Video Game Review:

PC Game: Sega Rally

I had always enjoyed the Sega Rally video game the was popular in Video arcades a few years ago. It had a reasonable vehicle dynamics model allowing tremendous slides and realistic recovery as well as believable weight transfer modeling when using the pedals. It was so good it made me run over to the game wherever I found it, eager to prove my skills against hapless 10 year olds.

When I first saw the game in stores as a PC game, I was interested in how it would come across on a small screen. The results are in and they are not what I expected.

After a basic uneventful install the game menus came up with the familiar navigation screen I remembered from the arcade version. You can choose to play either sim, or arcade mode, as well as a variety of controller, graphic and sound options to suit your machine and personal taste.

Since I wanted to re live my arcade experiences, I choose "arcade" and selected my Lancia Stratos, from a selection of cars slightly expanded from the arcade game. Most of the other cars are front or all wheel drive but I felt the tail happy handling of the rear wheel drive was Lancia more to my liking.

Driving the car was fairly good, but seemed to lack the feel the arcade game had. Even with my high tech force feedback system and cutting edge graphics card, the game was not the same dynamic experience as the arcade version. I switched to "sim" mode hoping to find some improvement, but was disappointed that it was not much different.

On the up side the graphics, while in the "arcade" style, were very nice to look at, and the weather was terrific with details like raindrops on the windscreen very convincing!

I tried out a few of the courses and was able to get through them after a couple of attempts. I have not tried out the 10 year championship as of yet, due to time constraints but I'm sure it will be a challenge to get through.

All in all, the game was somewhat of a disappointment to me, since the original was so good. However if you think of it as a "simulation" of an arcade game rather than a racing sim or an exact copy of the arcade game, then you may not be as disappointed as I was.

Sega Rally is an older title and should be showing up in the "bargain" section of your favorite software store very soon!