PC Rally

Year 1995, Sound Blaster churning out engine sounds, and I've got another racing game in front of me promising a rally experience on a 486. PC Rally by Digital Dreams Multimedia. A name without frills, a box without over-the-top promises. At least they were honest about that.

It's a racing game in the spirit of arcade rally titles for MS-DOS back then. No suspension physics simulation, no differential tuning. You climb in, drive as fast as you can, try not to hit the grass. That was the whole racing genre for a large chunk of players in the mid-90s, and PC Rally fits right into it — smack in the middle of the pack.

The game offers three modes: practice to get familiar with the controls, free track selection, and championship. The last one makes sense to play first, because that's the only place where something happens that could be called progression. The controls are functional, nothing more. Cars respond predictably, tracks have enough turns to keep driving from being just straight-line throttle mashing. Graphics match the release year — smooth driving on period hardware, visually middle-of-the-road.

PC Rally brought nothing that pushed the genre forward. It didn't invent a new camera angle, had no licensed vehicles or a cult soundtrack. It aged not badly, but colorlessly. When I think of it alongside Screamer or Need for Speed from the same year, it's clear why this game doesn't live in players' collective memory. It wasn't bad. It just wasn't a reason to remember.

Today it'll mainly appeal to DOS racing game collectors who want to work through the genre catalog from A to Z. You can fire it up in a browser via DOSBox without issues, and after twenty minutes you know everything you need to know about it. If you're wondering whether it deserves an hour of your evening — it depends how much you enjoy reading encyclopedias instead of novels.