Top Gear Rally
Platform: Nintendo 64
Region: USA
Media: Cartridge
Controller: Controller Pak, Rumble Pak
Genre: Racing > Cars
Release Year: 1997
Developer: Boss Game Studios
Publisher: Midway Games/Kotobuki Systems/Kemco
Players: 1 or 2 VS
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Description

Jump in, buckle up and drive yourself insane! Top Gear Rally will have your engines revving! No options on this baby - it comes fully equipped: 9 polygon cars, 5 intense tracks (Desert, Jungle, Mountain, coastline and Strip Mine), 4 high-performance game modes and multiple camera views!

Info

On the Nintendo 64, Top Gear Rally features a realistic physics model with functioning suspension. At the time, this was an impressive new gameplay development.[citation needed] Road surfaces, including their imperfections, were accurately modeled to give the player the feeling of actually driving a car.

The performance of each vehicle in the game was unique. Not only with respect to engine power, but also areas such as tire grip, suspension stiffness, steering tightness, and between different drive-trains such as front-wheel drive, rear-wheel drive, and four-wheel drive. The game also features the possibility of damaging the vehicles, although the damage does not affect performance.

The game's graphics were considered quite advanced for a home console system, being better than the PlayStation's then-available offerings.[citation needed] Smooth, non-pixelated, texture-mapped surfaces, high-detail cars, and complex environments were displaying at a generally smooth frame rate. However, the number of on-screen vehicles couldn't exceed three without game speed being impaired.

Because neither Kemco or Boss Games Studios had licenses to use the real car names, the car names are somewhat disguised within the game. One can identify the cars by either looks or by the fact that the disguised names are often almost acronyms of the real names.

The game features a soundtrack consisting of tunes with a sort of trance-style. The electronic XM music was composed by Barry Leitch, who also worked on Super Nintendo Top Gear releases.

This version of Top Gear Rally was also released as a PC title called Boss Rally.

A noted gameplay flaw with the Nintendo 64 version of the game is that it is possible for the player to gain an immense advantage over the computer players by riding the rails on the sides of the road in most tracks. The rails don't slow the car down nearly as much as normal cornering or drifting, allowing the player to maintain top speed even through very sharp turns. Boss Games' later N64 title, World Driver Championship, did not have this oversight.