Active Reviews

Written by Ken Garland

Colin McRae, we all know him, we all love him. I’m speaking for the racing genre enthusiasts as a collective as hopefully with all the attention the series has gotten over the years you have all heard the name or tried the game. But like the good saying says, don’t assume anything. Let’s take a brief moment to run a background check on this guy in the gaming circuit. First off Colin is a top notch WRC (World Rally Championship) race driver, in 1998 he got his first video game on the PSX and PC titled Colin McRae Rally. It went up against some stiff competition that year since Gran Turismo was released on the PSX as well. Year 2000 we saw the premiere of Colin McRae 2.0 which was of course the latest edition to the series and saw many upgrades and fancy changes to the menu system. Colin McRae Rally 3 was released earlier in the year 2003 for XBOX and PS2 and is now pushing its way onto the PC gaming system. Up next we have Colin McRae Rally 04 which was shown to us at E3 this year and I will be writing a report on that right after I finish typing this one.

The preview copy we received was at an 80% complete status and was still missing much of the audio and track designs. The Championship circuit was not available but the first race in each Stage was which made for enough altering terrains to pull of a good preview of the game. Only a few of the cars were available and only two of the tracks have navigator commentary, which is fine with me. The first thing I noticed right away was the texturing and detail in the graphics. The high gloss reflection, the effects that were in the previous gaming versions all remained in this version. One of the most impressive things about the PC version is the speed; of course this highly depends on the type of system you are using. I had the chance to power it up on a P4 3.06 with 1GB PC2700 ram that was delivering graphics through the ATI 9800 Pro. Surprisingly there was not much of a difference between the two systems, they both ran at a very steady game pace but there was, like any windows setup that has been installed for too long, a slight difference in performance between the freshly installed P4 system and my year old Athlon XP 1900+ with 512MB PC2100 running an ATI Radeon 8500 64MB. However slight the difference was it was not enough to really take notice.

Having played the game on both the XBOX and PS2 I was interested to see what lengths the designers would go to in order to replicate the game on the PC platform. So far they have really done a great job and I am definitely looking forward to the review version of this game. I may still favor my PS2 version since the controls are just dead on, if I owned a racing wheel for my PC I would probably think differently but since I don’t I will be hitting up my PS2 version tonight while in wait of what is to come for the final PC version.

Editorial Note:
To clear up any confusion about how the game may run if your system doesn't meet either of the specifications listed above let me say that the only thing I was noticing that was a difference between the two systems were some small hang-ups where the screen would pause for what seemed to be half a second. That could have been attributed to a process running in the background or a year old installation of windows. The P4 system I tried it on was purchased the day I used it so everything was factory burned in and tested with no extra software on it so of course the game ran perfectly. (Thanks for pointing it out Gordon!)

Go back to the Colin McRae Rally 3 page.

Screenshots