Be Excellent To Each Other

Hired this game out the other day and when working through career mode noticed a distinct lack of Beexers on the times lists. Quite a few have played a bit of it but hardly any seem to have got through to the later tiers of the career. Anyway it's absolutely excellent, I always really liked Rallisport Challenge 2 on the Xbox and this is has the same feeling of speed once you start getting to the faster races, unlimited class hill climbs are eye-bleedingly fast and smooth.

Anyway it's probably pretty cheap to buy and I can't believe I overlooked it for so long because it's become my favourite rally game ever, perfectly capturing the challenge of balancing risk with speed to get through with minimal damage. Shame about the lorry racing and the stupid American co-driver also loading times between stages are a bit of a drag but on the upside restarts are instantaneous.

It's good then? I really liked 2005, but the handling on DiRT's demo felt really arcadey and poo.

I'd agree with you on the Demo front. I was quite looking forward to it but then decided to go for Sega Rally instead; which is also pretty good. I just need to get better at driving and also spend some more time playing it.!

I'd call the handling forgiving rather than arcadey and poo. The cars feel weighty and react as you'd expect to the dips and crests rather than in an arbitrary fashion. I like Sega Rally but I much prefer this, Sega Rally was too much of a circuit racing game. You pretty much have to react to the corners as they appear rather than try and learn and get the perfect line round every single one. It also looks nice.

While the original Colin McRally was amazing, the sequel (despite looking better than many first-gen PS2 games) was utter cack. The handling was awful, the controls were dull, and like too many Codebastards games it locked almost everything from the start and insisted on nigh-on perfect performances in every single stage or it just wouldn't let you proceed with the championship.

After the shitefests that were World Touring Cars and Race Driver, I haven't gone back for fear of further examples of a good idea skanked up. The PC Gamer review didn't paint the rosiest picture, saying that in trying to be all things to all people, there was always at least one part of the game you'd absolutely hate which would in turn temper your love for the bit you enjoyed.

I think you'd probably enjoy this one. It's true that some of the races aren't as good as the actual rallying but they wouldn't ever really bar progress because the difficulty can be set separately for each event so you could just turn it down if one of them starts to become annoying. Though in practice I have found even the ones I'm not as keen on to still be just about fun enough that I haven't needed to.

I had some Colin McRae game on my playstation, played it rather a lot. I'll be looking out for this, cheers markg.