Often when writing for a blog, you think to yourself where am I going to start? Where do I begin?Well, there was no sodding problem today – I knew precisely where I was going to start:
Edge Magazine, you gits, you oversold the graphics to this game and you owe me £45.00 you lying bastards.
You see, they had, Edge Magazine that is, in their so called video games rag, a preview of V-Rally for the Playstation. This preview suggested that Infogames had revolutionised graphics on the Playstation by writing directly to the Playstation hardware in assembler language. This had, so Edge Magazine continued, me, the big graphics-whore that I am hanging on every sentence, created graphics of a quality never seen before on Playstation. This was because everyone else developed games for the Playstation the girlie way: I.e. Using C++, and Infogames had used assembler and therefore they had squeezed out the true, awesome manly power of the Playstation.
I'm paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it. Needless to say, I placed my pre-order.
As this turned out, it was a bit of pork-pie as they say in Camden Town. I.e. Not the sodding truth.
They may have, they may not have, developed the game in Playstation assembler but it didn't make any sodding difference because the game looked like every other car related game on the Playstation. Plausible at the time, blocky today.
...and breath.
Still – is V-Rally any good?
Fortunately – it is.
Now, I own a car, I've driven for many years, I don't drive terribly fast, but I know how a car feels when it moves and how it handles. And while real Rally cars are a world away from the 3DOkid auto parked outside, I have a persistent belief that my real car is infinitely closer to a real Rally car than anything ever presented in a driving/racing game. And in that fact, V-Rally is no exception.
I appreciate that real rally cars are light and twitchy. And they jump and leap about and the sports suspension and frame and chassis is designed to be like this. And to a degree V-rally presents this well. I do not believe however, you can twat into a tree at 70mph and drive away. So, it's not very realistic in that respect, although it is desperately trying to be so. V-Rally sits in that nether region of car games, where actually Gran Turismo squats like big fat monkey pooh, not all realistic but at the same time completely unrealistic.
Realism aside. It is fun. And that's a minor triumph in it's own rights. It's quite addictive. The cars handle well, unrealistic, but well and your left with the feeling, even after the first couple of laps, that you could go quicker. And once you're hooked – you're hooked. V-Rally is a time gobbler.
There are selection of cars that will make any fan Sega's Sega Rally twitch with plagiarised spasmosis but it makes no odds – all the cars feel the same.
In arcade mode you're against three opponents which is fun and challenging and not marred by either an unfair elastic band system or a cheating elastic band system. For those that don't know, the elastic band system helps keep the race close so you never get to far ahead to be boring or too far behind to be hopeless.
In championship mode it's against the clock.
V-Rally is good in what it does, because you never feel that the game is cheating you. If you fail to win, or set a best time, it's because of your failures as the player, not because the track is too hard or the weather puts you off or it's too dark. Having said that night mode is tense.
And talking of tracks, we move on to another none-truth. Track editor. Hmm? Where is it Edge Magazine? In the preview it mentions a track editor. Which in my copy, here in 2008, it's not there. Not that I care. Level editors leave me cold.
This game, I can recommend. It stands up. You can play it in 2008 and you won't feel like some retro loser playing a substandard game because either you're too cheap or too poor or too much of a prick to recognise newer games are indeed better.
V-Rally – I swear – is playable. And yes, it's better than Sega Rally 3 on 360/PS3.
