September 13, 2004 - ChoroQ is a racing game. ChoroQ is a cartoon game. ChoroQ is beyond you. The Q is beyond us all. It is a title that blends racing and cartoons into something like a car...cartoon...race-god thing. Enjoy the screens and movies!
By our count, this is either the thousandth or the sixteenth ChoroQ title to date. It's a long running series with many iterations and many publishers, but only one developer: Takara. Because of this, the newest ChoroQ racing videogame for the PlayStation 2 videogame entertainment system remains very true to its roots in terms of control, sound, and graphics.
Every bit of the new ChoroQ is like a trip back in time to the birth of the PSOne when simplicity and the proper allocation of primary colors were of greater importance than a lot of excessive polygon and texture usage. This level of very easy to recognize graphics ensures players will never, ever crash into a cruise ship thinking it's a banana. There are also a lot of distinguishable effects like sparks to indicate that the little Choros are progressing in a forward direction and the blue swirly explosion-thing that says, "Easy there, little Choro. You're bumping into another Choro, don't you know?"
ChoroQ also doesn't aggravate its players when the bumping and grinding does eventually happen; crashes don't have any real impact on the races. When you crash into a car, the AI actually won't move a millimeter off its line, which makes any kind of superfluous battling or aggressive racing totally unnecessary. The only thing that does happen when a player nudges another car on the track is that his or her own automobile (depending on its size) will spin and fly out of control, sailing through the air and then tumbling across the roadway until it rights itself. This tells gamers, "Hey there, little Choro, you just bumped into another Choro."
Aside from avoiding the AI, racers will also have to negotiate a series of perilous turns that range from left to right. In these, it'll be important to hold the gas down just as you would on any straightaway in the race. Braking and turning sharply, you see, can often cause the vehicle to spin out of control, sometimes even directing it in the wrong direction. Don't worry! It's easy to realize when this happens (aside from the spinning), because the game prompts its players to wonder, "Wrong direction?" You don't want to go in the wrong direction because you might lose, so don't forget...Wrong direction?
Environments come in many flavors of the Choro rainbow. There are mountainside routes, urban locations, and canyon runs -- some are even night courses. All of this variation could be easily overlooked in any other racer, but ChoroQ let's its drivers sit back and enjoy the show cruising at what feels like any speed between 15 and a blazing 35mph. Some cars handle a bit differently than others, but you'll never have to ever worry about moving too fast to appreciate the backgrounds and ample use of rotating sprites.
Some of the different cars include wacky buses with skis, crazy little sedans with giant tires, and tricked out trucks that are the big thing in Japan. They're all very reminiscent of the Chevron commercials that featured those personable, cute little cars with big headlight eyes who advocated the use of sweet, clean burning Chevron gasoline. The Choros may not speak like their Chevron owned super car cousins, but they do have nifty little horns of their own that say, "Hey there little Choros, we're racing something fierce now, aren't we, babies? Beep-beep."
Amazingly, even though we've only been playing ChoroQ for about a day, we already feel like we've been playing it for tens of thousands of years. It's that intuitive and easy to come to grips with. If you'd like to see the little wonder in action, please check out our screenshots and movies contained in the media page below.
-- Ivan Sulic
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Topic: Info. Thread (screenshots included)
Angel Blade27
Nov 14, 04 at 12:58PM
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