Crazy Taxi for Dreamcast Review

The Gameplay

Pay attention because this will only take a minute. You drive a taxi. You pick up customers. You drop them off. You collect your fare. Did you get that? It’s that simple. After you collect your fare, you do the same thing all over again. Your goal is to collect as many customers and fares as you can in a given time limit, which could range from 3 minutes to 10 minutes. Or, you can play by the Arcade Rules, which means you work until your clock runs down, but you gain time the crazier and faster you drive and drop off your customers. Earn extra money for driving dangerously and ramping and drifting. But let the timer run out and the customer will bail on you without paying.

Crazy Taxi also has a number of mini-games to complete. Things like busting a number of balloons and jumping off a ramp the farthest offer good replay value because you’re always trying to do better than the top score.

The Control

Once you learn the “Crazy” maneuvers (drifting, dashing, the back dash, and the back drift), you’ll be performing them naturally. They were hard to pull off in the beginning because it takes split second button and shoulder presses, but once I got the hang of it, I caused a lot of whiplash.

This is an arcade game, so if you’re expecting Gran Turismo-like vehicle simulation, look elsewhere. The 4 different cars (with 4 characters) whip around, sprint frantically, and stop on a dime. Drifting is nearly done from a stationary pivot, if you’re good, and you never flip your car. Now that’s cool.

The Graphics

Most Dreamcast games are colorful. Crazy Taxi is even more so. The city is reportedly based on San Francisco, but whether it’s to scale or not is beyond me. Regardless, you can make out good detail in the buildings and the backgrounds, no matter what speed you’re whizzing by. There is a touch of slowdown and it seems to be random. Sometimes when traveling over park grass, the game slowed, but when played later, it was smooth. The game consistently slowed when you plunged your taxi into the water, which was neat and hard to get out of.

Thompson’s Two Cents

Simply a fun game. You can’t beat racing through a city, picking up customers, and being reward for driving recklessly. Shoot, if that were the case, I’d have become a cabbie a long time ago. Maybe in New York now? Anyway, with a musical soundtrack by Offspring and Bad Religion (oh, you do remember them, don’t you), addicting gameplay, and nearly unlimited replayability, Crazy Taxi is one game you should own for your Dreamcast.