Man, I am just pumping these articles out today. Must be that sweatshop ambition. I don’t have a lot of arcade games that I am super fond of. Not that I hate them or anything, it’s just that most of my experiences in arcades were playing the original Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter II and Third Strike, and Tekken 3. So yeah, most of them were just fighting games. Those joysticks just work so well with fighting games. But one arcade game that caught my interest was one game by Sega, known as Crazy Taxi.
Okay, first off, I never actually got the chance to play Crazy Taxi in arcades. I just had the inferior version on 360. And it’s a fun version, but there’s no Offspring or Bad Religion, so it’s inferior. Okay, but seriously, Crazy Taxi is a ton of fun. The game is very simple. You gotta drive around clients to their location, usually a Pizza Hut or a KFC, the food of America, and get them their fast. The faster you move, the more time you’ll get. Continue doing this until you run of of time and try to rack up the high score. It is a very simple game, but it works so well and it’s a ron of fun. You have all these skills you can learn that’ll help you out in the game, like braking before you drive to get more speed, drifting, using the ramps, or stopping dead in the circle in order to get higher points. The slower you move, the more likely you’re pay will lower. Run out of time and the pedestrians will more than likely jump out of the car just to get out of this perpetual yellow hell. You got five characters, but my go-to character is Axel, simply cause he looks like Zoro from One Piece and I like to sing the One Piece rap to piss off my friends. The music in this game is the typical punk soundtrack, something akin to Tony Hawk games, also a 90s franchise. You got classic songs like Way Down the Line by The Offspring. Nothing says Crazy Taxi like a song about alcoholism, child abuse, teenage pregnancy, poverty, obesity, and other such things. Give me that existential crisis, Offspring. Every time I play this game, I always tell myself, “No, I gotta go again. I need that Class S license”. This game is like an adrenaline rush. You wanna go fast, faster than that other Sega game. Want it, need it, gotta get the S Rank. You gotta move fast, know the environment (Which is pretty damn huge), gotta know the location of the pedestrians, gotta listen to that classic All I Want. It’s so damn addictive and I love it.
Crazy Taxi is sadly not as loved as it was once, because it’s a classic Sega game, and if it’s not Persona or Sonic, than it can go to hell. It did get some love, like B.D. Joe appearing in Sonic and Sega All Stars Racing, and getting a few sequels that no one talks about. Maybe one day we’ll see a return of that lovely Crazy Taxi… Or not. Who knows.
