With the holidays right around the corner, now is the perfect time to pick up a few goodies at a discount! Now through November 1^st, select North American titles on the PlayStation Network are available at special prices.

Nothing to wear for Halloween? POW – Dress your Home avatar in the Alpha Protocol Tactical Gear pack for only $14.99!  10 hour drive to grandma’s house for Thanksgiving?  BAM – pick up the SEGA Genesis Collection for PSP for the low price of $12.99! Need a Christmas gift for yourself? KAPLOW – SEGA Rally Online Arcade for PS3 is only $6.99. A complete listing of sale items is below.

PlayStation 3:

Crazy Taxi: $6.99 (30% off)

SEGA Rally Online Arcade: $6.99 (30% off)

Gunstar Heroes: $2.99 (50% off)

Alpha Protocol Tactical Gear pack: $14.99

PSP:

SEGA Genesis Collection: $12.99 (20% off)

Crazy Taxi: $6.99 (30% off)

Phantasy Star Portable 2: $19.99 (50% off)

Valkyria Chronicles II & Valkyria 2 DLC Pack 2: $22.99 (almost 50% off), $13.79 for PlayStation Plus members (almost 70% off)

In case you’ve missed it we have, right now, a huge selection of our Xbox Live Arcade titles on sale — 19 in all, as well as all avatar items discounted until April 25th. The full list of discounted titles with old and new prices is below, so let’s get to that:

And, as I said, all of the avatar items are discounted as well. There is what I would call a plethora — a wealth — of titles here; a wide variety. Something for everyone!

Many of these — particularly those involving rapid hedgehogs — you are all quite familiar with. They need no introduction. Some of these I feel compelled to call out: I had almost forgotten some existed on XBLA until now, and others are simply games I love to talk about at every opportunity.

For the record, many Sonic games are on sale. By which I mean, all of them. Sonic and the 2nd one and the one with Knuckles and the other one with Knuckles; Sonic 4 and the one with Knuckles and Big the Cat.

After Burner Climax

There is never a wrong time for After Burner Climax — it represents both SEGA’s arcade lineage and some of the most mind-bending arcade technology ever delivered. For me, it reaches back to one of my favorite 80s games, the 8-bit version of the original arcade title. A challenging game that invites you to blaze through it over and over, in glorious HD.

Phantasy Star II

Honor bound to mention this title, as I continue to represent the series to this day and the originals are some of the finest examples of the genre. A step up from the insidious grinding of the Master System original, Phantasy Star 2 has excellent heroes and villains to spend your time with.

Cyber Troopers Virtual On Oratorio Tangram

One of the first titles I ever wrote about as a Community Manager here, this is one I’d nearly forgotten about. Seeing it on sale a) warms my heart and b) makes me want to turn into a giant robot and blow other robots up. This game boasts one of the most awesome titles on XBLA and is, in fact, one of the coolest games in the genre. That genre is “robots who fight each other”; with multiplayer and a pedigree from the finest in Japanese robot battlin’ entertainment, what are you waiting for?

Streets of Rage 2

Because it’s Streets of Rage 2, for goodness sakes. The best side-scrolling brawler of the 90s, and therefore, of all-time. The music was excellent, and it was incredibly realistic, in that you could heal yourself by turkey legs concealed under breakable objects while fighting off swarms of thugs with co-ordinated names and jean jackets. I’ve heard Tokyo is actually a lot like this.

Crazy Taxi and Sonic Adventure

The advanced guard of the Dreamcast’s digital return — Sonic and friends adventure across the expanse of the Dreamcast platform in Sonic Adventure, in a unique combination of high speed action, epic story, and puzzle-based adventure. Meanwhile, Crazy Taxi turns you loose on streets that unmistakably pay homage to my own city of San Francisco, featuring an incredibly realistic driving sim of what it is actually like to drive in this city arcade-fueled driving mayhem. For the screenshot here, I picked my favorite one — the one where the car is driving fast and all crazy, and in which you are making crazy money.

Ecco the Dolphin

The most eerie, haunting, difficult, and enchanting game you could possibly have devised of an adorable dolphin searching for his lost pod. Rumors of a next gen sequel are unconfirmed as of press time.

Shinobi

The original, the arcade version, the quarter taking, green ninja wasting, shuriken flinging, advancing wall of spinning-head boss-round having, Joe Musashi-introducing master of side-scrolling 2D old-school excellence. I remember playing this one in the local Safeway back in nineteen eighty-something, thinking I could master it because I had the Master System version at home. I was wrong. This one is hard. Ninjitsu!

Mark my words – those Australians get everything cool. Summer when it’s our winter, awesome beaches that defy description, adorable Koalas and other animals – and this … the Dreamcast Limited Edition Vinyl. Jerks, all of them!

Luckily, while we are not offering this for a pre-order bonus across the US, we do have a hefty batch in stock to pass out to fans and fansites for giveaway!

The Vinyl is a very limited pressing and is individually numbered, it contains five classic tracks from Sonic Adventure, Space Channel 5 Part 2, and Crazy Taxi. As you can see from the photos, the sleeve is designed to look like the white Dreamcast console, only blue – as that was the color scheme for the European territories. Inside, the record has the familiar Dreamcast swirl and comes in stylish white – perfect!

We’re going to be sending these around to our various friends across the web and will be posting updates to everyone shortly. For now, marvel at the fun swag that’s being produced for our favorite white console!

It may go without saying, but we’re big fans of Crazy Taxi in the office. Ever since we got our first build of game, we’ve had a running score challenge. Along the way, we had to relearn some of the Crazy skills needed to master the roads found inside; some by trial and error, some by muscle memory, others by developer assistance. A few of these tips and tricks are found below, written by our own Ben H after trying and retrying to (unsuccessfully) beat my score…

The Crazy Dash: One of the most useful techniques for saving time is the Crazy Dash. This makes your taxi accelerate much faster than it would normally – great for that stop and go traffic. You can perform the Crazy Dash by releasing the accelerator and the brake, then shifting into drive and hitting the accelerator at the same time.

The Crazy Stop: Where would you be without the Crazy Stop? Probably halfway through someone’s living-room wall, or at least several yards past the passenger you were trying to pick up. Crazy Stop pairs perfectly with the Crazy Dash by allowing you to stop on a dime. Pull off a Crazy Stop by throwing the car into reverse and stepping on the brakes at the same time. For an even faster stop, do a Crazy Stop immediately after a Crazy Dash. Fun fact: Although Crazy Taxi draws scenes from San Francisco nobody on the Crazy Taxi dev team had even been to San Francisco when they began production on the game.

The Crazy Drift: Not only is the Crazy Drift the most convenient way to speed through sharp corners, but it is also the only move covered here today which gets you “Crazy Combo” points. It’s a little known fact but the entire sport of Drifting was actually made popular by this one maneuver. To perform the Crazy Drift, simply release the gas pedal, throw the cab into reverse, then throw it back into drive, hit the gas, and turn sharply. Occasionally you can slam into a building during a Crazy Drift, which results in your cab popping a side-wheelie and racking up a huge combo bonus – cha-ching!

The Limiter Cut: Professor Einstein always said that speed was relative, and in Crazy Taxi that particular law of physics remains untouched. If you want to go faster relative to the other cabbies then you can perform a maneuver called the Limiter Cut. This removes your top speed limiter momentarily, allowing for a short burst of speed. To remove your limiter, perform a Crazy Dash, a Crazy Drift (without the sharp turn), then a Crazy Dash again. These can be executed in quick succession for a quantum layering effect, which allows you to rocket around at close to the speed of light! Warning: after mastering the limiter cut, regular driving will feel as if you’re stuck in an ultra slo-mo replay.

Unlock each Character’s “Special Taxi”: With all the hubbub about going green today sometimes you have to stop and ask yourself, “how eco-friendly is my cab?” Nothing says “I’m the greenest cabbie around” quite like a human powered Rickshaw, which emits close to zero grams of carbon a year – depending on what you had for lunch. In Crazy Taxi you can unlock a special Rickshaw for each character by completing all sixteen Crazy Box levels. Once unlocked, the Rickshaw is selectable in Crazy Box, Arcade, and Original modes. To select the Rickshaw in Crazy Box mode, scroll to the right of Gus at the character selection screen. To select the Rickshaw in Arcade or Original mode, press Up at the character selection screen. Speaking of characters, Axel is the name of Kenji Kanno’s dog. He likes breaking his cage to escape.

Using these skills, we hope your game improves! If you’ve got any tips of your own, leave them below in the comments!

The craziness comes to a peak today as Crazy Taxi — the Dreamcast classic, a blisteringly fun driving game through the streets of a faux-San Francisco — releases on Xbox Live Arcade!

Already out for PlayStation Network, Crazy Taxi continues the Dreamcast console’s digital rebirth. What started with Sonic Adventure continues with one of the most purely fun games to appear on the system — even if I wanted to say something bad about Crazy Taxi, I don’t think I’d be able to. The game is both immediately fun and seriously challenging: ripping around the crazy streets is easy to do and the learning curve is such that you can get satisfactorily better just with some simple practice.

But to really master the game you need to learn the, ahem, Crazy Techniques. Thus we present a special video for Axel’s Crazy Taxi Instructional Video! Featuring a quick tour of the many difficult maneuvers you can pull off in your nigh-indestructible cab, this is a great place to get started on your road to crazy money.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In case the video moves too fast for you and you want a quick reference guide, here are the moves listed, and how to perform them:

Crazy Dash: While accelerator and brake are not in use, shift into Drive while quickly accelerating.

Quick Turn: Brake, press accelerator and turn at the same time.

Limiter Cut: Execute the Crazy Dash maneuver, then let go of the accelerator and shift into Reverse, then execute the Crazy Dash again.

Crazy Drift: Shift into reverse during driving; quickly shift into Drive and then make a tight turn.

Crazy Back Drift: Shift into Drive and accelerate, then quickly switch into Reverse while making a tight turn.

Crazy Stop: Quickly switch into Reverse.

Some of these are rather complex but with practice, they become second nature. The Crazy Dash is perhaps the most useful to pick up early on, and is quick & easy to learn — master that and your performance will improve dramatically.

Sonic Adventure and Crazy Taxi are now out and about — stay tuned for more news on Space Channel 5: Part 2, and SEGA Bass Fishing!

Attention Crazy Drivers everywhere — it’s time to make some Crazy Money on the Crazy Streets, because the Dreamcast’s own Crazy Taxi is out now for (Crazy) PlayStation Network!

Not enough Crazy for you yet? Then you might just be crazy enough for this game, which has some of the most infectiously fun driving of any game for any console. That it represents the Dreamcast’s continued return to digital space via Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network is just a nice bonus for fans of the system.

The real goodness of Crazy Taxi comes from the fact that, while incredibly easy to jump in and have fun with, it is actually an incredibly challenging game to master — this is especially true for the various challenge modes the game has. Careening around the streets like a madman (or madwoman) is both easy to do and deliciously destructive fun: huge jumps off tall hills net you bonus points as you slam wildly (and harmlessly) into semi-trucks while terrified pedestrians dive out of your way. It is, in fact, a great deal like actually driving in San Francisco (something I can readily attest to).

To actually master the game — meaning turning in top times (and there will be online leaderboards for this) and completing the challenges — requires both skill and strategy. You need to learn the twists and turns of the wonderfully realized in-game city and become an expert at the game’s difficult special maneuvers. I’ve become good — reasonably good — at the standard arcade mode of the game, simply racing from one passenger to the next. This version of the game is endlessly satisfying but it’s the various challenges (see the screenshot of using your car as a bowling ball, below) which keep you perfecting your skills.

You can get Crazy Taxi right now on PlayStation Network, and it will hit Xbox Live Arcade on the 24th. Additionally, PlayStation Plus members get a 20% discount on the game until November 30th. That is, as they say, some crazy savings.

There’s more Dreamcast news coming, and of course Space Channel 5 part II and SEGA Bass Fishing on the way!