Customer Reviews:
  Motor Toon Is a Nice Game (& the Grand Turismo Predecessor) January 4, 2005
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Motor Toon Grand Prix (MTGP) is a good-looking game with cartoon characters in a fantasy world, similar to Mario Cart and Crash Team Racing, but this is only a one-player game without the link cable system. The Sony studio's very next game was the critically acclaimed and famed Grand Turismo (GT1), and it shows in MTGP. Sony owes GT1 to the great 3D graphics engine of MTGP. (Some people look at the TV and ask, "Is that a PS2 game?" This is one of those.) MTGP has high-resolution graphics, very little "pop-up", and a high frame rate.
MTGP has great level design, plays well, and has moments of laughter. One level is a Haunted Mansion, similar to Casper and Scooby Doo cartoons mixed with the Haunted Mansion ride at Disney World/Land. Another level is a highway city at night under bright stars. Another is a larger-than-life Gulliver's Travels world where you drive over gigantic piano keys with the black keys as speed bumps, across humongous chessboards through towering chess pieces, over pool tables between pool balls, through large rooms. One room is for card games, another for betting games where you try driving across a roulette wheel while its spinning and between a pair of large red dice.
It's a creative fantasy world and the exotic settings and atmospheric art give the game a look that's worth paying the money for MTGP, particularly if there are children around. MTGP doesn't have the pressure and violence of some seriously extreme games, and so this MTGP fits in with other exuberant games like Ape Escape, Spyro the Dragon and Parappa the Rapper. Some days, I'm a casual gamer. Many games like Crash Team Racing and Mario Cart received top ratings in the magazines, (and these two sold really well back when first released,) but the mags and I thought MTGP was a "Sleeping Beauty".
One other recommendation: most PS1 games devised a system to open up levels after playing the game and winning the initial levels. For MTGP, I recommend forgetting that and going directly on-line to find the codes to unlocking this game because beating it takes away from the fun like a chore. I think the game begins with five levels open, and they are very good, but the codes will unlock them all, as well as many additional characters and options menus. When you use the codes, save the unlocked game to your memory card.
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