Crazy Taxi | DJcube

Prepare for the craziest cab ride of your life!

NA release: 18th November 2001
EU release: 3rd May 2002
JP release: 30th May 2002
Developer: Sega, Acclaim
Publisher: Acclaim
NGC Magazine Score: 70%
Mods Used: Widescreen Code

Crazy Taxi is a classic arcade game that takes the simple tactic of driving a taxi and makes it incredibly frantic and hectic. Your taxi is very fast, and you have a very short amount of time to get your passenger to their destination. A large arrow hovers above your head guiding you to your destination (sometimes really well, sometimes a bit off), although you’ll need to learn the routes, shortcuts and locations of places on the maps to really do well at the game.

As you speed though the city (with a great soundtrack blaring out of your cab), you will gain extra money by driving dangerously, and all the pedestrians will frantically dodge out of the way to avoid you ploughing into them, which all adds to the immense fun of the game. There’s also one thing about Crazy Taxi that would seem tacky in other games, but I can’t help to love it here: product placement. It’s great having to drive someone to KFC or Pizza Hut as though their lives depended on it, and grounds the game in a strange way.

For the Dreamcast version, Sega added an additional, larger city, which is much more difficult to navigate due to more complex roads and a lot of walls that make getting to higher locations more taxing. There are also a couple of different ways to play: either by the original rules (where your time counts down and you gain more from delivering passengers), or by playing sessions of 3, 5 and 10 minutes. The GameCube version is a very faithful port of this with everything intact.

Another addition for home consoles is Crazy Box, a series of challenges that require the use of advanced techniques, such as the boost that takes some practice to pull off right. It’s great for practicing those techniques, which you can then use to improve your scores in the main mode.

Crazy Taxi is still a ton of fun.

Fun

Inevitably though, games developed for the arcade rarely translate well to consoles. Crazy Taxi may be an exception to the rule to some extent, but the fact remains that there are only so many times you can drive the same customers to the same destinations before things start to get a little dull.
Geraint Evans, NGC Magazine #67

Remake or remaster?

There have been multiple ports throughout the years, but none of them contain the original package. The PC, Xbox and PS3 versions lack the original soundtrack and loses the licenced locations. The more recent mobile versions are wonky emulation that does bring back the original soundtrack, but lacks the licensed locations. We really need a remaster of the original with everything intact.

Official Ways to get the game

The various incomplete ports of Crazy Taxi are available on Steam, Xbox One/Series, iOS and Android.