Road Trip Adventure (PlayStation 2)
Developed/Published by: E-Game / Takara Released: 26th October 2002 Completed: 26th March 2017 Completion: Became President of the World. Trophies / Achievements: n/a
Picked up for $7 at a game store in Concord in the Bay Area and the second time I’ve owned this (I actually owned a copy of this for my PS2 when I lived in the UK!) I’ve finally finished the game that obviously inspired Pixar’s Cars* (a film that came out four years later, though I’ve never seen it because it looked crap.)
A “Car-PG” based on Japan’s Choro-Q line of pull-back toy cars, Road Trip Aventure is generally considered the best in the series and the whole idea has been rather defunct since the PS2 era, anyway. Basically, you play a wee cutie car that you upgrade, drive in races and otherwise drive around towns running errands and playing mini-games with the aim of eventually becoming President of the world, because the president decided that anyone who won the world grand prix could have a shot against him for the title.
(In case you can’t tell, this game about playing super-deformed toy cars that live in a world with no people is a bit silly.)
There are problems. Firstly, by being an RPG where your stats affect your car, your car handles horribly at first. And so there’s the problem where you need to upgrade to beat races (Because your car literally can’t win) but also need to beat races to raise cash to buy upgrades. It means the game just wants you to grind the (surprisingly small) number of races over and over, which is pretty bad! If they’d doubled the number of tracks or made things in the world raise more money (I’m honestly still not quite sure what raises money and what doesn’t) it would be a bit more bearable, but I’ll be honest with you—I worked out how to “cheat” the game’s roulette system (basically: tiresomely work out when to launch your car to hit a particular number, it takes some trial and error) so that I never needed to worry about money and just treated each new city as a new “unlock” of all the parts and it was brilliant.
And I can’t forget that the world looks like it was drawn with crayon, and not exactly in a good way. Tiny textures are stretched over entire buildings in a way that isn’t really the “simple charm” they were going for, more the “looks crap” they weren’t. The Choro-Q cars are the star, though, and they at least look brilliant: as soon as I got to the second city I was able to buy myself a shell that looked as much like my beloved (BELOVED) 1989 Honda Accord in Laguna Gold™ that I could manage and bloody hell it just made me happy to be on a wee adventure with my wee car.
There’s a charm to this! It’s ugly, it’s janky, but there’s plenty to do, not least building up your own city by meeting people across the world (not as impressive as it sounds, I promise, but still cute) and even shaping your own racing team by upgrading another two cars that race with you (another money sink, admittedly, if you’re playing “for real.”) And just exploring is fun, with 100 stamps to put in a book for doing often utterly random things. I wasn’t crazy about any of the mini-games (there’s a Rocket League-a-like… uh, sort-of) but they’re there if you want them, too.
I like Road Trip Adventure. It’s simple, silly, warm, ugly… fun? Can I just describe something as fun, even though that’s a crap way to describe something? It’s not really for everyone—you have to like cars, but not so much you’re serious about them—yet I just found the whole thing so weirdly odd and lovely.
Will I ever play it again? I could, but I probably won’t. I’d love to play another Car-PG though.
Final Thought: *Actually, I’ve always assumed that Tex Avery’s “One Cab’s Family” inspired Cars, because of where the eyes are (on the windshields.) However, I think that style looks crap and one of the nice things about the Choro-Q cars is that there is no anthropomorphization, so even though all the cars all live in houses and drive around and there are no people there’s no reason to question it. It just is, and it’s lovely.
