If you buy DRM-free, then you own the games you downloaded. But if your downloaded game has to phone home to ask if it’s OK to run or install, you don’t own jack. You’re renting.

Choro-Q High Grade 2 (a.k.a. Road Trip or Road Trip Adventure) for the PS2.

Just one more in a very long line of low-budget tie-in video games for a popular line of toy vehicles for children. Most western reviewers try to play it for the racing (which I admit is buggy and middling at best) and dismiss it as trash.

But it’s not about the racing. The racing is incidental; just a bit of action to break up the rest of the game and give you an overall goal to aim for. The real game is exploring a huge open world, meeting hundreds of NPCs, getting involved in their stories, solving mysteries, and digging up every last collectible in the game.

I bought a physical copy for PC cheap on sale, and never played it (my PC at the time wouldn’t run it for some reason IDR).

Now I live in Japan and it’s not available for sale here, on GOG or Steam, so I hope I can get that disc to work under Linux! I see there’s an official patch that removes the DRM, but there’s one for North America, and another for Europe, and I bought the game in Australia, so I it’s a coin flip which one I’ve got. Hopefully once I install it there’ll be some clues.

A few years ago I stumbled down a rabbit hole that led to the Shadow of the Colossus fan theory community.

If you play the game normally, you’ll wander a deserted, forbidden land and defeat the 16 colossi, revealing a little more back story each time, see the finale, and finish the game.

If you explore every nook and cranny of the world, make careful charts, compare the PS2 original and the re-releases, and even hack the game to take the camera out of bounds, you’ll find an astounding amount of detail that, at first, seems to be wasted. But over the years, fans have turned all of it into a surprisingly coherent possible expansion of the game’s universe, including linking it more directly to the developer’s previous game, Ico.

For a long time, many people were sure that some hidden secret remained buried in the game, to be revealed if only the right set of actions could be discovered. Most of the community seems to have given up on that now, but looking at what they assembled, it’s hard to shake the feeling that there still may be something to it all.