When I was eight years old, my uncle owned a Dreamcast. I had never seen anything like it at that point. I watched him play a handful of games on it and was completely blown away. The game that I remember the most vividly, however, was Sega’s Crazy Taxi.

The game looked amazing and seemed like so much fun. I wanted to hop behind the wheel of these insane yellow vehicles and cause some havoc around this crazy city. But… My uncle refused to let me play his Dreamcast. He said, and I quote, “you’re not cool enough.” I think it was more of him not wanting to stop playing than it was letting me play. Or at least that’s what I hope it was. Regardless, I never got to play Crazy Taxi or any Dreamcast game for that matter. Until recently. Guess what uncle, I’m cool enough to have my very own Dreamcast now and you know what game I was most looking forward to? You guessed it. Crazy Taxi was at the top of my list.

Now, does it live up to this childhood fascination? The short answer is, yes it does. Crazy Taxi is short-burst games of vehicular mayhem and just pure fun. You can tell that this game is originally an arcade game because it’s designed to be fun in short bursts. You only play for three, five, or ten minutes. That’s all you get. You get to pick up passengers and take them to their destination. That’s it. That’s all there is.

But there is actually a surprising amount depth here. At first, the cars handle a little funky and the controls are really simple. One button shifts you into drive and one button shifts you into reverse. You also have a brake and an accelerator with the shoulder buttons. That’s it. I think this must be because the arcade game had a brake, accelerator, and a gear shift. So there isn’t much there. But, there are a ton of little tricks to do with these buttons. For instance, if you shift into reverse and back into drive right before accelerating, your car will get a little speed boost. And if you let go of your accelerator and shift into reverse, then turn and shift into drive again, the car will enter a drift. There are a ton of little tricks like this in Crazy Taxi. The big one, however, is called the “limiter cut.” If you get a small boost and shift in and out of gear in the proper rhythm, you continually get a speed boost. If you can keep this rhythm up, you can start gaining obscene speeds. This completely breaks the game as you haul ass around the map. It really makes the game a ton of fun as you master these little tricks. You really do get better and better at driving your taxi around the city. Nothing feels better than nailing your limiter cut down the highway and doing a perfect crazy spin into your passenger’s destination. The game feels incredible.

But my favorite part of the whole game is actually a little collection of challenges called the Crazy Box. It’s essentially just a bunch of mini-game-esque challenges. Like popping twenty five balloons in 30 seconds. Or delivering six grandmas to their destination on a perilous path over the ocean. All these challenges are fun and some are rather difficult. But none are as difficult as the final challenge: a four minute lap around the entire map. This challenge is next to impossible. You have to perfectly nail every little technique over and over again to even be close. And even then, you can completely fail because of the damn traffic. It is incredibly difficult and feels oh so amazing when you finally get it. I had a nearly perfect run and nailed everything and I only finished with seconds to spare. This is after hours of trying.

But at the end of the day, that’s about it. You’re still just picking up passengers and dropping them off. You can get extremely good at this game, but it all boils down to the same gameplay loop. Not that it’s a bad gameplay loop! Not in the slightest. The game is incredibly fun. But it’s just not a game that you’ll play for hours and hours on end. Which almost makes it even worse that my uncle wouldn’t let me play. He could have just let me play a three minute game. I guess I am still salty about that. In fact, I’m going to go play a whole ten minute game right now! And you know what? I won’t even let my uncle look at my Dreamcast. That’ll teach him. I give Crazy Taxi a 3 out of 4.