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Compared to the current crowded market of sleek racing sims, Road Trip Adventure feels like a particularly crunching gear change, as if someone took Burnout Paradise and re-rendered it with Super Mario 64 assets, or sliced the point-to-point time attack out of OutRun and rolling-pinned whatever was left into a sprawling RPG. Three years before Pixar's Cars was released, here was a world inhabited entirely by sentient vehicles. The characters you meet may not have Lightning McQueen's weird windscreen eyes but the slightly cartoonish versions of recognisable real-world models - a Mercedes SL, a Renault 5, a vintage Mini, all apparently based on the chunky Choro-Q line of Japanese toy cars - have bags of personality.
If I'd taken a second to glance at the garish box art in 2003, when Road Trip Adventure was first released for PlayStation 2, I would probably have dismissed it without a second thought - too cluttered, too cute, too kiddie. As it stands, I'm still not entirely sure how I found myself pouring hours into it in late 2014. There are two possible explanations. One, I'd overdosed on gritty, complicated big budget titles crammed with so many particle effects I'd forgotten what a beautiful blue videogame sky looked like. (Essentially, I needed a change of scene, like a soot-clogged Victorian recuperating in the Alps.) Two, and perhaps even more significantly, it was possible to pick up Road Trip Adventure from PSN for roughly the same price as a packet of Penguin biscuits. The only thing better than a holiday is a bargain holiday.
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