Colin McRae Rally
Genre: Racing
ESRB Rating: E for Everyone
Developer: Codemasters
Platforms: Mac OS X, Windows PC
Price: $39.99; Release Date: Nov 7, 2007

I have to admit right-off that I don’t consider myself a gamer. I don’t have any game consoles, in fact the last one I had was a Sega Genesis! lol! I play solely on my Macintosh G5.

I only play a handful of games and three of those are driving games. I like driving games. Also I’m playing on a keyboard, not a wheel. Of those three games only one has the look and feel that keeps me interested for more than 10 minutes and that’s Colin McRae Rally.

This is one fun game! There’s not a large learning curve involved, just a couple minutes to get a feel for the cars and tracks and then you’re off.

If you’re anything like me you’ll end up with a favorite car setup and stick with it. I like the Peugeot 4wd. For me I feel that it sticks to the road best and is the most responsive in steering and acceleration, but I digress.

Until you get a feel for the car and the particular track you’ve picked you’ll probably spend much of your time running into trees and driving off into fields, but stick with it, before very long you’ll be burning up the tracks!

All of the cars and tracks have their own characteristics as far as speed, handling, acceleration, and breaking, which for me is a pleasant surprise and something of a clean break with the previous driving games for Mac that I’ve tried which have a very similar if not exact same feel no matter what car or track you pick (Ford Racing 2 comes to mind).

There are only a couple modes of play here. There is a “Rally” mode where you will race through a succession of courses in a given region. Then there’s “Stages” where you will go through one chosen course to see if you could beat your own (or other’s) times. And finally there’s “Championship.” I haven’t spent very much time at this last one. The reason being is you have to use a series of cars that are assigned to you and there’s no choice as to what you get. For my own liking and reasons for playing a computer game I don’t think I’ll be exploring this last one too deeply. Like I said before, I get bored pretty fast and I’m not in it for the challenge, just a 15 or 20 minute pass-time. But for the competitive gamer I can see this last stage probably being the most fun.

The one thing that I’d most like to see is a “free-roam” mode like in my old fave 4×4 Evolution 2. If you ever wander off of the main roads in Colin McRae Rally the game fades to white for a moment and then returns you back to the road a second later.

There is another point where I was a little let down.

Depending on where you look the spec requirements are slightly different. While this is not a problem for my G5 that runs Colin McRae Rally very comfortably, I was just as interested in running the game on my pre-Intel Mac Mini. It is supposed to run on that machine but some strangeness happens when I launch it. Upon launch it informs me that it’s running on an older machine and that the appearance of the game needs to be turned down a bit. No problem, I was fully expecting this. But a few seconds later it says the “the game will not run on this system” and then quits. I was a little let down by this as I was looking forward to hosting a game and racing head-to-head with a friend. Oh well!

Which brings me to online racing with Colin McRae Rally. I wasn’t at all impressed with the online experience. It took me a few tries to even find an online game being hosted and then once I joined it seems I was just racing against the other players time, not the actual players. I understand why this is the case. There would have to be an incredible amount of data in the form of graphics being thrown around across the internet coming from players with various computer and connection speeds. That being said I’d rather play against the computer or my own previous time-records.

Conclusion:

All-in-all, a great game! I recommend it. I believe it comes in some form on all platforms…I mean let’s be honest, if it’s on Mac it probably trickled-down from everywhere else first! LOL!

Anyway…

Happy Holidays!!!