Incidentally, the footage and audio from that last video of our race comes courtesy of 'Auto Modellista' for the PS2.

A very odd and endearing game that came out in 2002, Auto Modellista answers the question, ‘What if a studio, primarily known for its fighting games made a racing game?’





Right off the bat, Automodellista oozes with style. It has bright, colourful cel shaded graphics, a technique that was still new at the time, that instantly set it apart from everything else.

They didn't stop there either. They also added cartoon skid lines and speed lines to give a real cartoony sense of speed.





The game has a boppin’ good vibes soundtrack, the menu buttons make funkily satisfying noises when you hit them, and you've got that one over enthusiastic Japanese guy over announcing everything.







You can even modify and customize your own cars, something that was only just starting to appear in games, and went to 11 with Need for Speed Underground the following year.





And it just looks so good. Even 23 years later, the simplistic toony graphics style holds up and hides the lower poly models.





Coooor just look at it!





So why was this the last racing game Capcom ever released? Why don't we have a franchise of this series now?

Well… the game didn't really seem to know what it wanted to be…

Though it looks and sounds like one, it didn't really feel like an arcade racer… in fact it almost felt like it was trying to go in more of a simulator direction, but there it never felt realistic enough.

The controls are… odd. The analog sticks on the PS2 are used for steering, but they're more like steering a wheel - if you release the stick, instead of the car straightening out like you expect in every other car game, the car continues to go in the direction you set. You have to countersteer it back.

The handling is strange too. The game looks like it's encouraging you to drift your way through corners, but this will just slow you down and should be avoided at all costs.








My distinct memory of playing this game back in the day was a friend and I eagerly renting it from the video store, plugging it in and doing a couple of versus races, both of us getting frustrated with the handling, before dropping it entirely and going back to Gran Turismo 3 for the rest of the evening.

Twenty something years later, it was fun to revisit and give it another chance. Once you get used to the controls it is a reasonably enjoyable experience. The combination of real, licensed cars with toon shading is still novel, and I'll never be tied of that 1990s arcade soundscape of fresh sounding boop and blips, upbeat electronica and an over enthusiastic Japanese announcer yelling feedback at you in almost-English.








But that’s enough about yet another, unique and strange Japanese racing game. Next time let’s focus back on the unique and strange Japanese racing game that is Zero4 Champ RR…