Mobil 1 Rally Championship

[Tomáš]

Genre: Racing

Year released: 1999

Ross's rating: Unrated

Link to game: https://abandonwaregames.net/game/mobil-1-rally-championship

Free to play: No

GaaS: No

This is a blog post. To read the original post, please click here »

[Sickle]

Was not expecting this one to appear here! This is a blast from the past for me, played it a lot on my dad's win98.

 

If Ross likes to explore I think he's going to find this one at least a little interesting.

The game's environments always gave me kind of an eerie vibe, similar to how Ross described the maps in Polaris Snocross, but this game is far more generous in letting you off the track. I remember many times I ignored the race in favor of driving into small villages, barns, woodcutting areas, etc. The eerie atmosphere is accentuated during nighttime when you can barely see anything without the car lights.

Also remember playing this in splitscreen with a friend in the same keyboard, those were the days.

 

Can't believe I completely forgot about this game, didn't even knew it was abadonware .

[CrowIsTaken]

Great game, I played it a lot as a kid. I loved how long some stages were and different weather conditions. You definitely need to use dgVoodoo to make it run properly and also don't forget to cap it at 60 fps, otherwise it will crash randomly.

[Trar]

My mind wandered back to this game and now I'm going to try it out. I like rally racers and I kept thinking of that screenshot, plus the reviews saying the stages were not only long, but based off real geographic surveys. I've heard a couple people say this is almost the equal of Richard Burns and Colin McRae Rally, the two big names of classic rally games.

[MrSandvich]

Crossposting my previous recommendation of this game for Ross to review on RGD. I L-O-V-E this game!!

Quote

Hi Ross! I'd like to recommend Mobil 1 Rally Championship. If you sucessfully activated your powers of deduction, you'll find this is a racing game, featuring immense rally stages. It was the last game developed by Magnetic Fields, and released in 1999. The main attraction of the game are the super-long stages, created using real-life data from maps from the Ordnance Survey, a mapping agency for Britain and Ireland. They feel like a journey.

 

Looking back on it, the physics are nothing special, with sound design being quite poor in fact, however it's a game I thought you'd like due to the sheer immensity of the setting. IIRC there's a stage lasting for over 30 minutes (racing pace), with most of them averaging 10 minutes I'd say. IMO it was the best rally game until Richard Burns Rally released in 2004.

 

EDIT: I took screenshots of all the stage description screens in the game: https://imgur.com/a/h1bRD8a

Adding up, the game has 652km across all its stages, and 18km averaged on its 36 stages! For 1999, this was a proper achievement. It still is! And they received great reviews too, mostly nines across the board.

EDIT: I've recently replayed the game, so I'm gonna leave a few tips here:

Spoiler

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Mobil_1_Rally_Championship is a great source of info;

 

The games runs well on Windows 10, however the audio may glitch with multicore CPUs. Set affinity to one core only, via the Task Manager (Details -> Ral.exe -> Set affinity);

 

Widescreen resolutions are not supported, but they may be hacked with hex editors;

 

The game has three single-player modes: single race, championship and arcade. In single race you choose a car and stage, and race there; championship mode takes you through all the stages and all the rallies, where you compete against the AI's simulated time, and avoid crashing out of the rallies; and arcade mode is championship mode simplified, you race against the AI (this time they're physically there) whilst starting in last place.

 

Championship mode is the game's main mode. You choose a car and class and compete amongst them through the 6 rallies, with 6 stages each. Damage is on, so crashing or driving roughly will worsen your car's performance, and put you at risk of retiring from the rally. You may only fix, modify your car's setup, and save the game on the service areas, which are spaced out differently on each rally. Points are awarded at the end of the rally, to determine the season's champion.

 

The game is officially licensed for the A7, A6 and A5 classes of the British Rally Championship, but a fictional A8 class based on WRC cars is also available after you win the championship mode. Afterwards you may replay the championship mode with the A8 class, however, it's much tougher! The cars are really fast, and critically, in this mode only, after the end of a rally your damage ISN'T fixed, thus making reliability an absolute freakin' nightmare. Make sure to keep several different saves for this mode, and good luck!

 

Edited January 23, 2020 by MrSandvich
new tips (see edit history)

[findingfrenzy]

I'm loving the scenery, and the constant variety of the gravel Welsh roads. The engine audio is quite buggy for me, so I'm playing muted while listening to podcasts (controlling with keyboard or game pad). I'll look out for a steering wheel at the thrift store for this one.

[MrSandvich]

On 2/15/2020 at 8:45 PM, findingfrenzy said:

I'm loving the scenery, and the constant variety of the gravel Welsh roads. The engine audio is quite buggy for me, so I'm playing muted while listening to podcasts (controlling with keyboard or game pad). I'll look out for a steering wheel at the thrift store for this one.

There's a fix for that, you gotta set the CPU affinity in Task Manager to one thread only.

 

(More Bugfixes)

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Mobil_1_Rally_Championship