I picked up this game over Christmas and aside from a few errors
it isn't a bad depiction of rallying. The goal is to complete 35
special stages ranging from romps around Donington in the night to
marathons through snow covered forest trails. To start one must
choose a car, the choices being Toyota, Ford, Lancia, Subaru, and
Mitsubishi. The cars have varying strengths and weaknesses. I found
the Mitsubishi to be excellent under braking, the Ford to be fast in
the corners and the Toyota to be an all around competent car, the
others didn't really impress me. Second you might want to rename your
competition to real life drivers, I choose a sort of best of Finland
versus myself compaigning as Carlos Sainz/Luis Moya. Third you will
want to setup the varying options such as auto gearbox, auto braking
and the like.
Then it is on to the rallying which is done quite nicely
on my 486/66. If you have a decent soundcard you can select for a
speaking navigator which is very nice even if the man is sometimes a
bit slow warning you about upcoming hairpins. This together with the
lovely turbo sound, tire sliding sounds, pleasing engine notes, and
striking rain and thunder make this game top notch in terms of sound.
The graphics are also well done. Various types of trees, bushes, stumps,
onlookers, officials, and other impediments rush by you at a fairly high
frame rate, although sometimes at fairly predictible intervals. Slower
computers will probably be unable to keep up the realism (indeed, a 486/66
is recommended by the manufacturer). The stages themselves are of a nice
variety. Road surfaces include tarmac, gravel, racing, sandy, mud, grassy,
and snow covered but never two or more in the same stage. Weather includes
light rain, thunderstorm (both absolutely mesmerizing), snow storm, and
sunny. The stages vary in length from a 2.9 mile sprint to a a tortuous
24.8 mile marathon taking me over twenty minutes to complete.
The driving isn't too hard to get accustomed to. Once you master the various
conditions and road surfaces there are 8 basic types of turns to get used
to, although two of the same type can vary quite a bit. Try as I might
I could not play the game reasonably well with a joystick (it wants forward
for acceleration and backwards for braking which I have yet to master in any
driving game) so I used the keyboard instead. The keyboard layout is the
same as F1GP (good for me, bad for my poor keyboard). The key to driving
fast is pitching the car into corners and standing on the gas at the proper
moment allowing your car to slide out to the edge of the road but not over.
Unlike some games, one cannot take every corner flat out and the brakes do
get a healthy working out but one can still drive like a moron and be
reasonably fast. If you go off the road you simply bounce off whatever
is there a head back onto the road, albeit an angle that forces you to slow
down lest you repeat the process on the other side of the road. However
sliding the car too much at corners exit will result in you hitting something
and rolling the car over. One the main sortcomings of the game is the total
absence of flat tires. This would have been an effective deterent to foolish
driving, but strangely it was omitted. The only penalty for poor driving
is various amounts of car damage such as winshield cracks, worn brakes,
lost turbo boost, suspension problems and other things that must be repaired
between stages provided one has enough time to do so. Leaving these unattended
could result in retiring from the rally.
Beating the computer turned out to be very easy in the long run. I lost most
of the short road stages, but once we took to the forest I proved superior.
Too superior actually, all but one of the computer drivers had dropped out
by SS22 and that poor chap gave up with one stage remaining. So I won going
away with a time of 5 hrs, 4 mins. All in all, it was a lot of fun and I
would like to see other rallys added to this basic package. One progamming
error, however. The game doesn't properly free memory and if one plays it for
more than two long stages it will quit with an out of memory error. So I had
to play two stages, save my game, exit the program and restart if I didn't
want to lose my progress. This combined with manual copy protection added up
to a bit of frustration.
- George
> I picked up this game over Christmas and aside from a few errors
> it isn't a bad depiction of rallying. The goal is to complete 35
Sounds interesting. Who is the publisher?
>> I picked up this game over Christmas and aside from a few errors
>> it isn't a bad depiction of rallying. The goal is to complete 35
>Sounds interesting. Who is the publisher?
Europress Software, released in the states by Accolade. I neglected to
mention it was around $ 40.00 US and it came with a coupon for a free
copy of Test Drive III or Grand Prix Unlimited, neither of which I like.
- George
