Rally Challenge 2000

"RALLY CHALLENGE 2000 takes you on a scorching tour around the world. Get behind the wheel of one of nine authentic WRC cars, each with its own unique settings for speed, torque and steering. Experience road rage of global proportions."

A fairly short rally game with only 9 tracks. It doesnt play like your traditional rally game and is more arcady similar to the Sega Rally games. The game is very challenging with some maddening times to beat. The car you choose will make or break you depending on your driving style. In Championship mode you race through all nine tracks and gain points at the end depending on where you place. You need to end on the most points to win the championship. There are only a few seconds of separation between each car so you have to be putting up really good times to stand a chance. To give the impression of fairness, the finishing order does at least change between races.

It's not all about racing well though. each race lasts for three laps and your car is degrading the entire time. Even if you don't hit anything, your tires are likely shredded by the third lap vastly reducing your finishing time. You can of course choose between soft/grippy and hard/slipey tires which can help with particular tracks. Again car choice is hugely important as there are cars that favour grip and other that are more slidey. A gripey car that loses its tires by lap three ends up being pretty useless though.

After completing championship I move onto Arcade mode. In this mode you play a series of three races in each of the three difficulties. each race last only a single lap and you need to pass three cars in the first two races to stand a chance of winning in the third. Afterwards I show the same again in Mirror Mode. Nothing is awarded for finishing this mode. Again car choice is important. Whilst you don't need to worry about damage anymore, you do need speed and control. That rules out the grippier cars as they are quite slow overall. If I haven't shown a car it is because I couldn't find a way to win with them in any mode using Automatic gears.

The game doesnt look to bad on the N64 with plenty of blurring to hide any dithering artifacts. One thing that stands right out though is the mirror like reflections on the car windows. probably some technical wizardry went in to that effect. At the end of each race a replay is started. I only show these in Rally mode, but in hindsight it was probably not the best place as I ended up with dark night tracks most of the time. By default these have motion blur enabled and there are a couple of different modes I show later. I don't show any replays in arcade mode. Overall it is not a bad arcade rally game but having to mess with each car to find what works can be frustrating. The Seat Cordoba and Toyota Corolla seem to be the best cars, fast and controllable with quick recovery from slides and the Proton could be the best overall. The worst ones to avoid are Nissan Almera and Hyundai Coupe as they are just to slow to accelerate out of slow corners.

00:00:00 Intro
00:00:50 Rally Championship - Australia
00:06:45 Rally Championship - Spain
00:13:22 Rally Championship - Brazil
00:19:28 Rally Championship - USA
00:26:45 Rally Championship - Italy
00:32:56 Rally Championship - Germany
00:38:24 Rally Championship - Canada
00:45:00 Rally Championship - Great Britain
00:50:32 Rally Championship - France
00:56:26 Credits
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00:58:40 Arcade Mode - Easy
01:06:22 Arcade Mode - Medium
01:14:12 Arcade Mode - Expert
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01:22:40 Arcade Mode - Easy (Mirror)
01:30:18 Arcade Mode - Medium (Mirror)
01:38:02 Arcade Mode - Expert (Mirror)