12-Nov-2007 Driving for people who don't know how to drive If DiRT is the brains of the rally outfit, this is the face. The guy with nice teeth and hair just-so, but who can barely manage a conversation unless it's about his favourite type of trouser. Doesn't really matter - you feel cooler just for being around him. Sega Rally makes you look awesome.
This is about the look of racing, not the technical complexities. If you're driving through a safari setting, you'll see elephants. If you're in Holland, giant windmills are inevitable. In the Arctic? Northern Lights, innit?
Even the invisible walls aid wish-fulfilment of what driving in really fast cars should be like. These traditionally infuriating barriers are there to help, not to restrict.
They're like those inflatable tubes they put into the gutters at the side of the lanes to help out people who are rubbish at ten-pin bowling. Usually, they bounce you immediately back into play, sometimes even ahead of the car you've been chasing.
You never, ever, ever, ever go off-track, which means to a casual observer you'll always look like the most incredible driver in the world, even if you're lagging well at the back of the pack.
Which brings me onto catch-up. Apologies if it's something you're already aware of, but I'm going to have a brief glossary moment in case you're not.
Catch-up, aka rubberbanding, is an automatic AI adjustment, perhaps best known from Mario Kart, that automatically raises or lowers the speed of NPC racers to ensure some degree of competition. It persists no matter how good/bad you are.
Those of you who are unfamiliar with this concept will be shocked to hear that it exists in any racing game, and doubly so that Sega Rally is entirely transparent about it.
Set up a multiplayer game, and there's an option to turn catch-up on or off, right there. Like the invisible walls, it's designed to make you feel like you're always quite good at the game, never disheartened by humiliatingly spectacular failure, or winning by a lap.
In theory, anyway. Turn it on and multiplayer races are glorious conflicts, a constant bumper-car battle of tailgating and sideswiping, even between players of wildly different ability.
It's sporadically awry in singleplayer though, appearing on some tracks to apply to the NPC cars but not to you, so that you end up trailing in last place, with five cars exactly equidistant from each other in a neatly-ordered pack impossibly far ahead. When you scored an easy victory on the previous course, such mindless punishment can grate.
Coupled with that, the learning curve rises steeply; you may never go off-track, but you'll struggle to net the near-perfect run of First Places you'll need to unlock the next tier of races. This new Sega Rally's trying to have its cake and eat it - to be the minimal-skill woo-hoo of its arcade antecedents, but to also offer something to serious ralliers. This makes it rarely more than adequate on both counts.
It's also a game of limited scope. Seeing elephants isn't funny any more when you're racing on the fifth slight variation of exactly the same safari course. Still, it gives rallying back to the impatient masses to a decent extent.
It's an agreeably straightforward 2D arcade game in shiny 3D disguise, experimenting with extraneous limbs while it tries to establish exactly what it should evolve into.
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