This year's US presidential election has, as ever, brought a hitherto-unknown degree of scrutiny to certain of its key players. One person who seems to have come out of it fairly well is the Democratic nomination for vice president, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, whose biography is basically a folksy paean to public service, on top of which he comes across as an actual human being rather than an Onion character.
One standout discovery among the deep-dives into Walz's past is that the man has great taste in consoles, and was particularly attached to the Sega Dreamcast: to the extent his wife apparently took to hiding it from him. And lo the internet delivered, with one Resetera user turning out to have acquired the very console in question after it was handed down by Walz, and recalling the machine came with a copy of Crazy Taxi. IGN has a full rundown if you want to get into the weeds, but the short version is that the US now has a Veep nominee who knows all about making some kerrr-aazzzy money.
Are ya ready? Well here we Walz, thanks to a new mod that puts the political everyman into the original Crazy Taxi. It's the work of one Edward La Barbera, who read the articles about Walz and his Dreamcast and, y'know, thought it would be a laugh.
"I saw a news article on the gaming forum Resetera, about Tim Walz owning a Dreamcast. Rumor also had it his favorite game was Crazy Taxi," La Barbera told MPR News. "I thought it'd be a funny homage, like Bill Clinton in the arcade game NBA Jam.”
La Barbera spent about a week on the mod, and what tips it from good to great is the incorporation of various Walz voice lines taken from his Democratic National Convention speech, with the character especially fond of saying "is it weird? Absolutely." The mod even adds a more Minnesota flavour to the map, with a wintery overhaul and the addition of a new stop which, naturally, is a polling precinct. "I replaced palm trees with snow-covered pines," says La Barbera, "replaced the stadium with Target Field and the mall with the Mall of America."
The ribbon on this modding gift is that La Barbera also decided to add current vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, who also has various voice lines taken from her DNC address. The only way this could be improved would be if, at the start of the game, you heard Harris asking "you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?" Then instantly into the Offspring soundtrack and YA YA YA YA YAA!
The mod can be found here, though to get it working you'll need some familiarity with Dreamcast emulators. Or here's some footage of the mod in action, and Governor Walz showing that all's fare in love, war, and politics.
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