When someone plays a game you’ve recommended, don’t you get a warm and fuzzy feeling? It’s an odd thing to get excited about, but it makes sense in a way, since it shows a level of trust in you. That person took the time out of their day, chose not to play the games they were certain of, and committed to the investment that goes into starting up a new game, all because you assured them it would be worth it. That’s why I take recommendations fairly seriously, both in giving a chance to the ones I receive, and carefully specifying the audience when giving them out myself.

I recommend Crazy Taxi.

I feel like I can do that without the usual parentheticals because this is a game that was designed to recommend itself. An arcade game had no other option but to try and be the flashiest, easiest to pick up, and most exciting attraction in a room full of competitors doing the same thing, and as one of the most enduring titles from that setting, it naturally excels at all the criteria. You just push start and immediately have fun, the 90’s jams start blasting, your wheels screech towards your first passenger, there’s no wasted time where the game tells you to invest your patience to hopefully get a return later on. The controls require no explanation if you’ve seen a car before, you don’t have to memorize locations around town when a giant arrow points the way, picking up and dropping off passengers on a timer is a simple premise understandable to anyone, it all just makes sense and feels good no matter where you are on the skill curve. Importantly, rounds also only last a matter of minutes, so no one needs to commit their time to getting oriented or in the zone; you can pick it up and put it down no matter how much free time you have.

So, if the formula for a recommendation is weighing the time investment and learning commitment against the possible payoff, how can I do anything but recommend it when the former side of the equation is nearly zero? The risks are low, but the return is high. I can speak from experience, this was another game taken from my “Games YOU want more people to play” list, suggested by users LukeGirard and DustyVita, with the former even taking the time to explain some of the optional techniques from the manual as I streamed my first play session. Connections like that are why we’re on this site after all, so go give some crazy games a chance!

Crazy Taxi is probably my favorite arcade game, personally I don't know where to begin, I'll start with the setting, you drive through a pretty summer town, delivering people to there destination in a timely manor, but how you get there? that's all up to you baby! you can jump off ramps and make close calls by barley touching other vehicles, all for extra money! either that you can just crash into everything insight leaving destruction and chaos in your wake, you're choice, all while rocking out to the soundtrack provided by bands The Offspring and Bad Religion! (or The Juliet Dagger for the PSN and Xbox Live users), all in all Crazy Taxi is an unforgettable romp of a game, I always find myself playing this when I've got some spare time and I'm not playing anything else, and even though I had it on Xbox Live I got it about year ago for PS2, mainly for the different soundtrack, if you like the idea of driving people around causing mayhem where ever you go I give this a strong recommendation!

Despite how long it's been since the series got an actual new game (especially if you rule out the slightly more recent mobile games), I've always considered Crazy Taxi to be one of Sega's most iconic franchises, as having it spawn a few sequels and a ton more knockoffs really cemented its place in both the racing genre and video games as a whole. Even with this in mind, I never got the chance to try this game out, and as much as I wish I could give the original arcade cabinet a try, I decided to play the game's PS2 port instead. This is one of those games that I can see myself coming back to very often in the future, because while it does have some drawbacks and I really can't see myself playing it for more than 30 or 60 minutes in one sitting, Crazy Taxi is still an absolute blast to play.

Growing up, pretty much every clip of the game I saw in a YouTube video mentioning it looked totally wild and in-your-face, but even then, nothing compares to actually playing Crazy Taxi. 24 years after the game's original release, there's still nothing that plays or controls quite like it, as the blistering speeds, short fares, and hilariously janky physics will have you crashing, dashing, and drifting your way to your next stop if it means getting any more money out of your current passenger before they jump out of your cab out of impatience. Crazy Taxi has a slew of different techniques and mechanics that you absolutely need to get the hang of in order to get a high score at the cost of the game itself doing a horrible job of actually explaining them to you, but once you do figure them out, it feels great to actually pull them off and get that much closer to the fabled Class-S license, with the Crazy Drift being especially fun thanks to its potential for chaining moves to get a higher combo. Speaking of which, Crazy Taxi encourages you to pull off as many tricks and moves as you can during each fare to not only make it to your destination in time, but to also get extra money through a higher combo string, and this combined with the aforementioned amount of moves can lead to some immensely satisfying moments of linking one move to another, such as going from a Crazy Drift to a Crazy Dash so that you can jump off of a ramp before having a bunch of near misses with oncoming traffic. The game's totally-not-San-Francisco map was also quite well designed with its emphasis on landmarks and opportunities to use your moves (including a staggering amount of product placement), and memorizing the routes to and from destinations made making the most out of the simple to pick up, yet difficult to master control scheme all the more rewarding. The punk rock soundtrack from the bands Bad Religion and The Offspring gave Crazy Taxi a lot of its loud, yet charming personality and offbeat late 1990s attitude, and despite how bite-sized the game is, the voice lines from B.D. Joe (and only B.D. Joe, because I literally never picked anyone else) are practically etched into my brain.

On its own, the core gameplay and arcade modes of Crazy Taxi are as fun as they are chaotic and addicting, but the console version comes with an extra addition that I felt was totally at odds with the rest of the game, and that would be the Crazy Box challenges. On the surface, having a set of challenges to complete that also serve as a way to teach the player about the game's mechanics seems like a good idea, but for some reason, a majority of these challenges are demanding to the point where it's frustrating. A lot of these missions are ones where making even one tiny mistake means that you have to reset from the beginning due to how tight the time limits are, but because the game's almost inherent jank is the kind that can pretty much only fit a fast-paced arcade game, you'll often end up restarting the missions constantly over factors that never feel like your fault, as the controls in this context feel like they're working against you. It doesn't help that the button timings for the Crazy Drift and especially the Crazy Dash are so strict that they don't even register half the time, and while that's perfectly fine in the game's arcade mode, it doesn't mesh well at all with the challenges where every single move you make has to be absolutely perfect if you want to get even the bare minimum score. I also wasn't a fan of the game's "Original" map that was added in addition to the one from the actual arcade game, although that's more of a preference thing than an actual criticism. Despite its flaws, I still had a lot of fun with Crazy Taxi, even if I don't see any reason to pick up any of the sequels any time soon.

Recommended by LukeGirard and DustyVita for this list.

One of those games where the more I’ve played, the less qualified I’ve felt to talk about it; even finally getting an S-rank only had me seeing about half the arcade map and most of the deeper mechanics still feel arcane to me (Crazy Box is the realm of the gods) but it’s got a move called the [LIMITER CUT], so you know it’s good.

Guess I was most surprised by how demanding it all is- not just getting the timing right for your special moves (or the fact that there are even special moves), but the way you’ll need to get some familiarity with each of the fares and what part of the map they’ll take you too. Play haphazardly, and it’s pretty easy to squander your time in an infinite cycle of delivering passengers to and from Pizza Hut and FILA, so high ranks end up being just as much a test of your mental map of the city as they are of your ability to dart between traffic. That might sound a bit too high-minded though: on a base level this a game that’s worth playing because it nails the roar of the engine and has one of the best licensed soundtracks in gaming- something I only really learned to appreciate when it wasn’t there.

I played a bit of the Xbox 360 port out of a grim sense of obligation and it’s actually kind of staggering how lifeless the game feels without “Them and Us'' and “Way Down the Line'' blaring in the background- the whole experience seems like it was tuned with Offspring and Bad Religion in mind, everything from the timing of the animations as your passengers leap out of the cab to the way the music hypes you up as you careen through the road, which is to say nothing of what it adds to the game thematically. A YouTube channel called Under10Hours made an excellent video that made me consider the tracklist that much more and really opened me to the underlying bleakness of the game. Where, whether you come in with a meager D-Rank or clock in a new personal record, your last few seconds will either be spent frantically looking for a new fare or hearing your passenger berate you as your dart to the finish line, always a gnawing sense that you’re never quite good enough, that you could’ve hustled just a bit longer.

YA YA YA YA YAAAAHHH!!!! Just remembered i beat this on my phone, so why not review it? I remembered seeing a publication from a reviews site, i think it Gamesradar, that referred to this using the term "pure blue sky gaming", which i'm not sure what it means but i think it perfectly encapsulates the summery vibe these kind of arcade titles have, the wacky, playful vibes all around, with the super stylized graphics that still feed you a steady dose of reality, with some really clever product placement on the places you bring customers in, and an absurdly fun and memorable soundtrack, which, alongside the THPS games, singlehandedly made me interested in punk rock. The controls could be a bit more responsive, but really these kind of bite sized arcade experience is a perfect fit for a mobile device, there's not many 3D driving experiences more fun than these available for phone app stores, so bringing this classic back in a free to play model along with other games was a really clever move from Sega. And the gameplay itself is just irresistable, it may feel a little limited with only two maps, making me imagine the potential there would be for a sequel to introduce different ones, but it feels so satisfying to rack up points doing crazy stuff on traffic and completing a fare at just the right time, going at an absurd speed with that amazing presentation and the adrenaline pumping music in the background is an exhilarating experience even, encouraging the player to take risks with the varying degrees of difficulty and the bigger rewards for how high it is. All around a great slice of arcade goodness at the reach of your fingertips, with decent enough controls, just wish there was a bit more content introduced to make the experience not so short, but for the time it lasts, it's such undeniable fun.

Kickin' soundtrack. Neat idea for a game in general, but one that I feel should have stayed in arcades, as there isn't enough content to justify a console release (considering the arcade and console are different it's kinda weird they don't have separate pages here).

I actually spent most of my time in Crazy Box, trying to master all the various moves. The game does a terrible job at teaching you these, so you're best off looking online. I ended up clearing every challenge and...I still don't really get a lot of it. When it comes to drifting I have no idea what the heck is going on. Sometimes I'll do a perfect 90 degree drift and stop exactly where I want, other times I'll spin around a full 360 degrees and go sliding 5 miles away from where I wanted. The crazy dash was easy enough to get to grips with, though I found that doing it while starting was consistent, doing it while in motion was surprisingly difficulty - on the other hand the "limit cut" move which is a bigger speed boost but more mechanically difficult to pull off I found very easy to do consistently.

So even though I cleared all these challenges meant to teach me the advanced moves, I barely even know how some of them work shrug and don't even ask me about stuff like crazy drift stops.

When you do get to grips with these you go into one of the two maps the games has and just kinda do the same thing over and over. That's why I think it works better in arcade. At least for me, beating my own record over and over isn't an incentive, so once I'd gotten S rank and the credits on both maps, I didn't feel like there was much reason to keep playing.

The amount of branding is kind of funny, and combined with the music and overall vibes really cements itself as a time capsule of the late 90's/early 2000's.

Physics were all over the place. It felt like even the smallest physical object could bring you to a complete halt, get you stuck in some weird hitbox orgy or toss you a mile off course.

Great arcade game. Not all that great for a console game...especially for the sixth generation.

When I first played Crazy Taxi I was just a young lad, and I thought that the police force was the best thing in the world. I would watch shows like Cops and think that these guys were heroes, and that if I ever needed help I could just call the police and they would come and save me. But then I played Crazy Taxi.

In Crazy Taxi, the police are the villains. They are the ones who are trying to stop you from doing whatever you want, they are the ones who are trying to ruin your fun. And worst of all, they are the ones who are always arresting you. Whenever I would play Crazy Taxi I would always get arrested, and it would always be the cops who were arresting me. This made me hate the police force, and it made me realize that all cops are bastards.

But the thing that I hated the most about the police force in Crazy Taxi was their brutality. They would always beat me up and take me to jail, and it was never fun. In fact, it was really quite painful. And it made me angry, because I didn't think that the police should be able to do that. I thought that they should be helping people, not beating them up and taking them to jail.

And that's why I think that the police force is a bad thing, and that all cops are bastards. They are always arresting people, they are always beating people up, and they are always ruining people's fun. I think that we should be able to walk around the streets naked and killing people without getting arrested, and I think that the police force should be abolished.

A perfect home version of one of the last great arcade games, sacrificing nothing and adding meaningfully to the original content.

The core gameplay is hopelessly addicting for even the most casual player, but if you feel like really getting into it there's a whole world of weird button combination special techniques that feel like glitches but open up the gameplay hugely if you have the time to practice their very specific executions.

New to the home version is a bundle of brief minigame challenges that, in addition to being fun and tough, pretty effectively teach you how to play the game at an advanced level. There's also a whole new (huge) second city to drive around in, but it's not quite as much fun as the original one.

And lastly, it must be said ... the extremely early-'00s vibe of this game -- the style, the product placement, the MUSIC ... it slaps. Sorry! I don't make the rules! It unironically is awesome and good and there's no more discussion to be had about it.

A stone-cold classic and just as much of a blast to play now as it ever was.