LGR - Crazy Taxi - PC Game Review
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Date: 2022-04-14
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Comments and reviews: 10
Adam
Crazy Taxi is one of the most replayable arcade games that Sega has ever made. This is actually one of my gripes about Sega consoles. As their main attractions were usually Sega arcade games, the (often carbon copy, no frills added) home ports made me realize how limited they were in terms of replayability: Daytona USA and Sega Rally, for instance, both only had a handful of tracks to race on, and the replayability lied solely in learning how to master every nuance of those tracks. It's a brilliant idea when you're trying to eat quarters, but it doesn't make for a good console game. Virtua Cop, Virtua Cop 2, Confidential Mission, even Die Hard Arcade, all of these games are GOOD games, but they're just not very long because they're made with an arcade mindset where the goal is to get you to have fun for a short amount of time and then put more quarters into the machine to continue. When you don't have that monetary limitation, it's easy to blast through them because they're not expansive. (Side note: I believe Sega could have enhanced these games for home use, either by adding gameplay modes or adding content, or both, but they almost never chose to do that)
I'd argue that Crazy Taxi also isn't that expansive, as the home version just consists of you doing more of the same on the same level. But the concept and how they use it lends to massive replay. The map is fairly large, your fares are always changing, and there's a plethora of things to utilize (ramps) or learn about the game (the various maneuvers) that you can hone to extend your play. And there's a charm even in the presentation of NPCs which is a critically overlooked aspect of many games. This game can give fares a good amount of character in a very short amount of time, from what they say when you pick them up to what they say when you're driving. It's really engaging, at least it is to the extent that it affects how I drive a particular passenger, which is saying a ton about a basic -arcade game. - Even the drivers, who amount to nothing more than handling and speed characteristics, tend to have a personality of their own.
Crazy Taxi might well be the best arcade game that translates into a fun, replayable home game that was ever made. Seriously. And while you dislike Crazy Box, I actually love it, because it's a challenge mode, a mode that forces you to learn how to execute these moves to perfection in order to advance, which in turn makes the arcade mode more fun! Because the better you get at the maneuvers the farther you can go! As much as I love Daytona USA and Sega Rally, they never had anything close to this. You just learned the tracks and the handling and that was it.
I think outside of owning a full arcade unit (I'm going to start my arcade cab collection just as soon as I win Powerball, just kidding, I don't buy lottery tickets, the Dreamcast port is by far the one to go with. The PC version had the potential to best it, but it was obviously a low-budget port, so I'm glad I still own it and the Dreamcast. To be honest, I see no reason to play any of my Dreamcast titles on anything but the Dreamcast. Anyone who had the opportunity to buy a DC and didn't should be kicking themselves, it's such a great console. It is, BY FAR, my favorite Sega console, and one of my favorite consoles EVER. Crazy Taxi on PC just goes to show, PC ports aren't always the best. Too bad, it could have been, but oh well.
All in all, Crazy Taxi is just an impressive arcade game from every aspect, and makes for a damn fine home game as well. Not too many arcade games have this kind of lasting replayability, and while the PC port is obviously flawed, it's better than no Crazy Taxi. I love my Dreamcast and I love the DC port of it, and I will continue to play it as long as my DC will read the disc! Might very well be the best Sega home port ever! Also, one last thing, I love the original soundtrack and I cannot play the game without it. I'm really weird about music in games, so just chalk it up to that.
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Crazy Taxi is one of the most replayable arcade games that Sega has ever made. This is actually one of my gripes about Sega consoles. As their main attractions were usually Sega arcade games, the (often carbon copy, no frills added) home ports made me realize how limited they were in terms of replayability: Daytona USA and Sega Rally, for instance, both only had a handful of tracks to race on, and the replayability lied solely in learning how to master every nuance of those tracks. It's a brilliant idea when you're trying to eat quarters, but it doesn't make for a good console game. Virtua Cop, Virtua Cop 2, Confidential Mission, even Die Hard Arcade, all of these games are GOOD games, but they're just not very long because they're made with an arcade mindset where the goal is to get you to have fun for a short amount of time and then put more quarters into the machine to continue. When you don't have that monetary limitation, it's easy to blast through them because they're not expansive. (Side note: I believe Sega could have enhanced these games for home use, either by adding gameplay modes or adding content, or both, but they almost never chose to do that)
I'd argue that Crazy Taxi also isn't that expansive, as the home version just consists of you doing more of the same on the same level. But the concept and how they use it lends to massive replay. The map is fairly large, your fares are always changing, and there's a plethora of things to utilize (ramps) or learn about the game (the various maneuvers) that you can hone to extend your play. And there's a charm even in the presentation of NPCs which is a critically overlooked aspect of many games. This game can give fares a good amount of character in a very short amount of time, from what they say when you pick them up to what they say when you're driving. It's really engaging, at least it is to the extent that it affects how I drive a particular passenger, which is saying a ton about a basic -arcade game. - Even the drivers, who amount to nothing more than handling and speed characteristics, tend to have a personality of their own.
Crazy Taxi might well be the best arcade game that translates into a fun, replayable home game that was ever made. Seriously. And while you dislike Crazy Box, I actually love it, because it's a challenge mode, a mode that forces you to learn how to execute these moves to perfection in order to advance, which in turn makes the arcade mode more fun! Because the better you get at the maneuvers the farther you can go! As much as I love Daytona USA and Sega Rally, they never had anything close to this. You just learned the tracks and the handling and that was it.
I think outside of owning a full arcade unit (I'm going to start my arcade cab collection just as soon as I win Powerball, just kidding, I don't buy lottery tickets, the Dreamcast port is by far the one to go with. The PC version had the potential to best it, but it was obviously a low-budget port, so I'm glad I still own it and the Dreamcast. To be honest, I see no reason to play any of my Dreamcast titles on anything but the Dreamcast. Anyone who had the opportunity to buy a DC and didn't should be kicking themselves, it's such a great console. It is, BY FAR, my favorite Sega console, and one of my favorite consoles EVER. Crazy Taxi on PC just goes to show, PC ports aren't always the best. Too bad, it could have been, but oh well.
All in all, Crazy Taxi is just an impressive arcade game from every aspect, and makes for a damn fine home game as well. Not too many arcade games have this kind of lasting replayability, and while the PC port is obviously flawed, it's better than no Crazy Taxi. I love my Dreamcast and I love the DC port of it, and I will continue to play it as long as my DC will read the disc! Might very well be the best Sega home port ever! Also, one last thing, I love the original soundtrack and I cannot play the game without it. I'm really weird about music in games, so just chalk it up to that.
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Brian
On my Dreamcast I played two and a half hours got 86, 500 +/- on one run. No lie no cheat no social life! I ran out of green and yellow runs I was SO on fire. I bought the 360 remake and could have shot the remake devs, the GameStop ceo, the kid who sold it to me. I asked if it had the OG music on it and got yes it does! I didn't I'm sorry I love the college punk rock on of not that ahem (15 min of explitives deleted here) garbage. I can't even play CT with that ahem music (vomits quietly) I still have my CT for dreamcast but sadly had to sell my DC to feed my mother (worth it) in 2015. So now I'm stuck with a crappy music version of CT and only want to throttle (proverbially) the douchebag who yanked my fav music from an S+ title dropping it to an A!
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On my Dreamcast I played two and a half hours got 86, 500 +/- on one run. No lie no cheat no social life! I ran out of green and yellow runs I was SO on fire. I bought the 360 remake and could have shot the remake devs, the GameStop ceo, the kid who sold it to me. I asked if it had the OG music on it and got yes it does! I didn't I'm sorry I love the college punk rock on of not that ahem (15 min of explitives deleted here) garbage. I can't even play CT with that ahem music (vomits quietly) I still have my CT for dreamcast but sadly had to sell my DC to feed my mother (worth it) in 2015. So now I'm stuck with a crappy music version of CT and only want to throttle (proverbially) the douchebag who yanked my fav music from an S+ title dropping it to an A!
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Elgoog
Funnily enough, it is one of those racers I always played (and still play on the Dreamcast) with the d-pad and full-or-none acceleration, I find it controls weird with the analog stick. That said, it's a hell of a lot of fun, and one of those reasons getting out my Dreamcast means turning the living room into an arcade hall and playing and laughing with my buddies. Games like these make you understand why SEGA was known as -the king of the arcades-, because this marvel is pretty much arcade perfection. And would probably make a modern, -academic- game designer cry for violating so many -principles-: P
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Funnily enough, it is one of those racers I always played (and still play on the Dreamcast) with the d-pad and full-or-none acceleration, I find it controls weird with the analog stick. That said, it's a hell of a lot of fun, and one of those reasons getting out my Dreamcast means turning the living room into an arcade hall and playing and laughing with my buddies. Games like these make you understand why SEGA was known as -the king of the arcades-, because this marvel is pretty much arcade perfection. And would probably make a modern, -academic- game designer cry for violating so many -principles-: P
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Dick
I only owned crazy taxi 3, which was added to some magazine about video games and technology in a small cardboard-like packaging. I have no idea how it ended up in my house since I was a 10 old girl and lived only with my 1 year older sister and mom. But from what I see crazy taxi 1 and 3 are very similar, they just added 2 new maps.
I loved that game, even now I remember every detail in West Coast: ) I wish I could have played the original one, but I was 3 in 1999!
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I only owned crazy taxi 3, which was added to some magazine about video games and technology in a small cardboard-like packaging. I have no idea how it ended up in my house since I was a 10 old girl and lived only with my 1 year older sister and mom. But from what I see crazy taxi 1 and 3 are very similar, they just added 2 new maps.
I loved that game, even now I remember every detail in West Coast: ) I wish I could have played the original one, but I was 3 in 1999!
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Kastro44
I was so lucky to find this game next to a thrash container along with many boxes and other junk. It was in a perfectly well conserved box, cd and manual inside, I don't know who could have left it there, but anyways, I took it home. I'm a huge The Offspring fan, and I was pretty disappointed when I discovered this was the only game of the franchise where they had replaced the original songs.
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I was so lucky to find this game next to a thrash container along with many boxes and other junk. It was in a perfectly well conserved box, cd and manual inside, I don't know who could have left it there, but anyways, I took it home. I'm a huge The Offspring fan, and I was pretty disappointed when I discovered this was the only game of the franchise where they had replaced the original songs.
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Gameplay
I picked up a copy of this many months ago to run on my Windows '98 machine. Should have watched reviews first, because oh man, it runs like trash on my system! Athlon XP 2ghz CPU, Radeon 9550 256mb GPU--all other Sega ports from back then run amazingly well, while Crazy Taxi stutters and skips frames like crazy. It's so bad. Shame it was so poorly optimized.
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I picked up a copy of this many months ago to run on my Windows '98 machine. Should have watched reviews first, because oh man, it runs like trash on my system! Athlon XP 2ghz CPU, Radeon 9550 256mb GPU--all other Sega ports from back then run amazingly well, while Crazy Taxi stutters and skips frames like crazy. It's so bad. Shame it was so poorly optimized.
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Air
Alright, great video on one of my favorite Taxi Driver Simulators! I always seem to enjoy your videos, man, well done.
On the note of the PC Steam release: Yeah, it could be waaaaay better, I agree. But.
Well, lets just say there's plenty of ways to patch that up with proper jams and steering capabilities. Just saying!
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Alright, great video on one of my favorite Taxi Driver Simulators! I always seem to enjoy your videos, man, well done.
On the note of the PC Steam release: Yeah, it could be waaaaay better, I agree. But.
Well, lets just say there's plenty of ways to patch that up with proper jams and steering capabilities. Just saying!
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Lee
I don't think I'll ever be as good at anything again in my life as I used to be at Crazy Taxi. I knew the layout of everything, where every customer wanted to go, could nail every trick on demand. I was awesome.
I tried the -new- version a while ago. I was terrible. I blamed the lack of the Offspring over my aging reflexes.
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I don't think I'll ever be as good at anything again in my life as I used to be at Crazy Taxi. I knew the layout of everything, where every customer wanted to go, could nail every trick on demand. I was awesome.
I tried the -new- version a while ago. I was terrible. I blamed the lack of the Offspring over my aging reflexes.
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AlfonxB
Its the one and only game i play for hours on my GPD G5A (with reicast emulator. Sometimes i connect the G5A with hdmi-cable to my lcd and connect an xbox 360 wireless controller to the GPD G5A (usb otg adapter. I still love Crazy Taxi! It never gets boring. Its so much fun! :): ): ) And i am still playing it in 2018.
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Its the one and only game i play for hours on my GPD G5A (with reicast emulator. Sometimes i connect the G5A with hdmi-cable to my lcd and connect an xbox 360 wireless controller to the GPD G5A (usb otg adapter. I still love Crazy Taxi! It never gets boring. Its so much fun! :): ): ) And i am still playing it in 2018.
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RomiWadaKatsu
No seriously tho, while the new soundtrack isn't sum 41, it's still great. I remember when I was in high school burning it on a CD and passing it to all my friends, who thought it was amazing after listening to it on my portable CD player
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No seriously tho, while the new soundtrack isn't sum 41, it's still great. I remember when I was in high school burning it on a CD and passing it to all my friends, who thought it was amazing after listening to it on my portable CD player
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