Christmas Retrospective 1999: V-Rally

By this time I already had a solid list of games for my N64. I really wanted nothing this year honestly because there wasn’t much I didn’t already have for my console, the nightmare began as I woke up. I went downstairs and was directed to the gifts around the tree, well. Judging by what I got it would appear as if our cat had missed his toilet and crapped out a massive N64 cart known as V-Rally 99 Edition.

Gameplay

At that time I was a PS1 owner, so I had played other V-Rally titles and been quite happy with them, but this is like no other V-Rally game.
As soon as you start something feels wrong with the controls. If you use the center analog stick your car moves like it’s on ice, if you use the D-PAD your car moves like it’s got the whole of time and space in the steering column. It’s truly one of the worst experiences of gameplay I have seen in a long time. It still ranks up there today.

The walls seem to have a gravitating pull to your car. Why? I don’t know, maybe they are magnetic. Almost whenever you hit something you are greeted by an eternity of spinning around or even sometimes you get a gravitation pull towards the sky. I’m not kidding. You start floating from time to time.

The worst part is the sound, while some of the sound effects are good which I’ll get to later, what kind of car makes no sound when it hits something? So the entities around you known as walls and other objects are made out of play-doh apparently and it’s okay because your car is too. It wont make any noticeable sound if you smash it up.

Graphics

I know the N64 didn’t have the best graphical games out there. Pop-in is a huge issue when it’s jarring to the point where your seeing things that aren’t even there. Giving you false indication of upcoming turns/corners or bends you have to navigate around and you end up thinking to yourself ‘What? That wasn’t there a few seconds ago’.
Really it’s a poor excuse for an effort on a console that didn’t have the best record when it came to graphical glitches but when stuff like F-Zero X ran at a solid 60 frames per second with no graphical issues there is no excuse for the game to be this bad. Beetle Adventure Racing had pop-in issues, but it never made you think there was more or less around the corners than there actually was.

Sound

The game only has music on the start up screen, it would have been nice to have music in the game while driving as an option, but I’ll let that one slide. The engines sound pretty good for the time, however it all comes back down to that issue of no sound when impact is made, what were they thinking?

Final Verdict

In an era filled with pretty bad racing games a few stand out as good while this one stands out as total garbage. When a game can make you feel like you wish you were playing Big Rigs you know you are playing a lost cause, I mean sure. Big Rigs basically has no opponents and you can glitch through the geometry at will but at least it’s somewhat playable unlike this broken pile of garbage. I’d rather play Carmageddon 64. No scratch that, I’d rather play Superman 64. At least both of those poor games actually function in some way or another while V-Rally 99 Edition is a dis-functional mess. I should think back to those days. But I’ve done that and this game wasn’t even acceptable then and would probably have been met with anything below 60%. Since I’m not in 1999 anymore and I have to make sure not to mislead anyone into ever buying this game, the score below is what I must give it and I may even actually be a bit generous.

You should certainly not buy Big Rigs, Superman 64 or Carmageddon 64 either. You should probably check out F-Zero X or Beetle Adventure Racing though for N64 racers that are not the usual Mario Kart or Diddy Kong Racing which are both awesome but everyone has them right?

Check the two videos out for this months christmas retrospective reviews, if they don’t work you can use the links provided to just take a look at how bad or good the games did and still do look today.

V-Rally 99 Edition:

007 All or Nothing:

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