The PSOn🐼e celebrates its 25th anniversary this week. This miniature version of the launched just after the PS2 as a cheaper, more portable option so us latch key kids wouldn’t feel left out, and/or to confuse grandmas at the toy store - something every tech company seems to love doing.

Looking back at my love affair with the PSOne, there are still a lot of games we talk about all the time. Series born on the PlayStation like , 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Silent Hill are still getting new releases today, ꦯwhile Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, and Final Fantasy 7 have spawned massive mult✃imedia franchises.

I know, Tomb Raider originally launched for the Sega Saturn, b⛦ut we all know Lara Croft is a PlayStat🦂ion gal through and through.

Even the lesser-known, yet still beloved PlꦦayStation games were recently given their due in last year’s Astro Bot, which featured references to Vib-Ribbon, Mister Mosquito, and Jumping Flash. One of my personal favorite PS1 titles is one I haven’t heard mentioned muc⭕h in the last 25 years, and completely forgot existed until I saw the mascot character pop up in one ofAstro Bot’s hidden voxel stages. If you found Captain Rock in Retro Rampage 4 you either had no clue who he was, or you’re a real one, and like me you yelled out “Motor Toon Grand Prix!” as a wave of nostalgia rushed through your body.

Sony’s Forgotten Kart Racer

If someone asked you what PlayStation’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mario Kart was you’d probably correctly answer 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Crash Team Racing. CTR and its 201♐9 remake Crash Team Racing: Nitro Fueled are two of the most beloved kart racers of all time, and arguably better than the Mario Kart games they competed with. But what you might not know is that Sony actually had its own first-party kart racer that launched several years before Crash Team Racing, and it changed the lives of literally dozens of little kids. I should know, I was one of them.

Before it was known as Polyphony Digital, the studi꧃o behind PlayStation’s premiere racing game, Gran Turismo, was known as Polys Entertainment. It went on to develop Sony Computer Entertainment’s first-ever in-house project, a 1994 Japan-exclusive title cal♌led Motor Toon Grand Prix. A sequel came with a global launch in 1996, but since the first one was never released outside of Japan, Motor Toon Grand Prix 2 is known in the West as simply Motor Toon Grand Prix.

Motor Toon Grand Prix feels like it’s licensed from a Saturday morning cartoon you’ve never heard of. Its cast of silly characters includes the 🐭heroic Captain Rock (featured in Astro Bot) and the villainous extra-terrestrial duo Raptor & Rapto😼r (they look like dinosaurs). Princess Jean is a sexy and scrappy young woman who is introduced in the opening cinematic by punching the camera as it sneaks up on her in the shower.

Okay maybe some of this hasn’t aged super well.

Next up is a pair of gangster penguins called the penguin brothers who play poker, smoke cigars, and shoot guns,🧸 just like any classic children’s cartoon character. Then there’s Ching Tong Shang, the Chinese driver who… you know w🐻hat, let’s move on from the characters.

Much like the Wacky Racers they’re inspired by, the Motor Toon crew each have their own signature vehicle, all of which inexplicably have faces like Benny the Cab from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. What I loved about Motor Toon Grand Prix was how much it embraced the qualities of being a cartoon. When you took tight turns your car would go up on two wheels and stretch as though it were trying to hold onto the track. When you stunned another driver with a weapon like the crazy mushroom (maybe not the most original item in a kart racer) you would see stars spin around their head like the kind Elmer Fudd sees when Bugs Bunny hits him on the head with a giant mallet. Every track from Toon Village to the amusement park-themed Crazy Coaster felt like real cartoon worlds - or at least they did in 🍃1996.

Not The Remake We Need, But The One We Deserve

Motor Toon Grand Prix represents an era of animation that video games have yet to adapt. We’ve seen 1920’s-style rubber hose animation in Cuphead and games that ape the '80s toy cartoon aesthetic like Mythforc🌠e and Jumplight Odyssey, but this kind of Tex Avery-esque, breakfast cereal mascot animation has come back since Motor Toon Grand Prix was in the zeitgeist (and by zeitgeist I mean the things me and my little brother were into when I was six).

Polyphony Digital has obviously moved on to bigger and better things, and with just eight characters and a handful of tracks, there probably isn’t enough meat on the Motor Toon Grand Prix bone to warrant a full remake. But in the 1990s, it was the closest you could get to being inside a cartoon, and I’d love to see more games capture that vibe. Maybe 💎we think of a better name for Ching Tong Shang next time, though.