In addition to being a bastion for indie developers and startup studios, Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network are rapidly becoming destinations for actual arcade games. Many of these tend to be straight ports and, regardless of how fun they were, their aging shows through, like a favorite tennis racket with half the strings broken off. Crazy Taxi is venerated as one of the best arcade classics of its time but hasn’t translated well into this age. It’s still as fun as it was in the arcade, but whether it’s enough for ten bucks is debatable.
The basic premise of Crazy Taxi is still the same, assuming you spent the past decade in isolation and missed the game as well as its sequels and numerous clones. You start off the game by picking one of four purely aesthetic drivers – the only difference among them is their lumpy polygonal appearances – and leaping into your taxi. You’re given an amount of time depending on the gameplay mode to drive around assumed San Francisco picking up fares and taking them to their destinations before time runs out. If you take too long with a fare you lose it, and when you run out of your time your shift is up.
1Ghz Intel Pentium III or AMD Athlon processor
Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
DirectX 9.0b required
256Mb RAM
DirectX 9 compatible Sound Card with Microsoft certified drivers.
500mb HDD space.
