Pre-owned Gaming:- SEGA Rally (Xbox 360)

Bit of nostalgia here for me, going back to the days where arcades in Britain meant something, and gamers were out spending their parents loose change for a quick gaming thrill, I certainly was no different. But now long since the days of crowded amusement arcades; our attentions are now turn to console, and those franchises that made a name for themselves have appeared over the years in many collective forms; but to see SEGA Rally on Xbox 360 took myself back to those golden days of yesteryear, and even though it had been released for a number of years, a £7.99 price tag was hard to resist.

My first thought was of hope the game would recapture that arcade experience, sadly it did not quite do it for me, but still great fun even if my taste for racers is as sour as a lemon tree. The game does indeed look pretty damn good, the cars are polished, the tracks are gorgeous, even the trails of mud which engulfs the tires and rear-end of the car has life like qualities, almost as if you could get dirty yourself from the mere sight of it without leaving the household. One thing that I did and continue to notice was the sheer difficulty I had of winning a race, the CPU is merciless with it's driving tactics, but rather than give up, I was determined not to be beaten and took to the race track once again, same result sadly mind you.

The handling of the vehicles are not half bad; mercilessly compared with other driving games I've experienced in the past, but it still wasn't enough to mask my below-par cornering skills, good thing damage isn't present here. Driving through natural obstacles such as mud and snow is such a joy, and seeing the stones from road surfaces propelled into your first-person perspective viewpoint is more rewarding than it sounds, your in the thick of it, your not far behind first place. With that mixture; and the usual road surfaces to contend with, it offers different variations and experiences from the races, good thing your co-driver is with you every step of the way guiding yourself round them then. It is a shame however that even though there is indeed more than one track for each scenario, the variety in this case is a little repetitive and unvaried, but a race is a race and there are rally cars to be unlocked, so we grin and bare it.

Speaking of which, their seems to be many different cars and challenges to unlock that need certain amount of points; these points come from your earlier tallies, so you may need to go back again and take on those pesky CPU's in familiar circumstances until the total is met by the games demands. It adds to the games length; their will be no hand-outs here just because you did your best, work hard and you will reap the rewards in no time.

A particular feature in any software that I personally look into is the soundtrack; and if I recall the theme from the arcade version, I was hooked permanently to the SEGA Rally machine in an instant; it isn't present here on home systems mind you, but I guess that's what makes arcades so unique. The music might be basic and certainly won't ever make an all time top ten, but it does it's job to get players pumped and heavily into the driving experience.

All in all I believe that SEGA did a good job in re-establishing the franchise into the current crop of gaming systems, though it certainly won't blow the human mind, and if I had to choose one element of the game that impressed me the most, it would have to be the tracks features, theirs nothing better than getting your car just that extra bit dirty for the sake of the means to stealing that first place from your closest rival in the final lap, certainly one of my best recent buys from the pre-owned section.