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Disappointed

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 18
Date: November 14, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I eagerly awaited my copy of Rallisport Challenge, and finally after installing the 3 cds ?!, I fired it up.
I should preface this by saying I prefer my rally games to be as realistic as possible. I would trade finely rendered trees and shiney cars for accurate physics engine any day. Rallisport Challenge dispointed me on both fronts. The physics don't feel accurate, and the graphics were dispointing. The signs and objects that surround the "stages" are nice, but the roads blend in with the banks in spots and look like flat sheets of painted glass.
I did enjoy the ice racing circuits as long as I didn't expect too much from the physics engine. This game would have been good if it was released 4 years ago, but against other current Rally titles such as Colin McRae 2 and Rally Trophy it comes up short.

If you like to drive this game is for you!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: November 14, 2002
Author: Amazon User

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.

Superb!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 11 / 11
Date: November 19, 2002
Author: Amazon User

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.

Ultimately disappointing

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 2 / 10
Date: December 04, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This console (X-Box) port results in slick graphics, annoying music and unrealistic physics. The intensity, the hair-raising stress of on-the-edge racing is completely missing. If you think this is a 5 star racing sim, you should get out more often!

Best Rally Game EVER!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 2
Date: January 02, 2003
Author: Amazon User

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.

Best Arcade Style Rallying Since Sega Rally 2

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: January 03, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Fans of the classic Sega Rally arcade game should rush out to get this X-Box port - the variety of play modes and beautiful graphics will be enough to keep your pulse pounding for weeks. Fans of accurate simulation style rally racing should avoid this title - the retro "Rally Trophy" is the best recent rally simulator. However, for what Rallisport aims to be, a fun and wide-appealing racer, it succeeds on many grounds.

The game comes on three CD-ROM's and the breadth that this suggests clearly shows through with more cars and tracks than you can shake a stick-shift at. There are four modes of racing - the classic solo rallying against the clock, the fictitious NASCAR-bumping race with four cars in a dirt and asphalt oval, another fictitious race with four cars in an ice oval, and the Pikes Peak style hill climb. In the core "career" mode, you will need to race in all of these events to accumulate points and unlock more tracks and cars.

The terrain representation is the most noteworthy on the list of merits. For the first time on a PC rally game, the sense of uneven terrain is truly frightening. Banked turns and cambered roads look and feel authentic, especially in the Hill Climb event, where you can actually see the terrain just above your head that the upcoming off-camber hairpin turn is leading into - the sense of going uphill has never been captured better. Owners of Geforce3 or higher and ATI Radeon 8500 and higher graphics cards will especially appreciate the shadow and lighting effects, especially on ice, where the bright glare of the surface is captured convincingly. The downside of the arcade approach is that the roads are all extremely wide to allow plenty of room to slide around in, unlike the claustrophobic narrow roads seen at real rally events, lending a particularly inauthentic feel.

The driving dynamics, while clearly in the arcade camp, do break some new territory. Real rally cars are notoriously difficult to turn in. Rallisport captures that more than any other rally game before it - if you simply charge into a turn and crank the steering wheel, very little will happen except that you will plow straight ahead into the tree at the outside of the turn. You will need to utilize real life rally techniques such as the pendulum turn to rotate and begin sliding the vehicle into a turn and this will require some adjustment from past rally games that did not bring this initial understeer into stark relief. That said, the controllability of the vehicle slide clearly shouts "arcade fun", not "simulator".

Disappointments include the lack of a large dust plume on dirt tracks, an awesome sight in real rallies that I would have expected would be possible by now with today's computing power. And although the cars differ in power delivery, the cars all share the same 8000-rpm redline and vaccuum cleaner sound effects, from the 1.6 liter normally aspirated engine to the turbocharged Group-B monsters. Furthermore, some details show a lack of thorough testing - the gearbox options (short, medium, tall) effect only the top two gears which, although not optimal, may be fine except that when you select "short", fifth gear is actually shorter than fourth gear and sixth gear is barely taller than fourth gear.

A Pentium 1.8 GHz and GeForce4 Ti4200 is plenty good to turn on almost all of the eye candy options at 1024x768. However, the program did curiously un-mount one of my drives that I had mounted as my "Program Files" directory during the installation process. If you don't know what this means then you probably do not have a set-up like mine and do not need to worry about it - the game has run without crashing for many weeks now on my Windows 2000 set-up.

RALLISPORT CHALLENGE BY MICROSOFT

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 06, 2003
Author: Amazon User

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.

Very Fun Rally Game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: January 16, 2003
Author: Amazon User

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.

One of the better looking !!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: January 18, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game shows some brilliant visuals just because of its advancement in graphics technology, but its somewhat shameful that it couldn`t deliver graphics that could beat the less advanced Playstation2.
The smoke and dust effects aren`t upto mark, not even equal to Ps2`s Gran Turismo 3 which isn`t at all a full pledged Rally game.
I give it 4 stars because of the vertex and pixel shading utilisation to a large extent.

RalliSport is Superb

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: January 21, 2003
Author: Amazon User

The graphics are beautiful. You'll need a strong pc. With the microsoft usb force feed back wheel, this is the best driving game out there (nascar is boring). Get used to playing the AI. There are no game servers that support online play, at least none that I found. Not even microsofts gaming zone. Game does support IP to IP. IcQ me for a race 10814584

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