Top Gear Mini-RPG

Hi!
Good day and welcome to the review of Top Gear Mini-RPG. This is a game about cars, of course, but NOT based on the racing videogame released for SNES in 1992! No! This game, made by Wolfe with Rpgmaker2000 (actually the first game by this developer) for the 2012 5-year anniversary 5-hour game contest, is instead inspired by the popular 2002 tv series (a relaunch of the original 1977 British motoring magazine program with the same name).

What was this tv series about? well basically test driving, but there were also some weird moments that clearly were an inspiration for this game, like the Amphibious Cars Challenge or the Caravan Train in which they drove cars on the railway from London to Nottingham, one with four caravans.


Active volcano??? Well, this challenge worries me... (but look at those cute little cars!) but we've no choice here, so let's go east!

In this game, we're ready to some weirdness since we've to reach a volcano for... some test (it's never explained, and we do not see or read anything about that later), but first we've to choose our avatar between the three hosts of the tv series: the journalist Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May.
This will clearly change our charset, faceset, but also the car, since each one will choose a different one, not that this will change anything from a gameplay point of view, still it's a choice. The only one.
The game is just to explore two maps, one is the starting area, the second is a large RTP valley where there are various point of interests, but we need to explore the place and find the volcano. That's all, no monsters, risks or anything. And the game will end after a last cutscene.

Visually the game uses mostly RTPs (since it's RTP valley) but there are some edits/custom made assets like the charsets of the hosts, their cars, and the facesets that are clearly taken from some low-res pictures. Oh and there is also a rendition of the Top Gear theme song, but for most of the playable game we'll have to listen to a classic RTP music theme.
What else? The game is all here, probably a player will spend as half of the time watching cutscenes and the other half trying to find the volcano.


This is me, roaming the RTP roads, listening to loud RTP music!

Final Verdict
Ok, I can see that there are two kinds of parody games: those who place some famous people in weird situations that may or may not involve supernatural events (like the rpgmaker games about the youtubers Pewdiepie, Boxxy and Jacksfilms) and offer a longer adventure (that includes some tasks to complete, be it adventure or rpg), and those like Michael Bay The Game or this Top Gear Mini-RPG, that instead satirize the normal events/situations of the people and shows, taking that to the extreme, but just providing a simple scenario. Uhm it would have be the first case if the devs added dinosaurs and some gameplay sections for a more parodistic "Top Gear and Triceratopses" (a "Cadillac and Dinosaurs" silly reference), but it's not this case, and for this short, 5 minutes interactive situations (more situations than adventures, and surely not a mini-rpg!) in which there is minimal gameplay, I cannot really give a rating.

In any case it's not bad!