Since vice presidential candidate Tim Walz revealed himself to be a gamer, it was only a matter of time before somebody decided to run with it inside a video game. That’s why when we spotted Crazy Taxi: Tim Walz Edition, a Dreamcast mod on itch.io this week, we knew we had to write about it.
In case you don’t get the joke here, it started with an anecdote by Walz, published in the New York Times, about how he was a big fan of the Sega Dreamcast, but his wife, Gwen Walz, had “seized” it because he was using it too much. Many video game fans were, of course, curious for more details. What happened to the Dreamcast? What games did Walz play? What was the game that supposedly pushed Gwen over the edge?
That’s when a ResetEra thread from 2018 resurfaced, where user Bryn “Aaron” Tanner (identified by IGN) said that he had the former Minnesota governor’s Dreamcast. When asked to explain that story, Tanner said that he bought it for $25 from one of Walz’s former high school students, who received it from Walz while he was working for the congressional campaign.
The console didn’t come with any games, but IGN’s Rebekah Valentine investigated, and this former student was identified as Tom Johnson. He took the Dreamcast with him to college, and recalls that there was one disc sitting inside the console: Crazy Taxi. Thus a meme was born.
Crazy Taxi: Tim Walz Edition is a mod for Crazy Taxi that can only be run inside the Flycast Dreamcast Emulator. You play as a taxi driver (Tim Walz), who drives around town picking up passengers and transporting them to their destination. The twist is that you’re, you know, a crazy taxi driver, and have to get them to their destinations as quickly as possible. You’ll pull stunts, and crash into a ton of pedestrians on your journey.
In an interview with MPRNews, the game’s developer Edward La Barbera said he learned how to make Dreamcast mods specifically because of this whole Walz saga, and thought it would be “a funny homage, like Bill Clinton in the arcade game NBA Jam.”
Beyond just getting Walz into the game, La Barbera also added some Minnesota touches, including snowy weather, trees more indigenous to the northern Midwest, and flannel. Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is even a selectable character, and both her’s and Walz’s Democratic National Convention speeches are in the game as the voiced lines. There’s even a new destination type: a polling location.
It’s not super weird that Walz might be a Crazy Taxi fan — we listed it as one of the best Dreamcast games of all time. Sega announced last year that it was developing projects in five classic franchises, including Crazy Taxi. Basically, there’s always room for more Crazy Taxi.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.