rec.autos.simulators

anyone played a demo of this new game from europress yet.i belive the game
is out next week.it looks good....in the magazines anyway
--

David  O  Mahony
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yeah, I've played the demo.  It's by Magnetic Fields, who did the Amiga
racers Super Cars and the Lotus Trilogy.  Presentation is pretty good.
Graphics engine seems quite quick on my Pentium 120.  The game itself
reminds me a lot of the old Amiga Lotus games ... as this is supposed
to be a rally simulation, it certainly *shouldn't* :-(

So what's *very* bad?  The way the car handles for one thing.  No
Sega Rally type power slides and opposite lock dramas.  What else?
Touching the edge of the track produces the invisible speed losing
wall found in games like Need For Speed.  For a Rally game this is
a bit of a cop out.  Leaving the trail should lead to a scarey out
of control moment (near miss) or an accident of some description.  

In the demo at least, it's possible to travel flat out for far too long.
To me (and I haven't driven a rally car, but I've spectated at tarmac
and forest stages), driving a rally car is about using all your skill
as a driver to "balance" the car on a winding track, throwing the
car in to slides to negotiate turns, getting the braking just right on
slippery surfaces, and so on.  Every rally game I've seen so far (with the
possible exception of Sega Rally) seems to be a road racing game with
the Porsche, Ferraris and Lamborghinis replaced with rally cars.

It's about time we had a decent rally *simulation*. Sure, Magnetic Fields
seem to be able to put together a decent graphics engine, but a graphics
engine without the real feel of a rally car is obviously a dull attempt
at a rally simulation.  Try out the "Hill Mouse" rally game which is
somewhere on the WWW (can't remember where) to  experience something a
little more like Sega Rally in the car control department (Magnetic
Fields/Europress.  If you're reading this, I suggest you do the same).

I'd put the Europress game down as a firm "miss" (unless they rectify
the problems I've just described before the game is released).  It
appears to be slightly better than the previous Network Q RAC Rally
game they released ... but only just.
--

.. "Some might say that sunshine follows thunder"

Hill Mouse's page is at http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~b2506046/
The newest variant on his rally game will ultimately include the
Cosworth RS
and the GT4.

That's too bad - the graphics on Europress's game looked really good.
Rally games are one of the few genres of racing where you just can't
get away with much faking in the physics department. (No insult
intended,
Nascar/Indy fans) Sega Rally doesn't seem quite right either, but its
the
closest there is.

Let us not forget that Sega Rally is being converted to the PC
as we speak.  I suspect it will need a fair amount of computing
horsepower, but it should hopefully be as good as the Sega Saturn
version on a decent Pentium.  Presumably a nicer game to play using
a Thrustmaster T2 than it would be using a fiddly little joypad :-)
--

.. "Some might say that sunshine follows thunder"

Thanks,
Scott