Mine is Lady Sia for GBA. It’s just a platformer but I just love it played and completed more 20 times. Will probably speedrun it in future.
Mine is Lady Sia for GBA. It’s just a platformer but I just love it played and completed more 20 times. Will probably speedrun it in future.
ChoroQ HG (High Grade) 2 for the PlayStation 2, also known as “Road Trip” (NTSC-U) or “Road Trip Adventure” (PAL) outside Japan (IIRC). Be careful of the titles because various publishers have handled the international releases of games in the series without any care for consistent naming, so the same game can have different names in different territories, and sometimes two different games have the same name in different territories.
It’s a licensed game based on a series of cute car models made by Takara-Tomy, one of a very, very long line of games stretching both forward and backward in time. As you might imagine, there are a lot of fairly straightforward racing games in there, but there are some other styles of game, too. This wasn’t the first exploration-heavy ChoroQ game, nor the last (nor even the last by the same developer), but it’s my pick of the bunch.
Some people try to rate it as a racing game and give it a terrible score. But to call it a racing game is like calling The Legend of Zelda a fighting game, or calling Elite a shoot-'em-up; it’s missing the point by a wide margin. Sure the physics in the game aren’t amazing, but they’re serviceable enough for what they’re meant to be.
It’s an extremely open world exploration game, full of characters to meet, hidden treasures to track down, puzzles to solve, and errands to run. The racing is only there to give you something obvious to do next, or to give you a bit of thrilling action to spice up the otherwise quite slow-paced gameplay; it’s almost a minigame, rather than the main game.
ChoroQ HG 2 has many faults, but I also find it very charming. I first played it in my 20s, and still play it now and then, and continue to enjoy it.
ChoroQ HG 3 was made by the same developer, and uses a lot of the same assets as well as retaining the exploration and puzzle focus, but they traded the open world for a series of connected areas, which just didn’t feel as interesting to me. A couple of the earlier PS1 titles (by other developers) do something similar, and I feel that it somehow works much better there than in HG 3. Still, HG 2 on the PS2 is the best in my opinion.