Ah, when I heard the first details of this new Sega Rally it made me so nostalgic that I busted out the ol Saturn and ran a couple races of Daytona USA, complete with official Sega racing wheel.:) By that time I couldn't help myself and ended-up playing Darius Gaiden and Virtua Fighter Remix...couldn't find my copy of Sega Rally, though!
I've downloaded the demo of Forza 2, but was left feeling it lacked. It had a similar graphical ability to PGR3, except it had better vehicle damage, and played much the same. Add to this the lack of frentic action throughout and I found the game a little tedius.
I love PGR3, but I only really play it in the summer cos it's a great chill-out title. Stick some urban music, or techno or rock on your hard drive (Cos the in-game music is s**t) and play away. Unfortunately that left me gagging during winter.
I got Need for Speed Carbon: Collectors Edition and had the most tremendous time a few months back. Seat-of-your-pants action, some nice features and a cool customisation mode.
However SEGA Rally is something else. It's not just got tiny little feature, it's not just PGR plus damage. Hell I wonder if PGR4 will be much improved over PGR3, I'm hoping it is (2D illusionist trees have been around since Ganbare Goeman on the N64, give it a rest already -__-) but SEGA Rally looks the real nuts. Sure it doesn't look 200% better graphically than PGR3 (That'd be hard enough to do anyway), and yes the track deformation may or may not be a huge improvement, and I can get my thrill ride from NFS:C. But it's the fact that it appears to be a racing game that grabs the best elements from these three titles and massages it with a traditional SEGA look and feel to make what looks to be the next best Racing game.
Having SEGA Rally and an official Saturn wheel on my Saturn (Obviously), I can safely say that out of all the Saturn racers I own (Andretti Racing, Daytona USA, Daytona CCE, Sega Rally, SEGA Touring Car Championship and Virtua Racing) Sega Rally was easily the most fun. Yes it was amazingly short, and the fourth secret level (Lakeside) was nails, but you could just hit "Retry" over and over and over and not get bored. I hope this game has the same element of "just one more" the original had. It sounds like they have the right idea anyway, tense bumper-to-bumper action over hyper-realism. PGR and Forza are already doing the realism thing, it's good to see SEGA sticking to it's roots to make a game that's easily more accessible.
Only one small concern is the online mode. If the game is interacting with polygons 17 times more than any other racer, will this not most likely cause a huge amount of slowdown or lag during online play as everyone's tracks will have to deform accordingly? I hope SEGA have thought of that too and are actively making a solution to what could be a huge unfortunate problem.
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ive been beaten by primary school kids on art of fighting in jilly's in manchester. i was on some s**t