Customer Reviews

RalliSport Challenge

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I love Rallisport Challenge, and just like the people I love, I've had to love it with all of its flaws. This game is a mix of majestic graphics, realistic off-road driving physics, and ridiculously exaggerated speed. Don't kid yourself: if at any time, you slow to below 90 mph (and that means sharp hair-pin turns), you'll finish last. This game actually made me a Rally fan, and you can imagine my shock when I watched a WRC rally on TV, only to see the pro's sliding through turns and taking jumps at 60 mph! That's right, Colin McRae, Marcus Gronholm, and Markko Martin couldn't win a single race in "Beginner" mode in this game! This makes me wonder if Rallisport Challenge wouldn've have been better named as "Rallisport Blitz," and released by Midway as part of their arcade sports lineup.
That said, Rallisport Challenge is quite addicting. I've spent four hours at a time on this game, and I was never a race fan before. Mastering the art of the powerslide through tight turns on perilous mountain roads is joyous. You'll have to figure out the technique on your own, however, as there's no hint in the game manual, or tutorial in the game. I fear too many people will give up on the game before their skill-level improves, and miss out on the fun. Speaking of fun, here are a few fun facts you'll learn from this game:
1. A rock the size of your fist can destroy a 500 hp, 1230 kg rally car.
2. Rally cars are filled with helium. Any bumps in the road, especially in turns, will, best case, render your car uncontrollable for a while as you wait for your tires to touch the ground again, or, worst case, send your car sailing off a cliff into the sunset with air traffic control clearance.
3. A 500 hp, 1230 kg rally car at 145 mph is no match for a flimsy wooden advertising billboard on the roadside. In fact, the car will do three or four backflips in the air if you hit one.
4. Your AI opponents will all finish to within a nanosecond of eachother. If you don't finish first, you'll finish last.
5. Your AI opponents will seem to get a 5-second head-start. I'm asking the FIA to check their cars for nitrous boosters. Could be quite the scandal.
6. A few levels have you racing head-to-head with three other cars. This is nothing more than a "crash-up derby." If you don't ram that stupid Saab off the road quickly, he'll do it to you every time you get a lead.
7. Your co-driver insists on reading off the turns several miles in advance. You'd better have a good memory, otherwise you'll be confused as you enter a left turn as he's yelling "hard right!" That "hard right" won't be for a few more miles. We're having him tested for stimulant use. We'll get back to you on that.
If you can view these game issues with a sense of humor, and be prepared to spend a little time learning to control the cars, you'll find yourself as addicted to this game as I am.
One last piece of advice: play responsibly - don't get behind the wheel for at least 30 minutes after playing Rallisport Challenge.

Imagine yourself racing up a gravel mountain road in New Zeeland. As you climb thousands of feet, you can see far-off peaks as well as a plummeting view from the 200 ft. cliff you almost slid off during your last driving maneuver. You throw caution to the wind as you try to best your competition in a race against the clock. Misinterpreting your navigator, you take a hair-pin turn too fast and manage to hurl your WRX off the side of a hill... tumbling to a certain death. Better luck next time.

That's what it's like to play Rallisport Challenge: heart-pounding action coupled with gorgeous graphics and enormous levels. Rallisport is very good at relaying the vastness of the outdoors through the use of atmospheric perspective, colored lighting, and moving shadows. Heck, the clouds cast shadows on the ground in this game... and the clouds actually move!

My set-up includes and AMD XP 1700+, 1GB 266 DDR RAM, Nvidia GeForce 4 4600 ti, and a Logitech MOMO Force wheel. The game runs well on my system, with some skipping on the highest graphical settings.

A note on racing wheels: if you like racing games, buy one. I loaded this game before I had received my wheel. Keyboard racing will ruin this game. As a minimum, I suggest getting a gamepad... but a racing wheel makes a tremendous difference in game play.

While the gameplay is a bit unrealistic, it's forgivable. You're going to catch more air than you would in a real vehicle, but it's not too exaggerated. The many different vehicles drive differently, and you can customize things like suspension, steering, power ratio (4WD Only), and braking before each race.

The developers have paid serious attention to detail in creation of the levels. Trees look like trees, prairie grass looks like prairie grass, and mountains simply look huge. You really don't see this kind of detail in racing games. I was driving on one of the safari races when I thought that I noticed some gazelles in the distance. During the replay I realized that I was wrong: they were zebras.

Don't be discouraged by the undescriptive and negative reviews. I'm really having a blast playing this one, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone interested in racing games.

I am disappointed..., great graphics, but to me, that's about it. They have the sound close, but not close enough, there is a very vauge car setup screen, and the cars really don't handle that well. Put it this way, I was driving one car on a track that had some long streight streches. I assumed that it would be best to have the "tall" gear setting for this. I assumed that I would still be pulling higher sppeds before I had to slam on the breaks, but no. The engine revved out WAY before the next turn. Not nearly enough car settings. But it is multi-player "A+". I think they could have done better. But again, the graphics, especially the ice tracks, are pure art!

This game is extremely fun for any person who enjoys car racing games and even for some who dont. The graphics will take your breath away. The game play is solid, simple, and fun. It will take you about a day to fully get used to the controls of the car but once you do the game is a blast. The game could be better, but is still very fun to play. Your experience will only greaten if you have a steering wheel with force feedback. You will find yourself coming back to the game a month after you finish it to play again.

I bought this game with high expectations; having owned both Rally Trophy and Collin M'Crae rally 2.0 I was a little disappointed. This is more of an arcade game/ x-Box then a serious rally simulator. Driving model and force feed back were not upto par. when it comes to serious rally look someplace else such as Rally Trophy which when you get the bugs out of it is the best rally simulator out there.

I was a little skeptical about this game because I hadn't heard much about it, but this is the most detailed and realistic game out there. You do need a hefty video card though, I use a 128MB GeForce4 Ti 4200 with no flaws. It is definitely recommended if you have a 1Ghz processor or better for this game to run good. The car models are better than Playstation2 quality (gran turismo 3) and there is a huge car selection. Great game for everyone.

When I am not working on networks or teaching classes I love to play computer games. While mostly I play golf, baseball or puzzles games every now and then I like to try out something new. I found this game to be both fun and a great break from the everyday grind.

The install was easy as I started with cd1 and answering a few questions and before I knew it the installation was complete. I was able to get Windows 98, ME, 200 and XP to work. The game calls for a 32MB video card and I would say this is a minimum, I would also recommend a video card with 3D acceleration.

Also the hard space required is 1.5GB and I would recommend 3GB. There are several different rallys and each one has a different set of obstacles and events that can occur. I was able to play the game with the keyboard and mouse, but the gamepad or sidewinder wheel would certainly enhance the game play.

The graphics are great and with a P4 processor you have very little lag in the refresh and the game runs very smoothly. I only had one game failure and that was under Windows ME, the other versions had no failures and the game played for over 3 hours at a time.

While I am not an expert in this software, I found it easy to pick and play and overall I was impressed by the amount of different things that can happen when you play.

It's fun playing this game! There's a lot of cars and race courses to choose from. Some courses are difficult but if you play the game a lot, you'll get better at it. You also find out which car works best for a particular terrain/weather or race. As you win more races and gain more experience, you unlock the higher performance cars. This adds life to the game because it opens up other combinations to try out. You'll need a good graphics card for this game otherwise it will freeze or the rendering of the graphics will be compromised. It's also more enjoyable to play this game with a steering wheel rather than a keypad. Using a keypad is easier but the steering wheel adds to the driving experience.

AFTER SPENDING HOURS downloading the 'latest' and greatest driving games, RalliSport Challenge is still the funnest and most addicting driving game for the PC. The reason is that even with the graphics set to the highest level, you don't have to wait for sections of the track to load, as you do with GTR-Evolution (which I had to give away before I tossed the game off my balcony). I've had Rallisport challenge, and I managed to beat every record except for the downhill races, at which the best times are comically impossible to beat--the (false) logic being that, since you are going downhill, you should have a faster time. But the problem is that it is harder to control a vehicle when it is going downhill, so you have to use the brakes more, which cuts into your best time, so you're probably not going to beat any of the best times on the downhill races.

The best parts of Rallisport challenge are the Pacific course and the ice racing. I remember the hours I used to spend with Atari ice racing, which was nothing more than a block with four little blocks attached to it to represent tires, all from a downward look over an ice-glazed surface. In Rallisport challenge, everything is there, from the sun glare to the ice reflections to the perfect fun of drifting around the corners. The handling characteristics are almost flawless, and the sound of the tires digging into the snow if you miss a turn is spot on. You can hear the ice flying out from your spiked tires as you whiz across the finish line, and even in the hardest level (normal) you can lap your opponents if you master the controls. (I use the left shift key for accelerating, the CTRL key for braking, since it is right below the accelerator, and the space bar for the handbrake, while using the left and right arrow keys to steer). The Pacific course is like real mud and the car handles like Golden Gardens on a rainy day, and given that you can take shortcuts up to a point (if you go to far off course, you've had it, and it will reset your car). Segment 6 of the Pacific course is by far the hardest, with the track barely one car length wide, but still very fun to play and very exhilarating.

Definitely stick with the game long enough to get the Saab Viggen, as it handles better than that monstrous Suzuki hill climber which has more power than a 747. Actually, the Peugeot 405 offers the best combination of top speed, acceleration and handling. See [...]. The desert courses are the easiest, and the downhill mountain climbs are the hardest, and after the uphill mountain climbs and 225,000 points, I retired. After you advance past a certain stage in the career, you can rerace that stage with a new and better car, but be ready--the computer doesn't let you fall into a different power and weight class without a comparable shift by the computer-controlled cars.

I have learned in the non-stage races (the single race mode) that it is better to let the other three cars take off first and ram each other off the road, then come from behind on the first leg and blow by them. In the desert mode, I always use tall gears to get higher top speeds, while on the Pacific course and some of the Mediterranean courses I use regular gears, and on the last three stages of the Mediterranean race, definitely shorter gears. If you make one mistake when the navigator says "caution--exposure", he's not kidding, you will be rolling down a mountainside. I have found that the navigator is spot on, he is not too far ahead, and with the navigation aids on the screen set to arrow heads-up display, you'll know every turn coming up right on que. I have gotten the best lap times overall with the Peugot 206 and 400 series vehicles, while the Focus Rally car is the best for ice racing. I managed to get the Saab Viggen for the Hill climb, but the only way to win the ice hill climb is to change the tires to ice and not snow.

This game is very fun to play, and I always have time for a lap or two and can go just to time trial mode when I don't want to race. I also did not see where the signs are immovable, even the barrels and ad signs move with an impact--but the fences in some of the races do not give way as one reviewer pointed out. Don't be fooled by some of the "gift" cars you may have won, they don't always handle so well even thought they sound like they have a lot of power. The variances of the tracks allow you to go both ways, and that's like twice the amount of tracks. I have also found that the game gives its best performance with anti-aliasing and track particles off, and resolution set to 800 x 600 with opponents shadow detail turned off. You can still set the car details to high and have a very enjoyable, high quality driving game that still beats out GTR-Evolution and definitely Test Drive Unlimited, which require comical amounts of memory just to get a decent frame rate of say, 24 frames per second. I just don't happen to have an exobyte of hard disk space or 100 terabytes of video RAM on hand running four processors at 100 Ghz, so RalliSport challenge fits the bill perfectly, only requiring 128MB of memory and a 733Mhz processor. On my system, with 350Mb of video RAM and 1GB of SDRAM running two processors at 2.2Ghz, the game is a snap and really performs very well and keeps me coming back for more.

There is no longer any online multiplayer support for RalliSport challenge (before it was up to 4 players only), and no updates or patches for the game, but everything seems to do very well without them and I have never had a system crash because of it, even on my AMD Athlon dual-core 2200+ system. Probably because the game as of this review is nearly a decade old. But still, overall, it is the best game going in the Rally racing category, and I only wished there was an open wheel or Formula One racing type game with the same graphics engine and modeling as Rallisport Challenged.

Although you have the option to install the game with everything on the hard drive, it still checks the CD-ROM for the original disc, which is an annoyance, since the game should be able to tell that it is a verified original copy and not have to waste time to verify the disc, no doubt an anti-piracy device--but the small wait for the disc verification is worth it. The game automatically saves after every career event, which is great in case of a power failure. I still can't find a better game than RalliSport challenge with such outstanding playability, driveability and scenery that doesn't cut into the frame rate like other memory-hog driving games do.

Unable to run on either my desktop (XP) or my Vista laptop.Locks up my laptop and either locks up or blue screens my desktop on which I can run anything from crysis to the latest iteration of Microsoft flight Sim with everything on high and all available periphials.Yoke and wheel
rudder pedals,four throttle,etc.Wound up shredding the disc.That'll teach it not to mess with me boy.If it was possible I would have given it no stars. ..!.