V-Rally

Mixed feelings on this one. I love the visuals, the environments look beautiful for PS1 standards, The track designs are generally nice as well. Despite being short circuits, they feel inspired by real rally stages. V-Rally has a ton of content, as well. A good amount of cars to choose from, and an avalanche of tracks. The big problem comes with the physics. These cars are BOUNCY. If you touch the wall, or your AI opponents, your car is going to go flying! Hell, your car might even start rolling around after you land when taking a jump too fast. It's the kind of game where crashing is meant to be part of the fun, though if you're looking to win races, it's more frustrating than anything. When you get into a groove, typically once there are no opponents in front of you, this will feel like a great rally game altogether. But it's only momentarily. For the most part, V-Rally's gameplay is too silly for it to work for the better.

V-Rally Edition 99 is a licensed and more realistic take on the sport than 1997's Top Gear Rally, though the driving experience doesn't quite match that of the PlayStation's Colin McRae Rally.

The game features a heap of stages from across the globe and a good number of real-world cars. Cars can be tuned to some extent by adjusting a handful of settings, all of which noticeably affect gear ratios, suspension and such. Handling is a shade more sim-like than Top Gear Rally, but still not too far removed from arcade; some of the straighter and wider stages are actually boring given you can pretty much mash the A button and flick the stick occasionally. There's a sort of physics engine here, but it's not perfect, as collisions and crashes feel odd and send the camera into a wildly confused spin. Co-driver calls are a toned-down version of the real thing, using basic descriptors such as "easy left" and "hard right". Unfortunately, they're often inaccurate and sometimes completely wrong.

Pop-in is a common complaint, and whilst it's here in abundance, I didn't often find it to be an issue and it keeps the game fast and smooth. Visually, the game is reasonable overall and the weather and time of day effects are well-done.

Though flawed, Edition 99 can be fun when you get into the groove of a stage, and it's real-world cars and licensing are an appreciated bonus that had been sorely lacking on the N64 to this point.

Sometimes a game just 'clicks' after you've played it for a while, the same way that an album sometimes does - you have this eureka moment when you suddenly realize what it's all about. With V-Rally, it happened when I suddenly realized that holy crap, I didn't always have to pick the fastest car!

Stupid, I know, but every racing game I'd played before V-Rally had basically included varying speeds of car as a difficulty indicator - fast was easy, slow was hard. With this game, suddenly I was introduced to the idea that steering was impacted by speed too, that smaller and slower cars allowed you more control and therefore made it easier to race. So the Subaru Impreza was packed in for either a Skoda (hah!) Felicia or a Citroën Saxo, and suddenly the game made sense, became fun, and I started giving myself a fighting chance of winning. After that, V-Rally became the 'realistic' racing game I've played more any other ('realistic' basically meaning 'not Mario Kart [マリオカート] or Micro Machines' in this context) and honestly, given that I'm not a huge fan of the genre, it'll probably never be surpassed on that count. It's odd, because I've never watched rally racing in my life, but I found this a lot more fun than any Formula 1 simulator I've seen, even back in the golden age of Schumacher when I watched F1 religiously. It was just a very well built game - the courses looked good, made sense, and were enough of a challenge to be worth multiple playthroughs, and even the lens flare that appeared from time to time, which was criticized by a lot of people, was okay with me. The seriously aggressive AI was a major plus point too, making the higher difficulty levels much more fun - getting beat is much more fun when you're involved in a personal, almost obsessively niggling battle rather than just getting left in the dust.