Crazy Taxi | Why I Love
Why I Love is a series of guest editorials on GamesIndustry.biz intended to showcase the ways in which game developers appreciate each other's work. This entry was contributed by Tim FitzRandolph, the solo-dev otherwise known as Walaber, who recently released Parking Garage Rally Circuit, an arcade racer where you drift around parking garages now available on Steam.
My college had an entertainment center with a mini bowling alley, billiards, and some arcade game cabinets. One game in particular was quite fun. I'd play it once or twice a week, and I thought I was getting pretty good at it, able to play for about five minutes or so on a single play.
One day I had just finished a pretty solid round, when I realized someone had been waiting to play their turn. I stuck around to watch them play. They played for what felt like 45 minutes on a single play (in reality it was probably more like 10-15 minutes). My mind was blown. They were doing things in the game I had never seen. A game I thought I knew pretty well had a layer of depth that I had no idea about. Actually, not just one layer, more like ten layers. I was hooked.
As you may have guessed from the article title, the game in question was none other than the Sega AM3 arcade classic Crazy Taxi. If you've played the original, you probably remember the San Francisco-ish city in which the game takes place, with your first fare in the game taking you down some steep streets with trolley cars and traffic to avoid.
When you first play the game, it probably looks like this:
The player I was watching was doing THIS:
I was astounded. Carefully watching them play, they were doing an interesting technique: let go of the gas pedal, shift into Reverse while coasting, then slam the shifter into Drive and floor the pedal a moment later. This granted a sudden burst of speed, which they then repeated rhythmically to reach higher and higher speeds. Needless to say, I started mimicking this technique and was able to start to pull it off
Read more on gamesindustry.biz
