The Closeout Warrior

I think Crazy Taxi might be my favorite driving game to come out in recent memory, even though on the surface it looks a little dull.

Crazy Taxi tasks you, as one of four cabbies, with picking up customers and taking them to their destinations withing the time limit. You get them there quickly and you get bonus seconds added to your clock and money added to your bankroll. How you get the customers to their destinations, though, that’s where the fun starts.

Your cab is unique in that it’s got the amazing ability to accelerate from zero to top speed in under 5 seconds, can stop on a dime, can drift around corners, and is completely indestructible. If you give your customers an exciting experience, they’ll give you tips. How do you make it exciting? Near misses going through traffic, jumping and getting ‘big air’, and drifting around curves. Each successive tip increases your multiplier, which increases the tips you can get, while crashing will reset your counter. So you’re encouraged to drive extremely aggressively, but not hit anything. It’s quite the challenge, especially with congested streets, and cars that always seem to right in the optimal path of your car. Set all of this mayhem with a soundtrack by The Offspring and Bad Religion and you have the makings of quite a game.

Your reward for playing well, other than a high score, is that each successful fare adds precious seconds to your timer, allowing you the ability to play longer. The better you get at the game, the longer you can play it, which is quite the anomaly for an arcade game.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Arcade, Dreamcast, PC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.