I always wanted to be a pro rally racer. Imagine driving
your car at insane-like speeds through a racetrack, which in
Canada would basically consist of logging roads. Alas, this life is
not for me as it can be quite costly pursuing this venue of life
especially if you don't have a rally racing team in your city. So I
must play the games and take them all too seriously.
A quick primer on rally racing games might be in order.
"Q-Rally" is the first rally game that I found encompassing. The
intro movies are live action and feature some of the most amazing
clips I had ever seen at the time, as I didn't watch much pro rally
racing on the television; thus, these videos were quite shocking, as
well as intriguing. Next came "International Rally Championships"
by the same company. This is a wonderful game whose flaws are
quite numerous (the head lights didn't work in tunnels, the movies
were horribly dull, the menus were a pain to navigate, a complete
lack of a dashboard view, etc...). However, its soundtrack is so
brilliant that I play it on my portable CD player to this day. I should
mention that both of these games allow the player to browse
through a good deal of detail about pro rally racing either in
history lessons, descriptions of current and past cars, and good
explanation of the divisions of cars which exist in the WRC (World
Rally Championships). Then all of a sudden the gaming market
exploded with pro rally racing games: V-Rally 1 and 2, Colin
McRae Rally, Rally Championship 2000, and many more. These
are all very fine games (and I'm sure I have failed to mention a lot
of the big ones here, but hey - I can't go buying every pro rally
racing game that was ever published!). However, one question
arises: "in a market saturated with pro rally racing games, what
makes Colin McRae Rally 2 stand out above and beyond the rest?".
In other words: "what does it offer?".
First off, you will notice that McRae is no longer on the
same team as in the first Colin McRae Rally game; he switched to
the Ford racing team. So he will be sporting a cute little white
Ford. However, unlike McRae's WRC standing of late, he kicks ass
in this game. Do note that this is a sequel so that means all the
graphics are much better and can max out your hardware. The
graphics in this game are quite stunning at times. The car damage
effect is truly neat. All your windows can break to reveal the
driver and co-driver inside (you can even see the glass fall to the
ground!). Your engine hood can and will flap in the wind if you
steer your car into a tree or, failing that, a post of some sort. Your
muffler can be turned into a charred black stub. Your rear bumper
can be left on the side of the road. Your side mirrors will swing in
the air as you scrap your car in a tunnel. Your lights can shatter,
break, and leave you in the dark. Your incompetent driving can
even lead to dents in the body of the car like on the roof of the car!
So it is quite visually extensive, though some of the damage can
get dull quickly after seeing them so many times. With this all
said, one can also expect the normal graphics from a game of this
type. There are wheel thicknesses, antennas which bend and
blow in the winds, three dimensional trees, two dimensional
backdrops of trees, a nice sun to stare at, some rather nice
backgrounds, smoke from your overly abused car, spectators by
the road side, and (my favourite) tyre tracks in the snow which can
get quite memorable. Missing are: mud and snow being kicked up
in the air and a rear view mirror for multiplayer games.
The music and sound are good. They aren't anything
especially good or bad to talk about. High point: the music is very
smooth and nice and doesn't require accessing the CD-ROM, which
under Microsoft Windows will usually pause the processor for no
apparent reason. Low point: the engine sounds are useless along
with the tyre sounds as they don't give you a real feel for what is
happening; in racing one gets a good feel for what is happening
with the tyres and the engine by just their respective sounds.
The game play is, well... fun! This like the original will
feature such intensive tracks that no one and I mean no one can
play this game on manual transmission; you have to use an
automatic transmission. When driving on the tracks you will hear
your co-driver (aka: co-pilot) tell you instructions for the upcoming
turns. Well, if he was my real co-pilot I would have him shot. This
guy is almost useless. His instructions are horribly slow at times
("right 3 ... onto mud" - butby the time he says mud you have
already figured it out and are swearing by the ditch) or un-timed
with the track ("left 6 right 6 left 3 square right 3 left 2" - now
remember all that and run the next few turns in silence) or
confusing ("maybe jump" - what the hell is a "maybe jump"?) or
mysterious ("caution" - of what? A rock? A ditch? A fence? A
hitchhiking alien named Zaphod who happens to be by the
roadside? Caution of WHAT?) or is nondescript ("left 3"
<smash> you meant "square left 3") or is just plain wrong
("long left 3" <smash> you meant "hairpin left"). So the guy
will piss you off and cost you time. The other side effect of him
speaking too fast is that he will tell you there is a square right and
a square left, but he won't tell you it's a T intersection - and by the
time you are AT the intersection, he will say "square left", which is
obviously wrong, and will usually result in you slamming into a
dead end. Moving along to the tracks, or stages. They are quite
fun as they as well built and feature a good array of decorative
objects here and there. Now and then, the level designers will
have a little fun with you and put a sharp turn after a yump or
dump a turn after climbing a crest; basically, sometimes things
come out of nowhere just to smack you in the face (do notice the
placement of street signs, rocks, trees, bushes, tyre stacks, small
stone road dividers, and hay stacks as all these things are
completely solid and if you smash into them, your car will flip, stop
dead on the spot, or otherwise leave you wondering).
A couple more problems with gameplay. When you play
a championship, you obviously have to repair the car, as it gets
damaged. The illogical part is that you can slightly damage your
gearbox or completely destroy it, and it always takes you exactly
the same amount of time to replace it. Same for all other
components. Moreover, in multiplayer, you get to repair after
every stage, rather than every two stages like it's supposed to be.
This makes game unnecessarily easier. On the other hand, a neat
feature of the game is that when you have a force feedback
device, you actually feel the road and everything, and when you
damage certain components of the car, you feel it in the response.
If you damage the steering, for example, your car will feel a lot
more sluggish in turns and such. The other components also
matter... probably. I haven't seen a large effect of damage on
anything other than the body, the gearbox, the brakes and the
steering (that leaves about 5 more components). What happened
to the engine, by the way? When you damage your gearbox to the
point where your engine redlines improperly, you should be
incurring some serious damage to the engine (not to mention
when you plow into a tree) - so why is the option to repair it not
there?
There are a few options you can choose to enjoy the
tracks: rally and arcade. The difference is basically car damage
and tracks. You don't have car damage in arcade, and you have
circular laps for arcade. So no one will ever touch arcade. In the
rally option you have a few subsections; they are all quite standard
except for the challenge (those who like "Tokyo Extreme Racer"
will be shocked at the lack of flashing your high beams to
challenge some other driver). Multiplayer is fun but lacks
somewhat, as you want to have car damage and crash into your
buddy but can't - as I remind you, the "rally" section is basically
solo-play (you see your friend as a ghost car) and the arcade
doesn't have car damage but allows for the cars to smash into one
another. Once driving you will be caught up in beating your
friend's time that you will completely forget how satisfying it would
be to have the option of running your friend into a ditch then
laughing your ass off as his windshield shatters to the ground. I
should mention that this is a moot point: you never see your
friend's car damage. This leads into the whining section...
With most games there are initial problems to be solved
with a patch. Well this game is badly in need of a patch. The
co-pilot navigational directions are a big one to fix (if possible).
The other thing to fix is the shadow car problem. During replays
your car may turn into a shadow. It has a bottom shadow, and a
side shadow (you see the silhouette of your car). You also see it
cast a shadow on roadside objects, just like it should. But there is
no CAR there! It's also very annoying that the replays can't be
saved, as you can't save them nor can you switch vehicles in
multiplayer replays nor control their playback with fast-forwards,
rewind, pause, camera angle, or anything simple like that. Even
during game play you may have a shadow car, which functions
precisely as described above, except you control it, which is even
freakier. In multiplayer, you may see your friend not as a ghost
car but as a shadow. Another problem is out-of-bounds errors.
Once your car strays off the track too much you are teleported
back onto the track. In some areas (and you will find them soon
enough) if your car falls in the ditch then you will not teleport back
but rather be forced to "climb" out of them with a great loss in your
time. There are also annoyances in the tracks I believe should be
fixed. Many a time you shall encounter forks and T-intersections in
the race. The problem arises when they don't have road signs to
tell you where to turn. Okay, your co-pilot does tell you where to
go, but, as I mentioned above, he frequently doesn't time his
narrative with the actual track, so you will very often take the
wrong turn. They also go for quite a while, so it'll take you some
time to figure out you went the wrong way. A perfect example of
this is a certain left turn in Italy. But I'll let you find it for yourself.
So you shall be swearing a good deal for no fault of your own.
There are a couple more multiplayer glitches (which are still not
fixed as of this writing, after the patch was released). One, it's
sometimes hard to tell who is ahead. The position indicator says
you are. The timer says you are. But if you LOOK at the track, you
will see your opponent in front of you. Who lies? Also, sometimes
your opponent (or you) will get a one-second or so head start for
absolutely no reason.
As far as rally racing games go, this one is not one of the
most sophisticated ever made. The replay options don't exist. The
cars' information are skeletal (exactly how valuable is "BHP [eight
squares out of 10]" and "Weight: 10 squares out of 10"?). The
racers' biographies are well junk. A section to promote pro rally
racing in the real world is not here (I'm used to Europress's pro
rally games). Your co-pilot options are nonexistent (eg: male,
female, quiet type, very talkative type, etc.). Your car setup
options are very simple, not to mention time limited. There's no
refuelling of the car. All videos are quite short and dull. Visual
effects are limited to the bright spot which is the sun (no solar
lense flares, no water splashes, no flying dirt, mud or snow, no
flying birds overhead, etc...). There is no weather control for the
practice runs (actually I don't think the weather actually changes
from one run to the next on the same stage). The screen capture
simply pastes to clipboard (this made the first captures extremely
annoying!). And the co-pilot really, really sucks. Thus to answer
the question posed earlier, this game sticks out because it has
"Colin McRae" stuck onto the box, and for very little else.
By: 
