they’re at the peak of a steep hill or near a cliff when they could be approaching anything other than that. Even if you could get used to the graphics not rendering well, the slowdown that is present in this mode is just unacceptable. Depending where you are on the map and how many cars are near you, the game will chug along to an embarrassingly slow frame rate. The game chugs along noticeably bad on the island that is featured in original mode. Curiously, it seems that collision is what triggers the slowdown in original mode. I did not notice any slowdown in original mode until I hit other vehicles, and then it was like game was trying to simulate the effects of head trauma that one could expect in a car crash. Remember the navigational arrow from arcade mode? It’s back to help you out this time, but it’s way more glitchier to the point where it feels like it’s only there to sabotage your runs. The arrow in original mode just points to whatever it feels like, cardinal directions be damned. On top of all other sins of original mode, the mode is just too easy at its default settings and I think it’s due to the boringness of the map. For example, I played original mode for the first time in years and got an S-tier license on my first playthrough which is considered beating the game. Arcade mode is like a masterfully crafted piece of pottery, but original mode is a piece of wet pottery that got messed with to the point of collapsing in on itself.

  Crazy Taxi on the Sega Dreamcast is a nearly perfect game that all ages and skill levels can enjoy. This game is perfect for both a hardcore gamer and the most casual of gamers, carving out a unique niche for the time of its release. This game is easy to understand, easy to have fun with…yet very challenging to master for even seasoned drivers.  What this game does best is that it rewards the player for getting better, whereas most arcade games are designed to shake you down for your quarters. Sega could have easily only included the arcade mode in the Dreamcast port, but crazy box is a great addition that challenges the player while also teaching them how to play. Sega made a good effort with original mode, but original mode is sadly a mess that works against everything that makes this game great. Despite the original mode being very flawed and the games overall glitchy navigation system, this remains a must play game in my opinion. Crazy Taxi simply delivers on chaos in speed yet never feels like it’s out of control, often feeling like you put a saddle on a guided missile and took it for a spin. Crazy Taxi for the Sega Dreamcast is an A-tier port of an S-tier game, and I think that everyone even casually interested in video games should find a way to play this or the arcade original.

Don’t skip this one, you’ll have CRAZY FUN!!