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Sunday 13 January, 2008
SUMMARY
Crazy Taxi is a driving game where the player drives a taxi around a city looking for fares. The goal of the game is to make as much money as possible in the given time limit. There isn’t a lot too it. Basically, the faster you get your passengers to their destination, the more they will tip you. Frighteningly enough, they will also tip you more if you drive completely recklessly.
GAMEPLAY
I must say, Crazy Taxi can be pretty fun. There is something exhilarating about fast paced, free range driving. The game also provides a nice break from the horrifically stringent driving laws of the real world. I was able to drive so badly in this game, after a while I started to wonder why someone wasn’t trying to stop me. An even bigger mystery though, was why everyone seemed to be encouraging my vehicular rampages. I was getting heavily tipped for almost hitting cars while driving on the wrong side of the road.
Despite having very realistic graphics for its time, the game itself feels quite unreal. This is partially because of how much you can get away with. However, more glaring examples of unreality are the characters. One would assume that a game with a crazy taxi would probably have a crazy taxi driver as well. Well their guess would be spot on. All the drivers the player has to choose from have the appearance of beach bums and the attitudes of drugged up speed fetishists. Strange as they may be, they fit well with the overall feel of the game.
The passengers are really strange though. They are prone to extreme mood swings and all behave exactly the same. Example: I pick up a lady who wants to go to pizza hut. Every time I do something exceedingly dangerous, she starts cheering and practically showers me with tips. She acts like she’s more into maniacal driving than the actual nut-job of a driver. If I bump into anything though, she gets really angry about how bad of a driver I am and seems to forget she’s been egging me on this whole time. But it doesn’t matter because she starts cheering again the instant I resume being my reckless self. It would be fine if just some of the passengers were like that. But I could pick up an 80 year old priest and he’d cheer me on just like everyone else. Basically the lack of variety in passengers not only breaks the illusion a little for me, but it also causes me extreme aggravation to be stuck in a city full of schizophrenics where one second they are extreme thrill seekers who sing me praises for driving off roofs, and the next second they yell at me for putting them in jeopardy and loathe me with every fiber of their being.
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