Sega Rally
Each month we celebrate the most important, innovative, or just plain great games from PlayStation’s past. This month the last of Sega’s classic arcade-styled racers is what’s revving our engines – belt up and enjoy the ride!
They don’t make ’em like this any more. Why not? Someone, somewhere, thought it would be clever to suggest the word ‘arcade’ meant ‘crap’, and everyone fell for it, right around the start of the PS3 generation. So this game, which remains 1995 Sega Rally’s last great sequel, was passed over by many players, and never got the recognition it deserved when it launched. Well, let’s change all that right now.
This is exactly what racing games used to be like in the ’90s, only reimagined with PS3’s superior capabilities in mind. The handling will probably alarm you when you boot the game up now, because the car actually responds to your directional input. No ‘realistic physics’ to carefully manage with gentle prods of the stick and squeezes of the triggers; no shopping trolley inertia that puts you into the catchment wall at every turn – just ultra-controllable driving that lets you redline it through corners, pull scandalously awesome handbrake turns, and thump over jumps as you careen out of a dense jungle and into blazing sunshine. And you know what? You’ll wonder why gaming ever moved towards realism. We had it so good.
This is essentially a reimagining of the original Sega Rally Championship, which set the gaming world alight when it appeared in arcades in the mid-’90s, before receiving a frankly astonishing port on Sega Saturn (one of the few games PlayStation gamers envied at the time). Ironically, that game got its best conversion on PS2, but sadly that was only released in Japan. Still, no matter. Despite having a more ambitious structure, this 2007 game has got the DNA of 1995’s Sega Rally shot right through it, from the shouts of “Easy right, maybe!” through to the comparatively short laps around exquisitely-designed circuits.
TRACK RECORD
We’ve been so starved of great track design over the past decade, what was merely bread and butter racing in 2007 feels exciting and full of vitality in 2018. And, being Sega Rally, it’s set up for spectacle, too, whether that’s the sight of a trademark low-flying helicopter
BOTH YOU AND THE GAME ARE FIRING ON ALL CYLINDERS AND IT FEELS FANTASTIC.
overhead, or the aurora borealis reflected in the smooth surface of a frozen lake – once you’ve scrubbed away the surface snow with your tyres on previous laps, of course.
Yep, that’s where the game’s biggest technological achievement is found. The surface of the track is made up of deformable 3D terrain. Drive over it once and you leave tyre tracks. Do it again and they get deeper, just like they would in real dirt or snow, affecting your grip as you run through the same rut. Keep driving and you can carve out a line around the circuit, which you can use to make your laps quicker and quicker… until the ruts get so deep they start to fill with water, that is. It works really well.
Better still, the various surfaces don’t just look convincing under your wheels. You can really feel the softness of virgin sand as you zoom along a golden beach on the first lap, or sense the squish as you churn up a narrow lane, splattering your car’s bodywork with layer after layer of fresh mud. Use this knowledge of the various grip levels and you can eventually work out how to power-drift over gravel, heading for a sheer rock wall, then hit dry asphalt just in time, catching your slide and propelling yourself off down the straight at full speed. At moments like this, both you and the game are firing on all cylinders, and it feels absolutely fantastic. It’s a sense of joy gleaned purely from skilful play, exactly how Sega Rally made you feel back in 1995. There’s no hand-holding here, and no rewind button if you screw it up, just arcade fun everywhere you look.