Sega Rally Championship Demo

The Sega Rally series is quite old and diverse, since it has been around for a few decades now. Although not all of them managed to impress the public, one or two releases brought the racing genre closer to what it is today, by integrating new mechanics and developing groundbreaking ideas that are still used in video games, albeit in a more modern package.

Sega Rally Championship made its name known on consoles and it was ported to PC a few years after that, but the underlying concept remained the same and you can definitely see that it was one class above almost everything else available at that time. Despite the simple visual appearance, you can feel that the racing itself feels like it should and that the cars actually have to struggle in order to navigate the tracks.

There are multiple game modes to choose from in the beginning, depending on how much time you want to dedicate to it. Hence, a quick time trial should be enough if you only want a short burst of adrenaline, while the World Championship is the appropriate choice to make if time is not an issue. The latter is composed out of three stages, namely forest, mountain and desert, each one of which features different tracks.

For the first time ever, the cars react differently depending on the surface on which they have to race, which means that you are more liable to slip and spin out on gravel than you are on tarmac. This feature may not seem like a lot nowadays, but back then it was quite the revolution when it came to the racing genre. Thus, the developers were able to take full advantage of the different types of environments.

A lot of care went into the visual chapter as well, even if it may not appear so. The blocky landscapes hold a lot of detail and the tracks themselves are full of interesting scenery and objects that bring the view to life. The cars do not have any kind of reflection, nor do they appear to be modeled out of more than ten polygons, but they get the point across and the 3D technology was still new at the time.

In case you are curious how far the racing genre has come in the last two decades, you can give Sega Rally Championship a try and see for yourself. Hopefully, you’ll be able to appreciate the game for what it is and ignore the lack of flashy graphics. Unfortunately, one of the drawbacks of the PC version is the control scheme, which might pose some difficulties in the beginning.