Game Media

By Brad Cook

Your Peugeot 206 slides on the gravel as you navigate a tricky right turn. You struggle to keep it from slipping off the side of the road as your co-driver calls out: “Six left 30 into two right care.” Knowing you have an easy left turn ahead of you, followed by another difficult right turn, you stomp on the accelerator, pushing the four-wheel drive car hard through the first, reaching 85 miles per hour in the process, and then slowing down dramatically to take the next one.

Colin McRae Rally Mac

Unfortunately, a brick wall along the outside edge of the second turn scrapes the left side of your car. Your damage indicator barely registers the incident and you press on, determined to make up that precious half a second lost in the process. You skid the Peugeot to a stop at the end of the stage, stopping for the first time to admire the scenery. Lush stands of pine trees populate the nearby mountainside. Overhead, a cloudy sky threatens to rain on the proceedings.

You sigh, unhappy with your overall time, despite cheers from the nearby crowd. There’s little opportunity to dwell on past mistakes, however, because you must repair some slight damage to your car and move on to the next stage of the rally. There’s little rest for those in search of a championship.

Around the World in 300 Stages

Colin McRae Rally Mac places you in the thick of rally racing, a sport that throws some of the toughest terrain in the world at you. Broken into stages, each rally takes you from gravel and dirt roads onto blacktop and back again; winding its way across bridges, through tunnels, over jumps, and along the edges of precipitous mountain passes. You could find yourself driving through rain or snow, adding to the peril.

The competitions also bring you to nine countries: the United States, Japan, Sweden, Australia, Finland, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Greece. Little touches in each abound, from realistic scenery and signs in native languages to the rustic farms and quaint downtown areas you’ll pass along the way. You might even notice a sign that says “Bigfoot Xing” in one of the U.S. stages.

Colin McRae Rally features 300 stages of competition, with more than 20 different classes of rally events, including Challenges, Cups, SuperCups, Shields, and Championships. You start the action with many of the stages off-limits, along with most of the 34 cars found in the game, but you can unlock everything by progressing through career mode, which starts you on the bottom rung of the rally circuit and challenges you to work your way to the top, where you’ll face off against Colin himself.

If you’d rather be Colin, enter championship mode. Or, if you want to practice any of the stages or complete rallies, select the challenge area. The game also features racing against up to eight human opponents over a LAN or via the Mac-only Internet service, GameRanger.

The Keys to Your Rally Success

No matter how you play the game, you have access to many options that enhance the experience, such as different weather patterns and times of day. A realistic damage model reveals each ding and scratch endured during the race — slam into obstacles too hard and you’ll see serious physical problems, such as cracked windows, bent hoods, and missing bumpers. A word of caution: black smoke pouring from the engine is a bad sign.

You can always start over with a fresh car in challenge mode, but during the real competitions, you’ll need to repair the vehicle between rally stages. Each fix takes a certain amount of time, and if you go over sixty minutes, you’ll get hit with a penalty during the next stage. You can also upgrade your car with enhanced features, such as ceramic brakes, and configure its tires, steering, gearbox, and other setup options to accommodate the terrain found in the upcoming stage.

And that co-driver we mentioned in the beginning? His cryptic statements are actually the key to your success. He tells you how difficult each upcoming turn is, on a scale between two and six (six is the easiest), along with the distance in meters until the next one. He also points out jumps, gates, and bridges, corners that tighten on exit or that you shouldn’t cut across, and other hazards.

Consider him like a starting pitcher would view a catcher: Pay attention to what he tells you and you’ll excel. You might even win the rally racing equivalent of the World Series.

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Front of Mitsubishi.

On Your Mark, Get Set… A racer and his co-driver get ready to compete.

VW Polo in the dirt.

It’s a Little Dusty Out Here. Trying to negotiate a curve.

Mitsubishi cockpit.

The View From Inside. A driver’s perspective on the action.

VW Polo profile.

Choose Your Vehicle. Check out each car’s specs before you make your decision.

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The Rally’s the Thing

Rally cars.

Long before NASCAR and its pristine circular tracks, rally racing challenged drivers with all kinds of rugged terrain and difficult environmental conditions. While the term “rally” didn’t find its way into common racing usage until the late 1920s, the first such event happened in 1894, when the Paris-Rouen Horseless Carriage Competition was held. January 1911 saw the inauguration of the Monte Carlo Rally, the first time the word “rally” was used.

The sport grew from there, eventually culminating in the 1973 creation of the World Rally Championship (WRC), a rally series governed by the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA), which was formed in 1904. (FIA organizes many racing events, including Formula One.) It features 16 rallies that take place around the world over the course of the year, with the champion crowned at the end.

As in NASCAR, WRC drivers earn points that depend on their final standing in each rally. The drivers don’t race simultaneously, so the one with the lowest cumulative time for a rally earns the most points, with the others ranked below him. The driver who finishes the year with the highest overall point total is the grand champion.

Colin McRae, who was the son of a five-time British Rally Champion, entered his first WRC event in 1987, winning his first rally in 1993 before earning his only championship in 1995. He was the overall runner-up in 1996, 1997, and 2001, with a third-place finish in 1998. He had 25 WRC rally victories to his credit, along with 477 WRC stage wins, two British Rally Championships, and one Scottish Rally Championship.

McRae passed away on Sept. 16, 2007 in a helicopter crash that also claimed the life of his son, Johnny, who was six, and two family friends, Ben Porcelli (also six) and Graeme Duncan (37). He was 39 years old.

 
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