Colin McRae opinions and questions

Finally got the Colin demo to work and I'm impressed. This is the best rally game I've played so far. It really got me sitting on the edge of my seat. Specially in the Monte Carlo stage: when you almost slide of the road into the deep... it's great. And when you do slide off it looks and feels very realistic. In Rally Championship (a game that really disappointed me!) the car is always slipsliding all over the track. And you never slide of in the way you do in Colin. This one is great. Very smooth graphics too. Two questions: 1. Does the final game also have this SEVERE pop-up (even at the highest settings)? 2. Is the scenery diverse? I mean, do all the stages in lets say Australia look like each other or do they all have some special scenery? I hated that in Rally Championship: everything looked the same: the same buildings, the same tunnels, repeat, repeat, repeat... (And what also really hated were those closed track stages!!! I like open road stages!!! But even in the Rally Championship open stages the finish looked EXACTLY like the start. Awful game that was... Still haven't got over it, as you may notice...) 3. Are the stages all this short (about 2 minutes and a half) and is the opposition really so easy (I get records on every stage!)? 4. Does the weather change from time to time or is every stage the same everytime? Thanks for your time! Jeroen van Engelenhoven

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> Finally got the Colin demo to work and I'm impressed. This is the best rally > game I've played so far. It really got me sitting on the edge of my seat. > Specially in the Monte Carlo stage: when you almost slide of the road into > the deep... it's great. And when you do slide off it looks and feels very > realistic. In Rally Championship (a game that really disappointed me!) the > car is always slipsliding all over the track. And you never slide of in the > way you do in Colin. This one is great. Very smooth graphics too. > Two questions: > 1. Does the final game also have this SEVERE pop-up (even at the highest > settings)?

Cant say it was something i noticed The scenery is the same in as much as "sweden is snowy and on lil country roads" but it isnt the same as in "hey.. thats exactly the same as that section in the last stage". And some stages tend to have their own special little bit. Theres a stage in Australia where ya come flying down a straight and have to cut across some train tracks and the train is parked there to stop ya "cheating" and cutting the corner, for example. sort of.... most stages are 4.5 Km to 7 KM and last about 3-5 min... probably averages about 3.5 min per stage...depending on how good ya are at it Im pretty sure if a stage is fine/dry then its fine/dry all the time, but to be honest, itdoesnt really bother me. Ya get enough variation from.. say... screaming down icy hills in the monte carlo rally, and then having to back up with a dry/dusty rally though forests in australia.

wooops... and no..the opposition isnt so easy..atleast not when ya change the difficulty. A rally you breezed through on one setting might take ya ages on the next level to squeeze through in 6th...never mind win the thing.

But why, oh why, do you have to finish in the top six? (Yeah, I know the obvious answer) Personally I'l like a bit more of simulation here instead of the arcade-approach. If you can't make it in the points then you score none and thus make it worse to win the championship. Haven't seen a real rally yet where you get to start again if you can't finish high enough. And the crashing in CMR sucks... a few seconds and the car is back on the road and completely without crashdamage to repair at the next servicestop. But when playing with an arcade attitude it's still great, I do like it, just don't love it like GPL. -- Petri

: And the crashing in CMR sucks... a few seconds and the car is back on the : road and completely without crashdamage to repair at the next servicestop. Please tell me how you're getting it to crash like that - if I get any kind of end over end or anything other than a really gentle roll then the damn thing really limps to the next stage and needs a load of repairs (having said that I'm a very bad driver at this game). -- Richard G. Clegg Only the mind is waving Dept. of Mathematics (Network Control group) Uni. of York. www: http://manor.york.ac.uk/top.html

> Please tell me how you're getting it to crash like that - if I get any >kind of end over end or anything other than a really gentle roll then >the damn thing really limps to the next stage and needs a load of >repairs (having said that I'm a very bad driver at this game). Uuuh, sorry! I seemed to play at the intermediate difficulty level - I think that explains it. Better to notch it up and then have a crash... BTW, in Codemasters TOCA I really enjoyed the bashing the car got in a really tight race, to finish first with the rearwindow shattered, tail lights out and the sides bashed in made you feel gooood. -- Petri

>Uuuh, sorry! I seemed to play at the intermediate difficulty level - I think >that explains it. Better to notch it up and then have a crash... How do I do that (without winning the Championship on intermidiate first)? On a similar note (and please bear with me - I did try to find some FAQ), are there any good advice how to wring out the best performance from my machine? I run a 400MHz Celeron (oc266), 64MB RAM, with Matrox Millennium G200 (8MB) and Voodoo1. The voodoo seems to be faster, though even it becames a bit jerky at 640x480 & most of the goodies on. (The drivers for both cards are the latest). A fantastic game, by the way. I've made my way to Swedish Rally (at intermidiate), but residing currently 3rd at the championship, there seems to be little chance to win WC (who is that Backlund guy anyway, no, don't answer, I think I can quess its our M?kinen tranlated to swedish?) Seppo