Video arcades may have fallen by the wayside in recent years, but there’s an interesting parallel to mobile gaming. In arcades, short, simple, and addictive are the pillars of game design, and these same principles translate so perfectly to gaming on the go. As mobile games become increasingly consolized, it’s refreshing to relive some of the arcade’s greatest moments.
And Crazy Taxi is a great place to start. Released in 1999, amid a waning and increasingly homogenous arcade scene, Crazy Taxi was a bold step by Sega toward more open-ended design. As fighting games grew to dominate the arcades, traditionally strong genres like racers started to lose their audience. Crazy Taxi was a reinvention of the arcade racing game that traded linear courses – the genre’s defining hallmark – for an open-world city.
At its core, Crazy Taxi is still essentially a checkpoint-based arcade racing game, but instead of passing through pre-defined checkpoints in a specific series, you can pick up fares that each have their own destinations of varying distances and reward levels in terms of both money and bonus time. The clock is always ticking down, so you have to constantly pick up new passengers and then drive like a maniac to the destination. The physics are exaggerated and loads of fun, even if everything feels like it’s made of cardboard.
This open-ended design ends up adding depth and strategy in addition to just making the game less repetitive. You can see how long a fare is before you pick them up, but not the destination. Shorter fares tend to offer more slack in their time bonuses, and are the key to keeping the game going. Of course, longer fares can take you to interesting locations that might pay off once you’ve bled an area of short-distance travelers. The city itself makes up a kind of large circuit, and new fares pop up at set times, allowing you to keep your ride going as long as you keep moving.
As a port, Crazy Taxi is about as good as you can hope for. The graphics are pretty much identical to the arcade original, with added support for wide screen and HD interface elements borrowed from more recent versions. There’s excellent controller support, as well as support for the Xperia Play, and everything runs smooth as silk. There are options for both touch and tilt-based controls, and the controls have been tweaked so that advanced maneuvers like drifts and boosts make sense with each control scheme. Even without a controller, you’ll be able to pull off most of the same crazy moves you could in the arcade.
This is not a large, 20 hour game full of missions and side-quests. Crazy Taxi contains the same two courses as the Dreamcast original, as well as the “Crazy Box” missions that act as a sort of advanced tutorial in the game’s mechanics. There’s no victory in Crazy Taxi, and not even much in the way of unlockables, so this is strictly a game for those that enjoy chasing that high score. If that’s your bag, Crazy Taxi’s stages can be explored endlessly, trying to find that perfect route that can last forever.