Crazy Taxi [CT] is all about fighting the clock; the difference to so many other titles is that you get to pick your clients / checkpoints :)
No License?! Yep, that is what you'll probably achieve on your very first attempt, if this is your first Dreamcast experience...
Car driving "videogames" have been around since dinosaurs, but instead of becoming extinct, they spread across all horizons, from coin-operated machines (coin-ops) to military simulators that are good enough to train tank drivers...
Car games are about car driving... and they can't take but two roads: arcadish OR simulation. These roads are disjunctive - they don't mix at all. All known attempts that try to fork the software across both ways have failed.
Crazy Taxi knows history and, bit like Carmageddon and Midtown Madness, is totally arcade-oriented.
Carmageddon had (and has) the "shallow originality" of being too much about smashing pixel-people (pppl)... while Midtown Madness manages a longer appeal, via its open roads network, that you can cross as you prefer, as long as you don't miss checkpoints... both "stress" the player with deadlines that aren't different from each other (meat a deadline and your gaming action will be extended)...
Crazy Taxi brings a slightly new concept: the dynamic deadline. There ALWAYS is a counter counting down, and you can extend your time by picking up taxi costumers that are to be driven to locations that are far (green), not-that-far (yellow), and near (red) from your location. The nearest you must travel, the less time you have to deliver the job... It is YOUR OPTION to choose your clients... and you'd better choose them nicely, if you are to score a "class A" driver's license :).
Crazy Taxi is pure joy, pure fun, and a-bit-of-brains-needed action. Yes, you must learn the network and the costumers (which are always the same), in order to realize what are the best trading routes and thus extend your gaming time to the point you'll earn enough to achieve a "class A" status.
People can't die here, which is good from a moral POV and underscores the software's arcadish nature. This is an impressive title running on the Dreamcast's Windows CE operating system, delivering a fair amount of polygons per model, and certainly showing the interesting power of the integrated PowerVR2 graphics hardware.
The game is very colorful, instantly playable, and it sure gets you to "play just one more time". You can impose yourself severe limits, such as "play for 3 / 5 / 10 minutes" or just ride until the start clock reaches zero.
Shortcutting will save your day and will require you to memorize not only the roads, but also the ramps that can catapult the car over certain obstacles that would just take too much time to contour.
On the minus side, there is just one rare bug, that consists on the tarmac showing no textures, thus producing "transparent" roads that are very confusing to deal with.
Check the Crazy Taxi video, available from the videos section. The corresponding realmedia file shows a bit of the game, as it was being played by a VERY UNEXPERIENCED girl :). The video is a low quality real system 8 stream, filmed with a video-cam. Notice that the other Dreamcast videos on the website (will) have much better quality, because they were converted directly from the installed PowerVR2.
You'll need version 8 of the free Real Media player to watch the .rm file. Visit www.real.com to grab such file.
dc_crazy_taxi_rs150kbps_22s.rm [22 seconds - 612 KB]
High Jumps and other arcadish situations are a common-place in CT. You must go crazy and jump many dangerous obstacles, in order to deliver some costumers.
Another arcade feature of CT, is the NO DAMAGE collisions - you can smash the car against everything on your path, that it will cost you nothing, but time.