Watch your step, for you’ve just entered theGraveyard. Inside, we’ll be digging up games that have long been without a pulse. You’ll see both good and bad souls unearthed every month as we search through the more… forgotten…parts of history.
Polyphony Digital is best-known for its Gran Turismo series, but its first major work on racing games was a PS1 hidden gem known as Motor Toon Grand Prix. Polyphony created the game as a proof of concept for more advanced physics being possible on the PS1 and rooted the game in a classic cartoon art style – very much akin to the old Wacky Races cartoon in a lot of ways. The cast of characters is very much like what you would have seen on the show, with a Batmobile-esque superhero vehicle, a large macabre vehicle and a silly dragster among the playable options. Japan got both the first game near-launch and its sequel, while North America got its sequel, which was essentially the same content of the first alongside the sequel’s content. This psuedo-definitive edition enabled the experience to feel far more fleshed-out and content-rich than a lot of games at the time.
A Diamond in the Rough
One thing that allows Motor Toon Grand Prix to stand out more now than ever is its focus on pure fun with every facet of its racing experience. The entire world within the game itself would be right at home with Wacky Races or any other Hanna-Barbera show and it feels lived-in and a bit like this is a lost licensed game from a bygone era. From the characters to the vehicles and the stages, everything is cartoony in the best possible way. It’s also a game that benefits from Polyphony’s attention to detail because even 25 years later, it’s a gorgeous-looking experience in every way.
The cars bend like they’re made of rubber and it’s very much in-line with cartoon physics not being regular physics, but still making logical sense based on what you see. Matt Groening had a saying in the DVD commentaries for The Simpsons that has stuck with me all these years later about cartoons having flexible reality, where things at least have to make visual sense. You want to have everything in-proportion in the universe so it all looks like it fits together and that’s the case with the vehicles, drivers and environments in Motor Toon. Item pick-ups and dash plates all have bold colors, as do the environments themselves.
From the first Toon Island track, the player is treated to all manner of color combinations on the screen. The beach side locale pops in every way and the PS1’s flat-shaded polygons really shine quite nicely on modern displays since everything is so crisp. The sharp look to everything allows for colors to pop and makes every stage seem like a playable art piece - even though the pseudo-transparent road track is a bit tricky to work with across the board. There, some parts of the track are easy to work with and some art because the hills can mess with the perspective of the track itself a bit and throw you off.
Other than that occasional issu, though, Motor Toon Grand Prix is a visual treat and aided by having highly-expressive faces for some of the vehicles. One benefit of this being a cartoon-influenced game is you do wind up with Looney Tunes-esque designs where you can have a bright red car with an expressive face making victory all the sweeter, while other vehicles tell their story through more extreme car body warping during big turns or in the case of the larger vehicles, them not moving as much tells its own tale about how massive and mountain-like they are.
So many racing games went for kart racing fun once Super Mario Kart hit the scene and even more aimed to follow the leader in the wake of Mario Kart 64, but Motor Toon beat a lot of them to the punch and changed up the concept quite a bit with its cartoony world. You have a fireball that acts as a shell expy, but also things that make use of the cartoon world with things like a boot that sends you upward to either make great headway on a curve or simply avoid a projectile or bomb. The backwards-throwing bombs come in handy as a user because they take up a lot of space and are sent out in groups of three – offering a solid chance that someone will be hit by them while the stealth power-up further allows you to evade damage.
Motor Toon Grand Prix is a slam dunk in every regard but its track selection, which would be expansive if only compared to arcade racing games of the day, but falls short of the quantity offered up by even Super Mario Kart. I would say that while the track content is a bit lean, every track is fantastic, so there’s an all-killer/no-filler mentality at play here that is in my mind when I play it, but I’m also left wanting more tracks to race on. Surprisingly, we haven’t seen this kind of concept come back despite the Gran Turismo series having so many spin-offs and sub-games over the years. The closest thing would be surreal elements like the music-beat mode in GT 7.
One area that holds up nicely with Motor Toon Grand Prix and serves as a more direct tie-in to Gran Turismo is its replay system. It’s remarkable to play this game with all of the GT series in the memory banks and see the origins of things like a cinematic replay system that does an incredible job of showing off gorgeous camera angles for a race that just ended – and doing so with minimal storage being available to players to store replays as well. It’s a remarkable technical achievement and something that made having more action-packed races a bit more of a priority than purely winning a race because of how much more exciting the replay would be.
Motor Toon’s audio is killer from its soundtrack to announcing and sound effects. The voice work is limited in scale, but bombastic for things like announcing weapons and unlike some PS1-era racers like Explosive Racing, there is a lot of enthusiasm in the voice work here. It’s all-killer and no filler in that regard and is aided by a soundtrack that blends in a few different genres within a cartoon world setting. There’s a spooky song for things like the haunted house area that wouldn’t be out of place in a classic Scooby-Doo episode and more dynamic tracks for the more science-fiction-set sections too.
Fun at the Finish Line
Motor Toon Grand Prix is a bit of a lost classic beyond just commercial releases. It would be nice to see the game get more content in the form of ROM hacks, but even that hasn’t happened over the years. Despite being a first-party Sony game, it has largely fallen through the cracks in a lot of ways and is at risk for being a forgotten classic if it wasn’t for the PlayStation 3’s digital storefront. Unlike so many PS1 classics, Motor Toon Grand Prix is accessible thanks to it being available on the PS3 PSN store for PS1 Classics and at under $10, it’s price-friendly. Hopefully, with Sony re-releasing PS1 games on PS4 and PS5 hardware, it will see a release for modern-day hardware as the PS3 store will go down at some point and the game will be legally lost to time at that point.
Graveyard: Shox
Shox was an EA BIG highlight and offers the kinds of racing thrills and excitement that are rarely seen today.
