You know that Crazy Bread from Little Caesar’s? This is like that, but with taxis.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, Sega dared to picture a world dominated by The Offspring and Burger King, and where any taxi ride costs hundreds of dollars. Now that’s a utopia. The result was Crazy Taxi, a game about taxis that I guess is crazy.
If you’re unfamiliar with the series, the main game is pretty straight forward. You drive around in a taxi, picking up people, and then taking them where they want to go. Crazy, right?!?! The difficulty comes from the game’s clock, which is pretty unforgiving. A standard game gives you 50 seconds to start, and gives you more whenever you pick up a new ride (and a bonus of a few seconds here and there for having a quick fare). In practice, it’s tough to not fall behind on time (it’s very much in the spirit of quarter-eating arcade games), but it’s still pretty frantic fun.
Crazy Taxi 2 adds a few new things to the mix, including some new drivers to play as:
In addition to the different drivers, there are also two different maps to play on, and a few different modes for each – the usual arcade mode, and some modes with set amounts of time instead of the constant “race-against-the-clock” scenario. I quite like these, as there’s a bit less pressure in finding fares and such. You can also pick up multiple fares at once, which offers another layer of strategy when figuring out who to pick up and when. It also leads to people entering your cab in weird ways:
Oh, and you can jump. I know you’re a car, but it’s still true. Maybe that’s the crazy part. My favorite aspect of Crazy Taxi 2, however, is the Crazy Pyramid, a mode that is truly, unabashedly crazy.
This tasks you with a bunch of mini-games – some are based on taking a fare in a world filled with weird jumps or ramps, while others are simply focused on going off a huge jump or, uh…playing golf:
Rather than explain this further, I’m just gonna include another screen shot.
Completing two of these challenges that are next to each other in the ‘pyramid’ will open up the challenge above both of them, moving upwards until you get to the final challenge. These can get VERY difficult, and they’re super fun to try and figure out and optimize.
There are a few rather abrasive things about Crazy Taxi 2, which I can easily chalk up to the time it was released (early 2001) – one is the profoundly annoying announcer, who sounds like if Tom Waits was a 22-year-old surfer dude who wanted you to suffer. It’s terrible. Some of the controls feel a bit archaic as well – if you need to drive in reverse (and you probably will), you need to come to a stop and manually change gears, as opposed to the standard “the brake is also the reverse” paradigm that’s common in a lot of games. I realize that this is literally how actual cars work and I probably shouldn’t complain about it, but dammit, I say it’s annoying. If you don’t like it, make your own blog. The game is still pretty fun in general, though.
One more original title was released in the Crazy Taxi series, the Xbox exclusive Crazy Taxi 3: High Roller, which had a Las Vegas-y vibe. Attempted ports/remakes for the GBA and PSP followed, but that was all she wrote for these crazy taxis. I’m kinda surprised no one has dug up the corpse of this franchise…it’s probably only a matter of time, though. I wouldn’t mind seeing a modern take on the concept.
Next week’s game is another super rad Dreamcast sequel, and one with a truly stellar (and well-deserved) reputation. I’m excited to take it for a whole bunch of spins. See you then!