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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

SEGA Rally

  
 
Spatula Clarke
20:13 / 17.09.07
I'm a big old-timey Sega fan (not so much that I can be bothered capitalising the fucking name every time I type it, obvs), and I'm a big old-timey Sega Rally Championship fan. In the arcade and, especially, on the Saturn, the original game is a straight-up work of genius and work of gaming art. It invented and informed a whole sub-genre of racing games - Codemasters' Colin McRae (RIP) series was a direct response to it, and every rally game since has been a response, in turn, to that.

And then it all went a bit shit. The sequel didn't get the kind of distribution that the original enjoyed - arcade scene in Europe and the US dying out, innit - and the Dreamcast conversion was rushed (despite being delayed) and rather poor. Sluggish frame rate, little sense of contact between car and road surface (unforgivable, because the original game, in both arcade and Saturn flavours, was all about that sensation).

Then the PS2 game, Sega Rally 2006. Terrible, quite frankly. I bought the LE and it's just as well that it came with an arcade-perfect port of the original, because otherwise I'd have been livid at the waste of both the licence and my cash.

And now there's a new one out, for the 360 and PS3. And PSP, but that's slightly different, so we'll forget about that version for now.

Demo's just hit the 360 marketplace. Is good. Is very good. Is, crucially, very Sega Rally.

It's difficult to describe, but there's a specific feel to Sega games. Real Sega games. It's about good times, brightness, joy. Look, say, at how the firm perverted Final Fantasy 7 and recast it as Skies of Arcadia. Dystopian future? Identity crises? Overwraught death scenes? Fuck that shit. Scrub it. Replace it with: cities in the sky, the importance of friendship, pirates, touching farewells to old enemies and constant, believable, lovable positivity.

God, I adore that game.

Anyway, that's what marks true Sega games out from the rest. Even stuff that looks fairly downbeat on the surface - even something like Yakuza. And that's the magic dust that the firm used to be able to sprinkle over every genre it touched, including racers.



It's back. Those of us keeping an eye out know that it never completely went away - the aforementioned Yakuza, Outrun 2 and Outrun SP - but it's been a while since it was so obvious and present in such a mainstream, guaranteed seller of a title.

bear in mind that this isn't even the work of Sega's 'A' team for racers - instead, it's the first release from a new UK team called Sega Racing Studios. Bodes very good things for the future - my hope now is for this same team to be given the Daytona USA licence.

So, what's so good about it? Well, first up, it handles like you remember the original game handling. Exaggerated, unrealistic realism. Totally arcade. Drifts that feel real, but are insanely simple to pull off and maintain.

It's not just a replication of the original game, though. The hook that they're hanging this one off is deformable surfaces. As your tires - or those of your opponents - bite into the loose road surfaces, they leave massive grooves in them. Grooves that then affect your handling on the next lap. By the third lap, there's whole sections of track sliced away.

I wasn't sure at first, but the more I play the demo, the more I like it. and it does affect the gameplay, although it takes a while to notice it - I've been taking advantage of grooves on the inside of corners , for example. Get the front wheels into them and spin the back out and they help you make the corner that much tighter, that much faster. the pad rumbles like fuck whenevre you pass over a bit of track that's particularly heavily marked, too, which makes the whole thing feel massively rough and tumble and has correctly been identified by the development team as something that's going to make time trials really interesting.

Negatives? Track design doesn't come across as being as immediate, iconic (obviously) or memorable as the three main tracks from the original. That's about it for negatives. Oh, the music's pap, too.

So. Yes. Download the demo, buy the full game. This, chums, is what it's all about.
 
 
nedrichards is confused
10:20 / 20.09.07
I can say nothing other than the above, well aside from the fact that I *love* internet connected consoles. I don't do driving games (apart from Outrun, obv) and there's no way I'd have bought this but thanks to this demo, at some miserable point this winter or next spring I'm going to buy this, put it on and *smile*.
 
 
Spatula Clarke
19:21 / 01.10.07
Two other ways in which it's clearly a classic Sega racer.

First up, manual gears. In the real Sega racers, manual is always the way to go, because it allows you to drift around corners with a tighter turn-in than automatic does. That's most obvious in the recent batch of OutRun games, where there are even some turns that are almost impossible to drift around without hitting the barriers if you're racing with automatic gears. It doesn't take much in the way of brains or understanding of real life cars - I can't drive irl - but it does take an understanding of videogames.

In Sega Rally Championship, drifting was more realistic than OutRun2 and Daytona USA. The benefits of manual gears were seen elsewhere: in the speed. Manual versions of the three cars had higher top speeds than the auto versions. The autos were also late on the gear changes, which meant that manual provided faster acceleration.

In this current Sega Rally, it's a bit from column A and a bit from column B. Drifting steel feels cod-realistic, but it's more easily and more accurately initiated and controlled with manual gears than it is automatic.

So, that's one way that it reminds me of the classic Sega racers. The other is that hardly anybody understands it or is prepared to learn how to play it, which is totally what happened with the home conversions of OutRun2. You want damage models and reallistic handling? Then what the fuck are you doing buying a game that's clearly going to come down heavily on the arcade side of the fence? Stick with Forza or GT, for crye-eye. What did you think you were going to get from a game called Sega Rally?

It's a barrel of fun, if you're honestly looking for an arcade racer. The track deformation tech is fantastic stuff that makes excellent use of current gen tech - some courses feature muddy sections where water builds up in the trails dug up by the cars' tyres, and it's possible to create whole flodded areas by racing over a different bit of each section each time. The snow-covered sections are excellent, snow turning to slush as the course progresses. And the whole thing does effect the handling, far more than it seemed to in the demo - you get noticably more grip from areas that have already been gone over once, especially on stretches of tarmac where rubber's been laid down by screeching tyres.

If it gets the small, dedicated group of fans that OutRun2's original Xbox outing enjoyed, I can see myself spending a lot of time with it, swallowed up by the online time trial score tables.
 
  
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