On the plus side, this isn’t another wrestling game.
V-Rally: Edition ‘99, or “Vred 99” as his friends call him, is a racing game by Infogrames. I have no memory of acquiring this, but it probably entered my collection at a point where I started picking up all the unexciting, common N64 titles in my pursuit of a complete set (I’m currently about 50 away…hooray for me).
Rally racing, or racing that typically occurs on regular roads and not big ovals, can make for excellent gameplay – the original Xbox series Rallisport Challenge is fantastic, for instance. This one is a port of the original V-Rally from a year earlier, with updates to center it around the 1998 World Rally Championship, which was won by this guy:
He seems thrilled. But is V-Rally – the game, not the Finnish man above, just as thrilling?
Sort of! How much I can recommend this one really comes down to how well it controls, how good/dick-ish the AI is, and how much variety the game offers. Let’s look at each of these one by one.
V-Rally controls pretty well, and feels adequately fast, which is a trait lacking in a surprising number of old racing games. At the default difficulty, a helpful and annoying voice will warn you about upcoming turns and hazards, which are pretty much constant. As with actual rally racing, it’s actively bad to try to go as fast as you can all the time, which I appreciate. There’s very little room for recklessness. I googled “distracted driving” to find an image to drive the point home, and it did not let me down:
On a less positive note, making even little mistakes can be surprisingly punishing. Hitting just about anything causes you to spin out and end up facing backwards, leading to a surprisingly arduous process of getting turned around. Some might appreciate this level of punishment for bad driving, but I found it pretty excessive.
Despite the above, these sorts of mistakes often don’t matter due to the game’s rather weird AI. I found that in most races, whoever got off to the best start would develop an insurmountable lead, whether it’s a human or AI car. In one race, I got off to a solid start and found myself 20 seconds ahead of the pack, even after multiple spinouts. Conversely, in races where I did something dumb early on, I’d find myself about the same amount of time behind no matter how well I did. “Rubber banding” is a real issue in a lot of games like this, but this seems to have a similar problem in the opposite direction. A lot of races just feel decided after the first 20-30 seconds.
The variety in cars and options in V-Rally is a real positive, and is much better than I would’ve guessed – there are 40+ tracks to race on and about a dozen different cars, which you unlock by playing through various circuits and playing its different modes. The courses all look and feel pretty different, too, though as a mildly color blind person I found some of the tracks (such as the Sahara-y one) very difficult to see amidst its surroundings. Most of them, however, look pretty nice.
Overall, I enjoyed V-Rally: Edition ‘99 for what it is, but considering its flaws it’s hard to recommend it over the many excellent racing games in the N64 library. If you really dig rally racing, though, it’s a solid choice.
There were a couple of sequels to V-Rally before the series went dormant for over a decade. Surprisingly, however, its fourth and most recent iteration was released in Europe this year, and will be out in North America in a few more months. If you’re somehow dying to get the latest V-Rally experience, your wait is almost over.
Next week’s game is a thing I apparently own, but I have no idea what it is. I’m mildly scared. I’ll see you next week! Oh, and don’t text and drive.
