I felt like putting a sports car o̶n̶ ̶i̶t̶s̶ ̶r̶o̶o̶f̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶a̶ ̶d̶i̶t̶c̶h̶ through its paces on a windy backroad, so I dusted off an old favorite:
The attachment mobil1.png is no longer available
The attachment mobil2.jpg is no longer available
At first I installed it on my K6-2 500/Voodoo3, which was the system I used to play this game on back in the day. Unfortunately it didn't run very well (12-15 FPS), and I wanted a better experience, so I threw it on my Shuttle XPC (Athlon XP 1700+/S3 ProSavage8) instead, where it runs nice and smooth at 800x600x16.
I'd love to say this game holds up, and in most ways it does - the track & environment design is great, the music is still awesome, and while the graphics engine is very dated, they used it well. It still manages to look good and convey a pleasing sense of speed.
Unfortunately where it falls apart is the vehicle physics, especially car-environment collisions; the cars just don't behave how you'd expect and tend to bounce around like pinballs if you hit a bit of overly-angular terrain wrong.
On the plus side, it has my favorite feature in any racing game: unlock everything with a single cheat code. So if you dial back your expectations of realism a bit, it's still a good fun game to blast down insanely-tight Scottish backroads or rip along the Welsh seaside at 200km/h for a few hours.
The attachment mobil3.jpg is no longer available
This is making me think of picking up a more modern equivalent. I just noticed Dirt Rally is on massive sale and even has native ports for OS/X+Linux. Tempting...
twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!