YMMV / Crazy Taxi

• Awesome Music: If Crazy Taxi is usually remembered for one thing aside from its fast-paced hectic gameplay, it's the punk rock soundtrack found in each of the games, originally featuring The Offspring and Bad Religion, along with Tommy Lee, Brian Setzer, and Citizen Bird/Silverbullit. Most players consider it such a vital part of the gameplay to the point where where the ports have been widely criticized for not retaining the same music. In fact, "All I Want" by The Offspring is so popular and tightly associated with the game that it was made a playable song in CHUNITHM.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Passengers actually jump out of the taxi while it's still moving if the timer runs out. That on its own is pretty ridiculous, but it sky rockets to insane levels when you find out that one of the possible passengers you can pick up is a pregnant woman.
• First Installment Wins: As is the case with Daytona USA, the first game is the most fondly remembered and has seen countless ports, while the second and third games were not nearly as well-received and has each been ported once (PSP and PC respectively).
• Good Bad Bugs: If you slide into a wall at a parallel angle in the first game, your car will tilt onto 2 wheels, and you will rack up massive tip combos. Doing this is necessary to get the really big hauls.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Part of why the second game and the third game sold poorly despite being set in different cities and adding new features and new minigames.
• Nintendo Hard: The Crazy Box/Pyramid/X. You'd better know how to Crazy Boost and Drift with nigh perfect accuracy if you want to complete every mission.
• Porting Disaster:
  • The three PC retail versions ship with notorious disc-based DRM that affect its backwards compatibility in the long run, and the PC ports ran at a lower framerate than the arcade and console versions, especially the third game's night time maps.
  • The Steam version, despite being able to run at higher resolutions than its previous retail PC version, it lacks proper analog controls for steering and pedals, and has a notorious optimization issue that causes the game to run poorly even on high-spec PCs on top of having the music and voice-overs changed.
• Quirky Work: A colorful arcade racing series where you look for customers who are waiting on roofs or even underwater for a ride, and take them to their location as quickly as you can, while ignoring any and all traffic laws, doing crazy stunts that would otherwise kill everyone on board for a serious tip, all in famous U.S. cities while punk rock music blasts in the background. The sequels add all kinds of weird passengers, including aliens, and the Crazy Box/Pyramid/X minigames have you hitting golf balls and bowling pins, popping balloons and destroying UFOs.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: Think you know the map by heart? Turn off the guidance arrow and find out.
• Sequelitis: The first game was immensely popular at the time of its release, becoming an All Stars title for the Dreamcast, and it seemed that Sega had another Cash-Cow Franchise on their hands. Unfortunately for them, the series saw a quick decline in popularity with the release of each sequel due to adding nothing new apart from the gimmicky jumping and different cities.
• Song Association: Alright, who heard this song on the radio and was tempted to jump traffic? Most, if not all, of The Offspring songs featured qualify.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Save for the GameCube and PS2 ports, the first game's iconic soundtrack has unfortunately never since survived its numerous re-releases, from the original PC port to the downloadable re-release in 2011. It finally returned in the 2012 iOS re-release. Soundtrack changes in other ports are just as criticized, and if a new game is announced without music from The Offspring playing, don't expect fans to be happy.
  • The voice acting for the original four cabbies, save Axel, was changed with the PS2 and GameCube ports of the first game, which carried onto the sequels. The recent re-releases of the first game are not spared of this change.
  • The mobile games for fans of the arcade racers for changing the game dynamics.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The iconic soundtrack features songs by The Offspring and Bad Religion that were released in the late '90s, helping to fit into the Totally Radical '90s punk-like nature of the game. However what really cements the game (or at least its original 1999 release and later sixth generation console ports) as a product of the late '90s is the inclusion of product placement for Tower Records, which went out of business in 2006, as well as Amoco (which was largely rebranded as BP a few years after, though the name has been brought back), not to mention the prevalence of classic, red roof Pizza Huts (many locations are now takeout only, and the red roof locations have often been remodeled/repainted). Later re-releases of the game remove the product placement, but the '90s attitude still remains mostly the same.
  • Even the game's taxis are becoming a part of this trope, as while traditional cab services are still around, it's been largely supplanted by ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft.

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