The final games featured for this series aren't the most popular driving games ever. They don't represent the pinnacle of graphical achievement either. However they are three driving games that represented the arcade experience very well. They created easy to play yet difficult to master experience. Best of all they were able to immerse the player into the experience very quickly. Allowing you to get a slice of a world, very similar to ours only slightly cooler and more fantastic. We'll begin with the most famous of the lot.
Sega's Crazy Taxi, released in 1999 was the freshest thing in the driving genre. The format had become cluttered, every driver looked and played the same for a while. Sega made a driving adventure unlike anything they had tried before. Most publishers would want to capitalize on their racing experience and just release another title in that format. Thankfully Hitmaker (AM3) didn't go down that road and instead placed gamers in a world where driving as recklessly as possible was greatly rewarded.
Players were placed in the role of a cabbie, trying to earn as much money as possible within a set time limit. Time bonuses could be earned by how quickly a person reached their destination and also for how many stunts the driver pulled off. Doing power slides and huge jumps were the best money boosters. Avoiding collisions and using shortcuts were the best for gaining time. The best players learned to balance everything while careening into oncoming traffic and looking for a destination. The game was a blast to play. I can remember putting plenty of quarters in the machine during a time when great arcade games were few and far between. It made a perfect transition on the Dreamcast console, along with plenty of mini games to keep me going.
The people at Sega poured every arcade nuance they had learned over the years into Crazy Taxi. The cabbies and their taxis all had personality, like grown up versions of characters from Top Skater or Jet Set Radio. They accepted a day job yet never lost their own personal flair. The cars were sleek low riders or bulky pre-war iron. The cities they raced in were as imaginative as the towns featured in Daytona and Super GT. Only now we could take the time to enjoy peeling around the streets, cutting through parks and alleys in a wide-open world rather than be forced to only catch a glimpse of the city from the rear view mirror. All of the drifting hijinks from the earlier Sega racers returned here, all of the responsive steering and indestructible transmissions were in full effect.
The music helped frame the experience, again, not unlike what Pennywise had done for Top Skater, So. Cal. punk favorites the Offspring provided all of the songs in the original Crazy Taxi. All I Want becoming the de facto anthem.
Latter Crazy Taxi games went through the motions but didn't recreate the charm of the original title. For what it was worth Crazy Taxi might be considered Sega's best driving series if not for all those other damn fine games Yu Suzuki had put out.
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