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An addictive game, with just a few laughable flaws

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 24 / 25
Date: June 09, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I love Rallisport Challenge, and just like the people I love, I've had to love it with all of its flaws. This game is a mix of majestic graphics, realistic off-road driving physics, and ridiculously exaggerated speed. Don't kid yourself: if at any time, you slow to below 90 mph (and that means sharp hair-pin turns), you'll finish last. This game actually made me a Rally fan, and you can imagine my shock when I watched a WRC rally on TV, only to see the pro's sliding through turns and taking jumps at 60 mph! That's right, Colin McRae, Marcus Gronholm, and Markko Martin couldn't win a single race in "Beginner" mode in this game! This makes me wonder if Rallisport Challenge wouldn've have been better named as "Rallisport Blitz," and released by Midway as part of their arcade sports lineup.
That said, Rallisport Challenge is quite addicting. I've spent four hours at a time on this game, and I was never a race fan before. Mastering the art of the powerslide through tight turns on perilous mountain roads is joyous. You'll have to figure out the technique on your own, however, as there's no hint in the game manual, or tutorial in the game. I fear too many people will give up on the game before their skill-level improves, and miss out on the fun. Speaking of fun, here are a few fun facts you'll learn from this game:
1. A rock the size of your fist can destroy a 500 hp, 1230 kg rally car.
2. Rally cars are filled with helium. Any bumps in the road, especially in turns, will, best case, render your car uncontrollable for a while as you wait for your tires to touch the ground again, or, worst case, send your car sailing off a cliff into the sunset with air traffic control clearance.
3. A 500 hp, 1230 kg rally car at 145 mph is no match for a flimsy wooden advertising billboard on the roadside. In fact, the car will do three or four backflips in the air if you hit one.
4. Your AI opponents will all finish to within a nanosecond of eachother. If you don't finish first, you'll finish last.
5. Your AI opponents will seem to get a 5-second head-start. I'm asking the FIA to check their cars for nitrous boosters. Could be quite the scandal.
6. A few levels have you racing head-to-head with three other cars. This is nothing more than a "crash-up derby." If you don't ram that stupid Saab off the road quickly, he'll do it to you every time you get a lead.
7. Your co-driver insists on reading off the turns several miles in advance. You'd better have a good memory, otherwise you'll be confused as you enter a left turn as he's yelling "hard right!" That "hard right" won't be for a few more miles. We're having him tested for stimulant use. We'll get back to you on that.
If you can view these game issues with a sense of humor, and be prepared to spend a little time learning to control the cars, you'll find yourself as addicted to this game as I am.
One last piece of advice: play responsibly - don't get behind the wheel for at least 30 minutes after playing Rallisport Challenge.

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.

I'm writing this breathless!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 9 / 10
Date: January 27, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Oh, man! I haven't had this much white-knuckle fun with a driving game in years! The last time I felt this way was when I first played "Need For Speed 3: Hot Pursuit". And while that game is a five-star game also, "RalliSport Challenge" is even better! But first, I must stress that your enjoyment factor will double if you have some kind of wheel-and-pedal setup. It's still a blast with just a joystick, but if you've been needing an excuse to invest in a good wheel-and-pedal setup, this is it! I'm using a 3-year-old USB Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback Wheel and Pedal setup along with Win98 1st Edition. It took me some tweaking around with my Windows settings to get my wheel working, and I'm still having some glitches (I'm thinking it may be conflicting with my USB mouse from time to time, but that's a far-fetched guess). But let me tell you; with forces turned on full, and the gorgeous scenery blurring past, and the car fishtailing around curves, it's just like driving a real car! I just finished a two-hour session, and my arms are shaking with exhaustion. For comparison purposes, I'm running a self-built Athlon 1.2 ghz. with 512 MB ram, a GeForce 4 ti4200 videocard with 128 MB ram, and I used the full (1.5 GB) install. With this system, which is over a year old now, I'm running this game at 1024 X 768 resolution with all details maxed, and it runs smooth as glass. I'm thinking of cranking the resolution up another notch. There are 48 courses, of which you have quite a few available right away, with others locked until you amass points in your career. The physics are kind of forgiving, but the other cars drive like demons and do not give you a break! The physics model feels quite realistic, and I cannot stress the sheer thrill of sliding around a curve with a cliff dropping away inches from one side. The course design is fantasic and varied, with all sorts of weather conditions, road types, and landscapes. I thought ice driving would be a drag, but that turned out to be some of the most fun, due to the way you can slide your car around the turns. Your tires spin, your traction varies depending on road surface, and you have a choice of 4wd drive cars, or rear or front wheel drive, and each can be tweaked with as you like. I'm planning on spending a huge amount of time with this, as there is a vast amount of varied gameplay here. You don't need a monster machine to run this, but I'm thinking a dedicated video card is a must. And a wheel would be nice too to get the most from your experience. Force feedback is not necessary though, however this is one of the few titles I've seen that does a nice job with the feedback effects. You will definitely get your money's worth with this title!

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.

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.

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.

Good Game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 5
Date: March 31, 2003
Author: Amazon User

As always Microsoft always come up with a good game. They most always throw in that little bit extra, which puts them at the top, or close to the top of game making. thank you.

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.

It should come with a WARNING

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 1 / 1
Date: March 13, 2003
Author: Amazon User

dangerous to your social and marital life. May take you away from every thing else :)
It's unbeleivably awsome. I have played many in that category, but this one beats them all hands down.
My only negatives are two:
1-once you commit to a race, you can't postpone it to finish later.
2-I consider my skills to be very high, yet I still can't get control of the more powerful nuscle cars in it. I win much more when I pick a smaller car. It's prcatically impossible to control the 600HP cars on curves and on ice, at least for me.
I use the MS sidewinder forcefeedback. P4 2.26 with 512RAM and 128Mb 4600TI video card, XP system. Flawless performance.

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