I need to get to Burger King!

Ah, Crazy Taxi. How many quarters did I feed these machines before the coming of the almighty Dreamcast? I probably don't want to know. These games are a shining example of why I love Sega for the pure arcade fun that always brings me back to the days of pumping way too much money into cabinets for way too little play time. The Dreamcast is an absolute treasure-trove of home versions of what feel like the end of the arcade era, at least for me anyway, as games like Crazy Taxi, San Francisco Rush, Hydro Thunder, and 18 Wheeler American Pro Trucker were among the last cabinets I can ever remember dropping tokens into.

If you follow me on Twitter, you've seen mention of a new website that my good friend Mister Binky writes for called No High Scores and if you haven't, you should definitely check that site out. I'm especially fond of Bink's "Don't Shoot the Food" posts, which combine his love of gaming with his love of food. Back to the subject matter at hand though, another contributor to NHS, Danielle Riendeau, did a post last week about the newly released Dreamcast Collection on XBox, focusing on XBLA title Crazy Taxi. Reading it immediately took me back to the days of living in my apartment in Atlanta when the Dreamcast would rarely ever actually be turned off, and we would spend hours playing games like Jet Grind Radio, NHL 2K, NFL 2K, Power Stone, Soul Calibur, and you guessed it, Crazy Taxi.

As we all know, I still have my Dreamcast and play it pretty often. It has a permanent home sitting on my entertainment center beside my Xbox 360. Thanks to Danielle's post though, this week it has seen way more use than it's accustomed to though, as I've been burning up the roads picking up fares and dropping them off at places like the Fried Chicken Shack, Jewelry Department, the Hospital, the Mall, and even Burger King in Crazy Taxi and Crazy Taxi 2. With the state of gaming today, focusing on progressing through a campaign full of blood, bullets, and all other sort of mayhem, we sometimes forget the simple fun a game like Crazy Taxi can bring. So I'd like to extend a big thanks to Danielle for the "retro reminder" that these games still exist, are still all kinds of awesome, and I can still play them whenever I want to , I just have to stop dismembering necromorphs every now and then and actually turn on Sega's greatest triumph, my Dreamcast.