blighttown

Basement N64: Top Gear Rally

This was an early N64 title that was not really that well received or that well remembered. It's a rally-styled racing game, and I never really played it when I was a kid. As an adult I've come to love it.

I think there are different kinds of nostalgia. I don't have any nostalgia for this game in particular, but I do have nostalgia for this sort of game:

That might not sound very fun, but I love it. It's also got an excellent soundtrack. Much like the game, the soundtrack's quality won't jump out and grab you. Buy as you're flying through turns it gets in your head.

So, why do I like this game so much? For an early N64 game, the racing physics are actually pretty advanced. Your car has suspension physics, as you bounce around turns you can feel your steering, braking, and sliding all affected by whether or not your car is mid-bounce. The driving itself is very fast-paced, almost to the point of being twitchy. It starts out quite slow, but as you progress through the championships, it feels really difficult to keep your car where you want it. Getting through one of the endgame races without bouncing off the walls is genuinely difficult. When you get it right, there's this amazing sense of speed and momentum.

This is also where the game is flawed. The game is probably most fun in the first 1-3 championship events. The later your get in the championships, the more the weather events are introduced. For instance you might play "Jungle" (yes, the course is just called Jungle because that's what it is) in sunny weather, but later you'll play it in rain, fog, nighttime, and snow. All of these weather effects really just map to differences in your vehicle's traction and your draw distance. Nighttime is just N64 fog colored black, and you can't see as far ahead of you. Just like real nighttime! But, it's basically never fun driving on the snow. The rain courses aren't as bad, but they're never as fun as the courses with normal traction. And, the graphics are so painfully blurry that the night and fog modes make it legitimately difficult to see where you're going.

As you get faster cars, the "slide-iness" and "floatiness" of the physics engine rears its ugly head too. You stay in the air preternaturally long, and your car just tilts at whatever angle gravity decides. So often you're flying towards a cliffside while looking at the sky, unable to do anything. The extremely fun game in the first 1-3 championships becomes almost (but not quite) unplayable when driving the fastest cars in the worst weather. It's not difficult to beat the game, as the times you need to hit are relatively forgiving. But it is damn hard to stay on the track, and sliding from wall to wall is not really very fun. This isn't so bad if you just brake more aggressively, which is also how racing works in real life: braking may be more important than acceleration. But the driving is so arcadey that at the slower speeds you basically never need to brake. The faster cars require skill sets which are not necessary in the slow cars.

I know, this still doesn't sound fun. But I absolutely love racing around tracks in this game. They got the sense of momentum and risk so right, while fumbling so many other parts of the time. Of course it's also a game from a time where there was much more experimentation. You'd never get this game today. And its flaws are so apparent, that most gamers would never give it a shot. I don't blame them, but they're missing out all the same. If I had to give this game some sort of objective numeric rating I'd be forced to score it poorly. They got so much wrong. And it will never make a top 10 list. But honestly, for single player, I think this is in my top 5 favorite racers on the N64.