CGA-2026-02 🕹️🚗 INSERT CARTRIDGE 🟢 Racing Lagoon
Racing Lagoon
Versions: The only official release was the release of PlayStation 1 disc version in Japan.
Platforms: PlayStation
Genre(s): Racing/Driving, Role-playing
Stores:
- Regrettably, there is no modern digital distribution for this game, so as much as I hate to say it, we're all on our own acquiring it. It should be noted that a fan translation exists, for which the patch is available here (it's a patreon link, but it's not paywalled), but as usual for translations released in patch format, you will still need to acquire your own copy of the game to patch.
Game Setup
The main purpose of this topic is to get people up and running with the game. As such, it's recommended that you:
- Share which version of the game you're playing
- Share what hardware you're playing it on
- Share if there are any tools/mods that you recommend
- Share anything you think is important for people to know before they start the game
- Ask questions if you need help
Another purpose of this topic is to revisit the game and its time period:
- Do you have any memories or associations with this game itself?
- What about its system or era?
- What aspects of retro gaming were common at the time?
- What other games from the same time period are you familiar with?
- What are you expecting from this game in particular?
Finally, this topic is the beginning discussion for people starting to play it:
- Post updates sharing your thoughts as you play.
- Ask for help if you get stuck.
- Offer help to others.
It is recommended that you reply to your own posts if you are making consecutive updates so that they are in the same thread.
Important
-
Any links to the game should be legal distributions of the game only. Please do NOT link to any unauthorized copies.
-
Put any spoilers in a dropdown block. Copy/paste the block below if needed.
<details>
<summary>Spoilers</summary>
Spoiler text goes here.
</details>
FAQ
What is CGA?
Colossal Game Adventure (CGA) is Tildes' retro video game club.
Each month we will play a different retro game/games, discuss our thoughts, and bask in the glorious digital experiences of yesteryear!
Colossal Game Adventure is a reference to Colossal Cave Adventure. It's one of the most influential games of all time, one of the first text-based interactive games, and one of the first games to be shared online.
What do we want to do with this group? Play influential games; interact with each other through text; and share the love for retro games online!
It also abbreviates to CGA (because we love chunky pixel art), and its name communicates the Colossal amount of fun and excitement that we have with retro video Games in our shared Adventure of playing them together.
Do I have to sign up?
No. Participation is open to all.
There is a Notification List that will get pinged each time a new topic goes up. If you would like to join that list, please PM u/kfwyre.
Are there restrictions on what/how to play?
Each month will have a focus game or games that will guide our discussions. Beyond that, there are no restrictions. The philosophy of CGA is to play in a way that works for you!
This means:
- Choose whichever version of the game you want.
- You can use cheats, save states, mods, etc.
- You can watch a streamer or longplay instead of playing it.
If you have already played a game and want a different experience:
- Try a randomizer or challenge run.
- Play a different version of it.
- Play a related game (sequel, spiritual successor, something inspired by it, etc.)
There is no wrong way to participate in CGA, and every different way someone participates will make for more interesting discussions.
What is the schedule?
Each month the Insert Cartidge topic will be posted on the 1st, while the Remove Cartridge topic will be posted on the 20th.
Nomination and voting topics will happen in March and September (every 6 months).
Schedules are also posted then.
All CGA topics are available using the colossal game adventure tag.
What do Insert and Remove Cartridge mean?
Inserting and removing cartridges are our retro metaphor for starting and stopping a given game or games.
The Insert Cartridge topic happens at the beginning of the month and is primarily about getting the game up and running.
The Remove Cartridge topic happens toward the end of the month and is primarily about people reflecting on the game now that they've played it.
There are no hard restrictions on what has to go in either topic, and each can be used to discuss the game, post updates, ask questions, etc.
So, have I started yet? Nope. But I am now prepared, because I just spent the past two hours getting ready to play it on my 3DS. Was already planning on it after @J-Chiptunator posted this handy guide for emulating PS1 on the 3DS, and then I doubled down because we're going on a trip this month for like 10 days and there's no way I would have time to play it. This was an adventure since I have never emulated a PS1 game on... anything, actually. And apparently it includes more steps than emulating Nintendo stuff.
So! Allow me to give you some tips! And I'll add a TL;DR at the bottom with those tips in a more succinct form. Because this post ended up being a recounting of my full adventure because it's now going on 3 AM and my brain is in a weird state after spending two hours stressing out over my poor laptop crying at the strain I put on its overloaded cyberbrain.
For context: I have a modded 3DS, and have a Macbook that hasn't had the OS updated in years, so it's on OS 10.15.6, Catalina. I also have homebrew already installed.
Of note, the guide's segment about converting files to CHD is apparently written specifically for Mac and requires OS 10.13 and above. Convenient, right?
...Yeah, so that failed for me. A good chunk of those two hours was just waiting for the terminal to update my outdated homebrew and install rom-tools, and from that I found out my Xcode is so out of date I'd have to download the latest compatible version from online. (On that note, I also managed to log into my Apple ID for the first time in years! ...I'm starting to suspect that's the actual reason my computer stopped pestering me to do system updates.) And the file I could find is apparently 10 GB, and my laptop said something about having 9 GB of free space. So. I tried installing rom-tools, and I still cannot say whether it downloaded or not. I just know that when I tried the commands later, it gave me errors that the file could not be found, and eventually my attempts to try "chdman" on its own brought up errors at which point I gave up on that method.
Here's another fun discovery I made while waiting for the terminal to maybe-maybe-not install the rom-tools! The English translation patch from Patreon needs Windows to work since it includes a .exe file as basically the first step.
...Yeah. That's a big roadblock on Mac.
Luckily, when searching for the Japanese rom, I saw a link that said "Racing Lagoon (Full English)" and decided to download it and hope it had the patch already applied. To test whether it was, indeed, English, I then booted up OpenEmu, a handy emulator on Mac (highly recommend, it's basically a bunch of emulators in one program) and... got to spend time trying to figure out how the heck to get PS1 to work because it gave me an error about needing three PS1 BIOS files.
Tangential Adventures in Troubleshooting OpenEmu!
So first step: I needed to look up what those files. A quick Google search for the names brought me to multiple posts linking a repository on Archive.org for files relating to OpenEmu, which demanded an account to view all the files this time. And then began the eternal loading when I tried to log in with a Google account. ...And also gave me an error when I asked it to "email me a key" instead.
Around this time, it came to my attention that Google was acting way too slow and just not loading. Perhaps due to something weird on Google's end, or possibly due to my computer being overloaded. (Again, my laptop showed only 9 GB of free space at some point in this process. And during 90% of the two hours, the terminal was trying to run the install rom-tools command. This poor thing was running at full power.) So I went to duckduckgo.com, and eventually I found a link to a site that DID have the BIOS files (two of which were apparently already downloaded at some point in the past, since they showed up with a "(1)" at the end of the name).
So I get them in, and the game finally opens. A long intro plays regardless of button pushing, with lovely looking English language credits. So lovely looking, in fact, I immediately wonder if they're part of the original game. I finally reach the start menu, and... the keyboard does nothing, OpenEmu does not recognize it. Turns out I needed to mess with app input permissions a bit to finally get the controls working. Though before that, I also added the Japanese ROM I'd already installed, just to double check the credits.
Here's a fun heads up: the opening and start menu are all written in English in the original, Japanese release. It's not until you reach "new game" and it asks you to pick a save slot that it finally shows some Japanese text at the bottom of the screen. So if you want to confirm the patch worked, you'll need to get to that point. On a brighter note: There is indeed a pre-patched English version somewhere out there. Great news for a Mac user like me!
And this brings me to the final piece of advice: if, like me, anyone uses a Mac and needs to convert it to a CHD? I found this. A glorious, brilliant online CHD Creator for cue+bin files, using MAME with "processing happens locally on your own machine". It's incredibly simple: just make a new folder, drag the .cue and .bin file into it, and upload the folder. Seriously, way simpler than messing with the terminal. (Side note: It's part of a larger site for a small team dedicated to researching and building emulators. Might be some other useful stuff on there!)
I found it in this reddit post from one month ago, and am currently trying to figure out how to express my gratitude and whether I can send these glorious human being an invite to Tildes, and if so how to do it without sounding like I'm a scammer. (It's
2:303:20 AM and I spent the past two hours dealing with my laptop running out of memory. My brain is at a weird rambly point where I think I'm high on the relief of success after a long struggle, and I probably shouldn't communicate with anyone.)From that same post, someone also shared a link to https://romtools.io/ which has a bunch of useful tools for people! In my case, I used the handy Rom Checker to check if the CHD file would work. Just a quick heads up: for me at least, the game lingers on a black screen for a few seconds before the SquareEnix logo appears, so be patient.
...And a final tangent about my struggles: I had a very choppy experience with that tester initially, because at that point my laptop threw up a "You're out of memory, force quit unused applications now" window. So that was fun. And after force-quitting everything and deleting the now-useless Japanese ROM and English patch along with some other files (and one game... maybe), I now have apparently 21.44 GB of free space. I've decided to just accept it and leave it there. I did confirm the Rom Tester runs at a normal speed when my laptop isn't actively crying out for mercy. So, good tool!
Luckily, the rest of it went smoothly. The part of the guide talking about setting up Retroarch is much more straightforward. After plugging in my 3DS's micro SD card, I followed the rest of the guide and tested it, and confirmed the game works. It runs probably as smooth as you can expect a PS1 game to run on a New Nintendo 3DS. It did give me a little pop-up that said "Playstation BIOS not found", but... eh, it boots and doesn't seem to stutter. It's probably fine. Please be fine, my heart can't take any more problems.
Thus concludes my adventures.
TL;DR: The Advice
(Actually, chances are you'll find it before the original Japanese ROM)So I hope that helps someone! I'm going to go crash in bed now.
What a journey! Thanks for writing it all up.
Stuff like this is why I love emulation.
Who ever thought that anyone could even play a Japanese PS1 game on a Nintendo 3DS in English? It’s such a wild setup and yet, it’s entirely possible thanks to the efforts of tons of different people who make something as absurd as this entirely realistic.
We really are living in the future.
Glad you enjoyed the writeup! I don't think emulating it on my 3DS would have occurred to me if JC hadn't linked that guide. It's definitely a bit surreal. I'd been planning to take my Switch on our upcoming trip to play some visual novels, but given how long this game's campaign reportedly is, I might just take my 3DS and books instead. I'd be taking it anyway in hopes of getting some Street Passes (man I miss that), and the 3DS is definitely more portable!
As a little side-note, really hope it's not too hard because I had no clue how to get the "easy mode" save to my 3DS, and my internet is apparently going to be spotty. Should probably look up tips and advice in advance just to be safe. xD
Does the emulator you’re using let you use save states? I’ve been using those to help myself along.
She's using RetroArch on her 3DS, and savestates are available here.
The Easy Mode save file is distributed in several formats.
To get it working in RetroArch, replace the suffix either the DuckStation (.mcd) or ePSXe/PSEmu-Pro (.mcr) file into a .srm one. Then, put it in root:/retroarch/cores/savefiles/PCSX-ReARMed.
That's because the files (or rather standard virtual PS1 Memory Cards) are structured the same way across multiple file types, except for .vmp (PSP/Vita), .gme (DexDrive Memory Card), .mem and .vgs (VGS Memory Card).
CGA Announcement: We have officially inserted the cartridge for Racing Lagoon. Use this topic to get set up for the month, help other people get set up for the month, and start playing!
If you would like to be added or removed from the Notification List, please PM u/kfwyre.
Notification List
@1338
@Akir
@ali
@arctanh
@AriMaeda
@atomicshoreline
@avirse
@balooga
@BeardyHat
@Boojum
@Bwerf
@CannibalisticApple
@chocobean
@clayh
@datavoid
@Debook
@DistractionRectangle
@dotsforeyes
@dozens
@Dr_Amazing
@granfdad
@Gummy
@hamstergeddon
@IsildursBane
@J-Chiptunator
@JCPhoenix
@jmpavlec
@joshbuddy
@kaiomai
@Kawa
@kej
@kfwyre
@kingofsnake
@Kirisame
@Lapbunny
@mayonuki
@Mendanbar
@mysterylevel
@PancakeCats
@Pavouk106
@PetitPrince
@Plattypus
@polle
@preposterous
@psi
@rosco
@rubix
@Rudism
@SloMoMonday
@Sodliddesu
@Soggy
@sotix
@Spore_Prince
@SpruceWillis
@squidwiz
@talklittle
@ThatMartinFellow
@tildes-user-101
@Timwi
@tomorrow-never-knows
@Trobador
@Venko
@vili
@Weldawadyathink
@xk3
@zod000
You forgot to replace [Game Title] here :D
You're right. Thanks!
Seems I opened tildes in my pocket :) Apologies!
So I gave this a very quick try on my PSP. First off, ohhh boy is this maximum 90's vibes. A PS1 Square RPG about street racing, with street-Sephiroth pontificating about cars, a jazz fusion soundtrack, and the dorkiest neon jacket tuner fashion sense? Fuck me up.
Except like, then I jumped into the game proper. You learn about the rule where you have to lose a car part whenever you lose, and the game throws you - equipped with a
Toyota AE86-Levin Corolla, a car with an absolutely anemic engine even by 90s standards - into a random encounter drag race? This is absolutely combative levels of obtuse game design, holy shit. I'm probably going to give this another try because the people who like this really seem to like it, but I think I'm either gonna need to take advantage of this save file with a tricked out car from the beginning, or I'm gonna need some crazy-ass hints on how to get past this learning curve...If you're emulating: use save states! I do think you're supposed to lose the first race for plot reasons, but once I got into the game proper I had no shame about restarting races if I needed to, especially because the handling is a bit iffy (I'm hoping that improves as I level up my car parts).
Also 90s video game anatomy needs to be studied. There's something both endearing and hilarious about the humanoid approximations of people that we got back then. In this game, it felt like the designers went "make the characters like Lara Croft, but in the shoulders instead." They are comically broad.
I'm just going to be so brutally honest, and its not very high quality tildesposter of me, but I do not have the kind of time or willingness lately to scratch my head about what to put in an introduction or description at the top of the main post for a game I myself have the most 3-word bullet point description of, without it being a regurgitated, probably-wrong rehash of summaries I could find on the very same mobygames and wikipedia pages I linked.
You may have noticed I didn't even participate in the prior couple CGAs and I'm not even going to be able to make the time to play this game, despite being the one who nominated it, let alone be an engaging host in this thread. I'm sorry to spoil anyone's fun or the quality of CGA, I only just remembered I'm supposed to come post this. I hope you all enjoy the game.
No worries, Kawa. If you want one fewer thing on your plate for your busy month, I don't mind taking the Remove Cartridge thread for you.
Please feel welcome to, thank you kfwyre.
Will do. Good luck with everything.
I played this game a while ago when i found out about it, so my memory wont be exact. I still have it installed on my steam deck with a fan made english translation iirc. It was trivial to setup as a ps1 rom on the emudeck.
#1 i loved the open world being treated like a final fantasy game. Little car representation zipping around the city looking for battles
#2 i loved the rpg mechanic of winning and losing parts. Really put a lot on the line for each race, though jarring as a concept to begin with and painful because of the handling model
#3 the races themselves were ridiculous, car handling was definitely not ideal. And the draw distance was comical. Switching between GT1 and this is definitely an experience.
#4 the aesthetic is just good clean fun. I dont know if weve really seen that final fantasy character look in a racing game since? Its just more of that sweet nostalgia powder to snort up.
At the end of the day, i like to think of this as a game Racing because the game mechanics are front and centre while the racing and driving are just another means with which to experience leveling up and collecting loot. Its cute and had i rented this back in the day, i would not have complained and i think id be a die hard about it now. But as an adult its hard to love beyond the surface.
Wow, videos online really sell it. I'm super keen to dig in, even if it's just through review and examination of how the game came to be.
One thing that's striking out the gate is how top heavy all of the characters are. That Pink-Panther cartoon design choice (the itty bitty legs and big torsos) is so hilarious, but totally common in other Square titles of the time (looking at you Vagrant and FFT).
Frankly, I sort of like it. I feel like we're so inundated with character designs that echo World of Warcraft (exaggerated limbs and accessories) meets the token big eyes of a Pixar character that this feels refreshing.