For fans of Segas flagship racing series, the following sentence will come as a big relief. The new Sega Rally game feels like a Sega Rally game. We know because weve played it for hours, racing on four different tracks at Sega Racing Studio in Birmingham on both PS3 and Xbox 360.
If we sound surprised, or at least relieved, its because up until now we had only been shown what was basically a tech demo of six cars racing around a pretty, but featureless track. It looked alright, but not
Dont get us wrong; we love MotorStorm. But underneath its glossy canyons and impressive mud physics lies a one-track mind (har har). Those looking for a little more depth in their racer need wait until September when Sega Rally Revo will be unleashed to the masses. How does it stack up? Read on, gearheads.
Attack deformation
The first lap through a course is the easiest. You're presented with flawless, untouched mud and slide across it with relative ease. But then it's time for the second lap.
Not everything gets better with age. Take, for example, that one friend who still somehow thinks its hilarious to drop Napoleon Dynamite quotes in everyday conversation. That fondness for mindless repetition means he's probably going to suck at Sega Rally Revo, a racing game where a path through a particular turn that works great at the beginning of a race could easily spell your undoing by the final lap.
This is all thanks to the games most interesting feature: Fully deformable tracks. As
MotorStorm had mud. Lots of it. Mud that squelched when you drove on it and glistened in the sun when you scrubbed away its dry top layer. Well, Sega Rally can beat that. The Sega Rally we saw running on Xbox 360 in London recently has real mud in it. It isn't just a graphical trick - the new Sega Rally streams mud directly off the disc and fills your TV up with it. It's Liquid Crystal Dirt and you'll be seeing a lot more of this technology as Sega licenses it to other developers in the near
Saturday 13 May 2006
Sega Rally's arcade dirt-racing action has always been one of Sega's strongest franchises, and now it's heading to the land of next-gen technology. We caught up with Sega for a backstage showcase of the game's incredible track-deforming features.
There's no next-gen horsepower spared here. We saw how the tyres on your car are modelled right down to the grooves in the rubber, which, depending on the type of tyre you're using, will cut into the track in a different way. And
