💾 Archived View for appl.garden › play › road-trip.gmi captured on 2024-06-20 at 11:52:21. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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A unique hybrid of racing game and RPG, based on a franchise of Japanese toy cars. Imagine an open world RPG where you race instead of fighting, and the characters are chibi talking cars. This came out in 2002 for the PS2, two years before NFSU2 and a year after GTA III, while featuring an open world rivaling the size of both... even if the world is mostly empty.
This is the kind of niche game that's only made more niche by having three different names in three world regions - I'll refer to it as just *Road Trip*.
I found this game through YouTube recommendations.
Well, I immediately decided it was worth playing when I saw the video, although it is hard to "review" the game objectively since a lot of its appeal comes from nostalgia, the so-bad-that-it's-good factor, and just my personal obsession with racing games.
For starters, yes, the game is for kids, but it features a surprisingly wide variety of cars (even if it's in un-branded and chibi-fied form). The list ranges from fire trucks and garbage trucks to muscle cars to more iconic vehicles such as the Castrol TOM's Supra, the Mazda 787B, five generations of Skylines, and many others.
The plot is silly - the President of the World decides that he's tired of being the president, so he organizes a World Gran Prix and declares that its winner will become the next president.
The physics are silly - not at all good for a racing game, but seeing your car randomly start flying after hitting a curb is at least funny.
The customization is silly - the "body" of the car doesn't matter at all, just choose whichever car model you prefer, the only thing that matters is upgrades - upgrades which range from better engines and tires to jet engines and submarine propellers.
The music is silly - one radio station is intentionally badly compressed audio of obscure rock bands that really wouldn't sound out of place on radio at the time.
YouTube playlist for the game's soundtrack.
Oh yeah, did I mention the open world? With underwater areas and floating islands? Oddly enough, this might be one of the very few racing games which actually made me invested in its open world, thanks to the abundance of minigames and quests. There's a VW Golf that tells you to play car golf, a Fairlady Z challenging to you to a race on the highway who calls himself the "speed guy", a car soccer minigame where you play against Italian cars...
Long story short, "silly" is the best word to describe Road Trip, even if the physics are not fun to actually race with, most of the world is barren (although, the long trips from one city to the next across empty hilly terrain is very reminiscent of the Windows XP desktop background...), many of the quests are tedious fetch quests (even if the dialogue is fun), the upgrade prices require a lot of grinding, and more than half of its music was stolen from a non-commercially licensed playlist.
More info about the music copyright violations.
Very flawed game, but definitely stands out in my eyes. *7/10*. To me this score seems fair, Road Trip seems to get a very wide range of review scores, with many 10/10s and just as many 3/10s. I desperately want a spiritual successor to this, there is just no other game quite like it.
This game works perfectly on an emulator, and doesn't exactly push the PS2 to its limits, so it requires less processing power compared to the likes of Gran Turismo 4. If your computer somehow struggles to run PS2 titles, consider trying this one anyway.
gardenapple - 2024-06-20