[00:00] Crazy Taxi World Tour. It's back. It's like the entire first game and also like an entirely new game and yeah yeah yeah yeah offsprings on the soundtrack as well as bad religion. To say this
[00:16] up front I did not actually play the game instead I watched a live demo played by the developers in front of me so I got to see this thing in action full force. Okay so I got three major takeaways.
[00:29] First, it's the whole first game, all of the characters, the West Coast San Francisco map. But it is world tour, so that means you are going to travel around the world and see a bunch of new big maps. Now, unfortunately, I didn't get to see those other maps.
[00:41] All they said was there are several continents in the world, so expect a map for several, you know, for each continent. I don't know if it's seven, because there's seven continents.
[00:54] I think they said five. Don't quote me. But what I saw of San Francisco is quite literally the modernized version of the original arcade game. So the one thing they did during the presentation to really show how much they're doing to make this game feel authentic but modernized is they showed the original game and then they showed the new one.
[01:10] And it really was like seeing a completely graphically remade overhauled version of the first one with all of its wacky physics all of its like all the way in which like cars just fly into the air if you drive into them But it less arcadey in the sense that there chillness to it You can actually drive around in an open world setting and not have to be constantly delivering people to their locations
[01:31] But when it happens, when it kicks off, Offspring starts, the pop punk bands riff, and you're doing the whole thing you probably know very well from Crazy Taxi. Second part, this is going to sound weird, but they put a lot of emphasis on lore and
[01:47] world building. This time around, the drivers are talking. They really wanted to build a world and make sure that the people were alive and talked and had backstories. It sounds counterintuitive to an arcade game, but I think it's going to make the game more fun.
[02:04] Another thing they really wanted to emphasize was making sure the world felt alive. So like the original game, it's very populated. There are people running everywhere. There's a lot of cars. but it was kind of impressive to see how populated every single at every single moment the game was
[02:20] there's just like the screen is filled with characters filled with npcs filled with cars filled with destructible stuff uh and it was really impressive to see them take that specific element from the original arcade game and kind of multiply it and you know punch it up into
[02:34] something really cool and then lastly the thing i can talk about is fishing And the third thing is there a fishing game There a fishing game You fish in crazy taxi and how you do it is absolutely absurd And to quote the director he said it very stupid and it is and it great What happens is you pick up a fisherman and he gets in the back
[02:57] of your car and you have to drive at the edge of the water like there's a there's a pier that you drive on you have to use the car stop and go and sort of like turbo mechanics to go and come to an immediate stop in which then that propels the fisherman's hook into the water and then you
[03:11] have to kind of do a mini fishing game of backing up and like stopping at the right time to be able to pull the reel back in. And he's just not fishing for normal things. First time, he pulled down an octopus. The second time, a whole damn shark. Like I said, the director said it's very
[03:28] stupid. And that's kind of emblematic of the attitude they're taking. And I know on the director, it's the original dude from the first game. It's the original director from the first game. he's overseeing this project as a creative producer and his whole pitch for why he's doing
[03:41] it now whether this is true or not he's like the world is sad and the news sucks so i wanted now felt like the right time to bring back something that would just make you smile but let's talk about the side quest stuff one of the side quests i saw was a pizza deliverer guy who needed to
[03:56] deliver 20 giant stack pizzas he was holding an entire tower of pizza above his head while you're driving around the city and helping him deliver his pizzas. And that's where like the weird element of story comes in because the pizza delivery guy
[04:10] had a name which was Cheeseburger But he seemed like he would be an ongoing character who would pop up all the time The fact that it was like they were trying to give life to these people and leaning into the quirkiness the craziness the zanniness of it
[04:23] feels like this game is really finding an identity in a modern era in a way that isn't going to take away from the original game. And that's kind of what makes this so much more like, yes, it is the original map. So one could just say it's like a remake, but they are doing a lot in a way that I never expected a crazy tax scheme to do.
[04:40] The other thing they didn't show was multiplayer. They did make sure to say this game is really, the multiplayer is there for endgame, like for a lot of people to really just flex their ability to just drive around. But the emphasis is making sure that game feels good to play regardless.
[04:56] It's there if you want it, but it's not the agenda is to, you know, thrust Crazy Taxi into a multiplayer sort of world. And they were talking about back in the day, it was just technologically more difficult to be able to do.
[05:08] A game like Crazy Taxi is a multiplayer game. So now's the time. There's going to be new pop punk music. What is it going to be? I don't know. The director said there's going to be some surprises. But yes, Offspring and Bad Religion are back on the soundtrack for those who want that.
[05:22] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Crazy Dex is coming out in 2027. For all the other Summer Game Fest jazz, you can stay here at GameSpot. With me, Kurt and Davina, and others.
[05:40] you