ModNation Racers: Road Trip

ModNation Racers: Road Trip accompanied the launch of PlayStation Vita and tried to bring the series' full concept to a handheld console: kart racing combined with extensive tools for creating your own content. Besides the racing itself, the game offers an editor where you can assemble your driver character, paint and rebuild your vehicle, and above all model your own track. The track is drawn directly with your finger on the touchscreen, the terrain rises and falls with a drag, and the game itself fills in guardrails, spectators, and surrounding scenery, so a rough sketch becomes a usable circuit within moments.

The races themselves are arcade-style, with drifting that charges up energy and a set of items ranging from rockets to shields. An interesting element is that accumulated energy can be spent either on attack, or on defense and a speed boost, so the player is constantly choosing between aggression and safety. Finished tracks can be shared with others and other players' creations downloaded, which was the main draw at the time of release. Visually, the game relies on a colorful cartoon style with bold outlines that shows off very well on the console's screen, and the music keeps a light, friendly mood. Character creation goes into surprising detail, since besides the face and clothing you can also change small things like helmet accessories, and the finished character can then be seen in other players' races.

Reception was mixed. The editor and its inventiveness earned praise, but criticism targeted long loading times, inconsistent frame rate, and rival AI that could be unpleasantly stubborn. Still, Road Trip remains an interesting title, since it shows how early a game built around content creation and sharing appeared on a handheld console. Today it's judged mainly on how well the editor itself works, and it remains surprisingly pleasant to use even after all these years. For Vita owners, Road Trip remains a fond memory of a time when people were still figuring out everything a touchscreen could do on a new console.