| Platform Reviewed | Sega Saturn |
| Genre | Arcade Racing Game |
| Number of Players | 1 - 2 |
| Multiplayer Value | Minimum |
| Length | Short |
| Difficulty | Variable |
| Skills Required | Hand-Eye Coordination |
| Interface Devices | Sega Saturn Joypad |
| Interface Design | Good |
| Programming | Good |
| Game Design and Playability | Good |
| Type Of Fun | Racing Competition |
| Replay Value | High |
| Overall Value | Good |
| Quality | Good |
| The Best | Good control during driving, pretty scenery, two player mode |
| The Worst | Only three courses. Outrageous! There should be 30 courses on a CD game. |
| How much would I be willing to pay for this | 30 Bucks |
Description:
You gots yur cars, You gots yur three courses, and ya race against each other, an' the clock. Any questions?
Story:
Racing, as a form of competition, has existed as long as human beings have walked upright upon the Earth. Anything that can move, can be placed into a position of racing. It is possible to race animals, vehicles, abilities, and even growing cycles of crops and flowers. Oh yeah, you can even run on foot.
Review:
There are probably as many racing games as there are pimples on the face of an average oversexed teenager, which equates roughly to the number of visible stars in the sky: thousands. Sega Rally is a standard arcade racer, it is well programmed and has beautiful graphics, the two player mode is a good addition, and the vehicles handle well. No worries.
I do have one loud complaint, which I also feel applies to most of the current crop (1995) of early Saturn and Playstation racing games - that there are not enough tracks to race upon. Since these games feature filled, texture mapped polygon based graphics, entire worlds take very little memory (if properly programmed) to store upon the vast real estate of a CD; it is absolutely ridiculous that there should be only three or four racing courses per game. Even 30 courses would be a paltry amount considering the storage space, and one of the factors that make racing games great is a wide diversity of tracks - or even the ability to generate one's own. I consider it to be quite stingy to provide the player with only three courses in Sega Rally. The term 'Cheap Bastards' comes to mind, with regard to many such games. The cost would have been to employ someone to create additional tracks once the basic library of polygon shapes had been created. Just by remixing and using these forms in new configurations, those three environments could have easily provided DOZENS of interesting courses to race upon. A random generator, if provided, could have offered MILLIONS. You get three.
Other than that, Sega Rally is a truly swell racing game.
Jennifer Diane Reitz is a Game Designer and Computer Artist, and one of the founders of Happy Puppy. She is the creator of numerous games and software products, including Boppin' , Shark Chums, Elsewhere, and many others. She has worked for such companies as Activision, Sculptured Software, Epyx, SRI, and Electronic Arts, and founded Accursed Toys. She has been active in the computer gaming industry since it's earliest days. She considers games to be works of artistic merit and achievement, and views computer entertainment as the most important media of our era.