Richard Burns Rally

[HappyFamilyGaiden]

Did no one find the overbearing tutorial (forced) ultra-****? A problem compounded by some of the longest load times ever. I was playing this last night - I had that 'Stuntman' just sitting about waiting for a mission to reload feeling...
(PS2 version)

Stefan.

[MonkeyWrench]

Not really, it taught me how to handle the car properly, which in turn increased my enjoyment of the game two fold. Though I agree the loading was a pain.

[jimtendo]

Just a little update on my 'multiple dirty disk error' i'm having on the xbox version...

When i'm in 2nd or 3rd (any position that isn't 1st) by the end of SS4 on USA the game loads up SS5 & SS6 - i've tried this twice, by racing a bit pap.

Though when i'm in 1st position on the leaderboard by the end of SS4 and when it tries to load SS5 it gives me yet another 'dirty disk error'

That's 4 times now, where i'm leading the rally for it to 'dirty disk' error on me when loading SS5... somehow i don't think that's a coincidence ?_?

[Commander Marklar]

isolated to one make of drive, or have you all got samsungs? i found the thompson i had constantly used to **** up with region free titles. related? hello?

[HappyFamilyGaiden]

I retract my complaining. RBR asks some very important questions about modern gaming. It is ****ing well ahrd though... :-)

[sharky_ob]

Unlockables

Has anyone managed to unlock all the cars on this yet? I'm still missing 2 but I've won all the rallies at least once and the championships except for the hardest difficulty. Am I doing something wrong?

[Dragon2k4]

Have you passed all the advanced techniques in rally school mode? That gives u bonus car plus doing the hardest diffulty and you've got them all eh?

[sharky_ob]

Thanks for the response

I've passed them all, but I've not got perfect for the last one - the full stage. Do you have to get perfect?

I think that the cars I'm missing are the Imprezza 2000 and the MG ZR (this is mentioned in the credits so I assume this is the bonus car)

[Dragon2k4]

Yep has to be perfect! Good luck

[HappyFamilyGaiden]

Hey there. As we await our review section to come alive, here's our (rough and pre-final) thoughts on the PS2 version of the game. Let me know what you think, or if we've missed anything glaring. :-)

Richard Burns Rally - PS2

As your granny will have said before she died, ?Be careful ? you might just get what you wish for.? But as her bones rot away and get eaten by worms, it will be her enjoying the last laugh as you power up your PlayStation 2 and bung in a copy of Richard Burns Rally to while away a few hours.

As ardent rally fans, getting hold of the latest rally game is always a strange experience. From the sublime heights of the better Colin McRae games to the dire offerings in the WRC series, a sense of trepidation goes hand in hand with the anticipation associated with any new game. So what happens when you boot up Richard Burns?

We read a quote recently that was throw away in the extreme, which claimed that RBR is the rally equivalent to Sega?s Ferrari F355 Challenge. This is simply a truism ? with both games asking the same very important questions about you ? as the gamer and what hardcore simulations mean to the games industry in the wider sense.

RBR enforces the completion of its training mode, which, as regular dedicated gamers, we found slightly insulting. And for no other reason that we are smart-arsed punks who believe that whatever a game can throw at us, especially if it springs from a genre in which we feel comfortable, we can take in our stride during in-game play. The training mode, though comprehensive, useful and enjoyable, is dogged by slow load times and a rather poor interface and in all fairness, doesn?t do a great job of explaining how one must approach the game to achieve success. This is something that must be learned in-game and in-depth.

As you await the commencement of the first true rally stage, picking from one of three available licensed rally cars, it?s almost impossible to avoid a feeling of ego-driven determination. You?ll show this game! Sim? You?ve played loads of them ? a Gran Turismo expert ? even played a little Live for Speed. It stands for nothing.

You set off, you keep your speed down, you break early and you keep the car travelling forwards, avoiding sideways action as much as possible. And along you pootle, you reach the end of the stage, you scrape on to the leaderboard in tenth place and feel very much underwhelmed. And so on to the next stage. This time, you decide to put your thumb down and to begin with, all goes well. You fly along the straight and through the first mild corned with ease. Then, it?s time to brake. So you begin breaking, begin easing the car sideways, in order to catch the corner pre-apex, apply the power and take full advantage of the simulated four-wheel drive. And it all goes disastrously wrong. You see almost no reduction in speed, your wheels lock up like a 1989 Vauxhall Nova and you slam into trackside obstacles with massive force. A rethink is definitely required. You slow down again, get round a few corners in a rather scrappy way and try to fend of a bubbling feeling of frustration.

The game makes full use of the analogue buttons of the DualShock 2 though it feels more to trick you than help you. Rather than buffering the acceleration and braking as popularised in a million other games, this just lets you have the full whack on demand, a feature that does nothing other than to make you wheel spin and travel sideways, or lock your wheels and travel sideways, depending on whether you?re braking or accelerating. And it becomes rather annoying.

And this asks a very important question of you as the gamer: Are you willing to accept such a level of enforced discipline in your modern games? Richard Burns Rally will punish you every time you push your luck. At high speed, the car becomes unstable, to the point of being totally uncontrollable. A bump in the road at anything over 90 MPH results in the car swaying off to one side ? the correcting of which, even with the deftest of touches, becomes a fishtail episode that results in a major crash ? robbing the player of that excitement of the feeling of speed.

And it was this we found so hard to get to grips with. The whole point of rallying is to hammer a car at high speed along a road or other course. We are quite prepared (and conditioned) to the simple fact that speed must be sacrificed for cornering often in a driving game, though RBR fails to manage this balance, with relative success only on offer, in the early stages at least, to those willing to drive slowly.

The game places a heavy emphasis on certain techniques such as left-foot braking and handbrake turns ? it tries to make you love the drift ? the sideways slide for which rallying is famed across the world. Though Warthog has made the tracks, in the main, barely wider than the cars. Say on average, the track is 30% wider than the car. So when the car powerslides and is at a diagonal to the track, it spans it entirely, from one corner to the other. The result is that the margin for error is miniscule. If one wheel runs off course, it is snagged by a ditch on the inside, catapulting you up the embankment, or clips a tree stump or rock, resulting in impact and spin ? again posing the question of whether or not you are prepared to accept such rigid discipline in a videogame?

Completing three or four rallies over the course of the game does not deliver a feeling of achievement akin to that enjoyed by players of Codemasters? equivalent ? simply because the completion of a rally, scraping through, can only be achieved by sacrificing speed and all but the slightest of powerslides. And therefore at the expense of any fun that may have been on offer. We would challenge Warthog to counter the argument that RBR would have been greatly improved, revolutionised almost, if the team has made the tracks significantly wider. This would have balanced the overbearing rigidity of handling the car with a margin for error and, more importantly, enjoyment.

Another bafflingly over the top aspect is the interface on offer to adjust the handling of your car. It is absolute rubbish ? self-servingly complex and seemingly designed to make the user uncomfortable. You see, the majority of the modification to the set-up of the car is carried out by manipulating the differentials on the front and rear drive train. You are given a flat page of numbers that you can adjust, with no real indicator as to what may be achieved by your tinkering and it simply doesn?t work. Either the game was rushed towards the end (a piece of speculation strengthened by the various bugs found in the final released code) or a simple error of judgement was made.

So with the whinging out of the way, what do we have left to say? In our opinion, the PlayStation 2 version looks great, belying early criticism of the game from some quarters. Although much of the environment is hashed, it holds together really rather well, with a lot of cool incidental stuff, such as spectators, marshals and suicidal animals dotting the scenery ? all pulling together to make for a game on which the development team clearly took pains to deliver to as high a standard as possible.

Richard Burns Rally is an amazing achievement. For a sim of this rigidity to come to market is astounding and represents a massive risk for publisher SCi. Although somewhat tragically, it has delivered way beyond expectations, sacrificing the fun of a sim/arcade racer crossbreed for a level of discipline accessible only to the most dedicated of hardcore gamers.


Cheers,

Stefan

http://spong.com

[sharky_ob]

Hello

I'd just like to say I thought the review was fairly harsh. After having the x-box version for the last few weeks, I've started to really enjoy the game. I've worked out that bumper cam is best, as you don't get the framerate issues, and the sense of speed is great. Maybe the x-box triggers give you more subtle control over throttle/brake, but I'm surprised you're using analogue buttons - can you use the right thumbstick instead? his would give you much more control.

I do consider myself fairly good at rally games, whatever that stands for, and I can throw the car around on RBR and get good times. Guess I've just got the skills to pay the bills, buddy.

I wonder if anyone will agree with me.....

Shark

[Dragon2k4]

Here! here! Yeah, the review was pretty spot on - the Xbox analog triggers definitely gives you much precise control on the revs/brakes.

Shark, have you got all the bonus cars up now then?

[MonkeyWrench]

Not to throw the thread of the rails to much but, "dire offerings in the WRC series"?!Being a huge rallying fan I'd say WRC3 is far superior than anything Codemasters has offered us.

Now if only we could get the visuals from RSC2 teamed up with the stages from WRC3 and the handling and physics from RBR I'd be one happy camper

[sharky_ob]

Dragon

I've got them all except the last one (the MG?) I've done all the lessons up to perfect now, but I haven't won the championship on hardest yet. The Subaru '00 is a bit of a shed!

A general point:-

I think that having a chamionship the length of WRC's in RBR would be amazing. The driver AI (if that's the correct term) in RBR seems really good, but the championship is so short there's no time for any real drama to develop. I still think CMR2 is a class rally game, and the 8 rounds felt about right. I suppose the fact that there were 10 stages in each on expert mode helped too.

By the way, why is it always so easy to win the snow events in rally games? I always get the feeling that developers think you should drive slower than you actually can, and make the AI drivers too slow. Finland is easy to win on RBR, even on expert mode.

[jimtendo]

Do a Richard Burns challenge and complete it...
That's what my bro did toy get the MG.

I think.