Tonight, the fare’s on us
Tonight, Destructoid is presented by RawFury’s Night Call, a neo-noir video game that puts you in the driver’s seat of a Parisian taxi murder mystery. Lookin’ for a free ride? Share your worst cab experience with us.
Isn’t public transportation a strange beast? We all use it since it’s usually the most convenient way to get around — this especially goes for urban/metro areas — but for some reason it seems to bring out the worst in people. The bus smells predominantly like a pepperoni peed in the aisle, trains are known primarily for their wrecks (the phrase “trainwreck” became common for a reason), and planes are the greatest thing on earth if you really like getting the flu in July.
Try as we might, we just can’t seem to do without other people driving us around.
The taxi is probably the most notorious of all. Seedy, intimate in all the bad ways, and expensive, a ride in a cab is cause for anxiety in most sane humans. And for good reason — ask anyone you know, and they’ve got a horror story from a cab ride. It’s common to the point of redundancy. Don’t believe me? We asked Dtoid readers to tell us about their worst cab rides. Here’s what they had to say.
Dere:
Back in college me and my roommate were taking a cab back from a bar crawl. We hit up like six different bars that night. We caught a cab with two hotties we met at one of the bars thinking we’d get lucky. Well on the way back I apparently had to take a piss pretty badly and I yelled it out as loud as I could so the driver would hopefully stop. He did not, so I pissed myself in front of two hotties while in the cab and woke up the next morning in my same piss-stained clothes, reeking of urine.
Tricerapops:
A cabbie in Georgia was playing with his phone while we waited for my drunk buddy to stumble to the cab. I saw that his wallpaper was covered in young women in thongs and tiny bikini tops, so I yelled “BIG TITTIED BITCHES!” He got furious and started screaming at me and attempting to physically remove me from his cab while I brayed with laughter. They were his daughters.
…but yo, why you got your daughter in a thong as your wallpaper, bro?
LaserPirate:
I was backpacking through Europe with friends and our first stop in Italy was Florence. There was only one hostel available with room and it was a damn Christian hostel. Christian hostels always have curfews. Our train was late and we had no hope in hell of walking or bussing to the hostel in time so we grabbed a cab. Logical, right? Problem was we told the Italian cab driver we were in a hurry. Do this day I have not gone as fast in a car, to this day I have not driven on the wrong side of the road (with oncoming traffic), and to this day I have not nearly died so many times in the span of 20 minutes.
My brother was a cab driver in Whistler, though. He’s got some crazy ass stories. He once beat the shit out of a fare and dumped his ass on the side of the road for trying to tear his cab apart (drunk-ass dude), drove off, went back, picked his knocked-out ass up, checked his ID for his address, and drive him home. Carried him into his house and put him on the couch. It was like -25C outside, though.
Xeo:
I used to take a cab to work just a few years ago. There was one guy I particularly liked, but riding with him was a wild ass ride. He was some sort of old biker from what I gathered. Long hair tucked into a bandanna, old faded, but intricate tats all over his arms. He was always blasting the classic rock station and got REALLY excited when Guns N’ Roses came on during my first ride with him, and started blasting it.
He quickly turned it down and apologized, and I told him I didn’t mind at all, in fact I quite like GNR. So he blasted it some more. This guy would smoke in the car, which none of the drivers were supposed to do. He sped, no shit straight jumped curbs or ran through the shoulder when stuck behind slow cars and cussed loudly at other drivers out his window. Drove like a fucking mad man too.
One day he’s driving me to work and talking about how he used to drive in California when he was a bit younger and he knew a guy, a martial artist who according to him, was a badass motherfucker. But he said something along the lines of, “He was good, man. Real good. A black belt in ‘Jeet Kwon Do,’ ya ever hear a’ that shit? Beat yer ass so fast you wouldn’t even see it comin’. Like Bruce Lee, man.” Which struck me as some of the funniest shit ever at the time, but I was trying not to laugh in the guy’s face.
He was actually super cool and always funny to ride with, but every trip was one helluva ride. You were never sure if you’d make it there without getting into an accident, but surprisingly he never did while I was with him anyway.
These are just the ones fit for publishing, by the way. Cab rides are truly a wonder.
For those of us who live for the strange things that occur in the shadows of night, Night Call lets us experience life on the other side. You play as a cabbie tasked with spying on his customers. An interconnected world of murder and mystery lies in the back of your cab, and as the last known contact with a string of now-dead fares, it’s either find out who’s behind it all or take the rap.
Share your worst cab stories with us in the comments below. Give us the dirt on what you saw, what they said, or what you ran over to get to your destination. The ten stop stories will receive a Steam key for the game, and the eternal glory of knowing you had the worst experience known to yellow, terrifying transport.
Check out Night Call for yourself, available now on Steam.
