\n

Play it on:<\/strong> PlayStation<\/p>\n

Current goal:<\/strong> Meet lots of friendly cars and win the World Grand Prix<\/p>\n

Ever been decades late to the party in discovering that your favorite movie got a sequel you\u2019d never heard of? I had a similar experience this week, albeit sort of in reverse, and with a game.<\/p>\n

Choro Q<\/em> is a long-running Japanese toyline<\/span> featuring appealing, super-deformed renditions of real-world cars, which zoom forward if you wind \u2018em up. In the late \u201890s the franchise started getting tons of Takara-produced video games for Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64, and most of all Sony\u2019s PlayStation. Most are simplistic racers that let you upgrade your chibi car over time. Choro Q<\/em> games tend to have just barely tolerable driving physics\u2014and framerates to match\u2014so for all their cute charm, they\u2019re a bit of an acquired taste.<\/p>\n

Enter a little PlayStation 2 game called Choro Q HG2<\/em>. Conspiracy Entertainment, rest its soul, published it in the States as Road Trip<\/em><\/span>, and it\u2019s one of the single best offbeat game discoveries I\u2019ve ever made. Neither the driving model nor graphics were great, but this particular Choro<\/em> game shook up the series formula by becoming a full-on CarPG, complete with a vast open world to explore, sentient vehicles spouting charismatic, barely localized dialogue, and a steady stream of quests, minigames, and generally odd surprises.<\/p>\n

My running belief has been that Road Trip<\/em> was the best of the PS2\u2019s four-game HG<\/em> subseries, and also the first of the RPG-like Choro Q<\/em> games. Turns out that no, the latter distinction goes to 1999\u2019s Choro Q Wonderful!<\/em> for PlayStation, which I just learned got an English fan translation<\/span> last Christmas. Road Trip<\/em>, but on OG PlayStation? That\u2019s my kinda giftmas present.<\/p>\n

Several hours in, it\u2019s pretty much what I hoped: smaller in scale and as janky as you\u2019d expect from a 32-bit Choro Q<\/em>, but also rife with irresistibly guileless dialogue like, \u201cSo beautiful. You got 38 fireworks and 2 Qcoins,\u201d and \u201cIce cream~ Ice cream~ \u2665\u201d (that character\u2019s an ice cream truck, you see). Are the races fun? They\u2019re\u2026tolerable! But mostly I\u2019m having a ball exploring each self-contained city, chatting up the oddball natives, and finally seeing where this \u201cCarPG\u201d madness actually began. Wonderful!<\/em> \u2014 Alexandra Hall<\/p>\n

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And that wraps up Kotaku<\/em>\u2019s weekend selections for September 8, 2023. What games are you playing this weekend? <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Play it on: PlayStation Current goal: Meet lots of friendly cars and win the World Grand Prix Ever been decades late to the party in discovering that your favorite movie got a sequel you\u2019d never heard of? I had a similar experience this week, albeit sort of in reverse, and with a game. Choro Q […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":74707,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/i.kinja-img.com\/gawker-media\/image\/upload\/c_fill,f_auto,fl_progressive,g_center,h_675,pg_1,q_80,w_1200\/619f9d87ab15cee7414bb3ec1f69a00a.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-news"],"yoast_head":"\n