Though the Saturn was a commercial failure, it had its share of strengths, particularly when it came to emulating arcade games in the home. 2D fighters were generally best on the Saturn, featuring much less missing content than their PlayStation counterparts, lightgun shooters like Virtua Cop and The House of the Dead are mainstays of the genre, and some of the best arcade racers (at the time) were on the Saturn. Sega Rally Championship is one of the preeminent racing games on the system, bumping shoulders with Daytona USA, though like Daytona USA - and by extension, other arcade conversions - it is a bit threadbare.

All the cars handle great, the courses feel really good, and the level of challenge is metered out perfectly. You're battling against other cars but also a timer that carries between tracks, and at times Rally Championship can expect quite a bit from you, but I found that every repeated attempt allowed me to make just a bit more progress. I'd learn how to better take and anticipate turns and gain back two or three seconds before hitting a checkpoint I previously fell short of. Much of the game's length comes from slowly mastering its tracks, but it's a satisfying loop.

That's about all you get here, and while it feels very good to play, it's not something you'll spend a huge amount of time with. It's the sort of game you pick up off the shelf and screw around in for 30 minutes once every so often, and that was just the nature of arcade conversions like this, so it's hard to fault Sega Rally Championship for having so little meat on its bones. I'd say it's maybe an issue if you're shelling out a bunch of money for a copy, but even then, Japanese discs are like, ten bucks. USA longboxes are a bit more pricey but, and I cannot stress this enough, the aftermarket for US Saturn games is completely and irreparably fucked.

That said, if you're still playing on actual hardware today, you're probably using a soft-modded action replay, and that being the case, Sega Rally Championship is a no-brainer whether you burn it or grab a Japanese disc.

Out of all the old school Arcade racers I've been playing lately, this is the one I enjoyed the most. Very responsive controls, tweakable handling, decent physics, gorgeous graphics, pleasant soundtrack. The tracks are very detailed and even have scripted events. There really isn't much to complain about, except for maybe the horrible pop-in, just like in Daytona USA, but you quickly forget about it as you marvel at the beauty of the environments and get caught up in the fun of adrenaline-fueled races. Also, though I'm not a fan of the time-checkpoint system, here it's almost unnoticeable as you're always given more than enough time.

However, as most arcade games, it is extremely short and lacking in content. You only have 2 cars and 3 tracks. You can beat the whole game in like 10 minutes. While this is perfectly normal for the Arcade, I think I'd feel robbed if I bought this game for PC or consoles. I've played demo versions of games that lasted 5-6 times longer than this. Much as I wish I could've rated it higher, Sega Rally just doesn't feel like a complete game to me.

Kenji Sasaki, the director of Sega Rally at one point in development worked so much on the project that he began questioning the very thought of finding driving "fun".

As a minnow you'll barely know how to drive a go-kart in Super Mario Kart, in comparison a fine-tuned high performance Toyota Celica GT-Four is well above your pay grade. You will start racing in the beginner-friendly Desert course just fine and dandy, until you try to make the very long easy right near the end and see yourself smacking head-first into the stone wall, sometimes even finding your curious eyes getting distracted by the zebras standing nearby. The Forest with it's pine trees welcome you to a hairpin turn that you have no hope of knowing how to handle in your weighty polygonal real world vehicle, and you barely find yourself making it to the end out of sheer luck. Then the apparent finale rears it's ugly head, an insurmountable Mountain with not only it's own hairpin turn, but many tricky curves, a long narrow turn leaving little room for error, and precise maneuvering through town. This is the end for you, this mountain cannot be conquered. You're left to zero knowledge of the hellish Lake Side extra course that lies beyond that mountain, home to narrow precision-demanding turns and chicanes that only true experts of the dirt may discover and have any hope of navigating.

You become enamored over how mean the mountain is, and find it's song mesmerizing through it's triumphant guitar riffs that feel like it's cheering you on. You're but a kid, but you try your best to figure out the science of operating a championship-grade motor vehicle. You only learn so much, even if you do get a bit better at the other portions of the track, a hairpin turn is still essentially a guaranteed crash. Despite an obvious skill plateau for your moronic self, you still find the game fun to play and come back to it just to hear it's cheery demeanor root for you. You've game over'd so many times, but it never feels bad, because the game only wishes to entertain and not belittle.

As an adult you come back to the same game with fondness, puzzled as to why you took so much leisure just driving by yourself in time attack. Was it really just the music? Was the Celica GT-Four just that cool of a car? You come back to the same course and struggle as you normally do, albeit this time with knowledge of how to decelerate and utilize the brake properly. You hug the inside of those corners, you get the drift around the hairpin without touching the embankment, and not a single wall is run into as you make the quick descend through town. That "cool part" of the music that you really liked is now suddenly the victory jubilee as you approach the finish line on the third and final lap. Addiction to the feel of the road sets in, and you find yourself beating the arcade mode and getting the esteemed honor to officially drive on the Lake Side course without the need of that code you found one time on your dad's shitty internet. The Stratos car also becomes yours, best of luck driver, you are now a true master and may access these dangerous assets at any time. You deserve it truly.

It's at this point we come back to Sasaki, who had taken a moment to drive his own car around the mountains to find his spark again to make good-ass driving games, he found the experience so exciting that he based the Mountain track on it and made the very same course that I loved and still do to this day. To transfer that experience to a video game and have it somehow resonate with a six-year old who is now a full grown adult that can handle that hairpin turn with relative ease is a true mark of brilliance, and why Sega Rally stands on it's own as the foundation of all rally racing games and possibly one of my favorite driving games ever made.

Hurrah to you Mr. Sasaki.

as well as being the game that defined arcade handling, sega rally is a truly unique experience in colour, sound and atmosphere. i wonder how magical it must have been to play this in an arcade back in the day. whilst the colours are very vibrant, they're never over-saturated, with cars that are impressively accurate and detail-rich considering the era's limitations. however, the strongest point of the game is the sensational driving, which is still the best in arcade terms. the stages are unique and progress in difficulty well. the music and sounds are crazy (game over yeaaah). i'm just not sure if the reason i can't unlock the third car was because i played the ps2 version, despite having completed the extra stage in first.

the magic of this game for me is how am3 clued in on the idea that racing games are all about the turns and chose to make a rally game, where every turn is so heavily telegraphed and conquering them without losing too much speed or taking a bump makes everything else melt away. every turn in this game is so rich and unique thanks to the subtle way the terrain affects your car's performance, and there's not a single distraction from them the whole time. gaining a few extra mph or avoiding a downshift on a given turn can make or break your run; it's truly addictive.

it's really all because of the physics system, which somehow straddles the line between arcade-y exaggerated kinematics and a more sim-like, cohesive engine. sega rally's slightly older sibling daytona usa is a perfect comparison point: daytona's drifts are a legitimate technique with recommended inputs and a cool animation, while sega rally's drifts are the flexible outcome of a wide variety of different inputs. just letting off the gas yields completely different results than downshifting once or twice before cutting the wheel. the amount of time you spend leaning into the turn changes the drift as well, especially as every wasted second in the drift is a loss of many mph you could've kept otherwise. at the same time making mistakes and adapting is a key to success in this game. being able to stomach a big speed loss and quickly shift into the correct gear to get back on track is essential, as simply knowing what to do on a given turn is never enough to ensure that you never lose speed on it. this is especially true since the grip changes so significantly between areas that the amount of time it takes to turn a certain angle varies between virtually every surface. this dynanism ensures the repetition of grinding arcade mode never becomes fatiguing even after hours of play.

this latter point is especially important as sega rally takes a cool three minutes to beat on a successful run. it's an insanely tightly packed experience that kept me retrying far past the point of frustration given its high difficulty, which perhaps makes it one of the most fun three minutes you can spend gaming anywhere. all three tracks are completely unique beginning to end, with legitimate design techniques that escalate over the course of the runtime. the difficulty curve is tremendous and absolutely pulls no punches, especially in mountain. having a nasty hairpin followed by a 4th gear swerve through a congested neighborhood and then launching into back-to-back right angles on wide muddy road is delectable whiplash even when smoothly handled. that secret lakeside stage hits the mark as well; it gives the player 70 seconds to navigate a twisty marshland mushed beneath the wheels that won't hestitate to throw you into a tailspin. my face lit up when I realized another track was in store after a lovely credits sequence filled with gorgeous nature views scrolled by, and even as I ate shit I couldn't help but feel accomplished for even reaching it.

I beat this initially on ps2, which is an excellent port esp if you have access to component cables and can play in 480p. it runs at a crisp 60fps as well, though oddly enough it runs in 4:3 with black borders in anamorphic widescreen. nevertheless, it's a great way to play an authentic arcade version of this game. this entails an utter lack of side content as well though, which is appropriate given that this version was a bonus, but it's still disappointing. I also played through the saturn version; in fact, I actually played the saturn version much more before picking up the ps2 version in the last couple of days. I noticed pretty quickly that winning on ps2 had an extremly tight margin of error, while simply working through all three maps on saturn was much easier and getting first place in the championship was much more difficult. I imagine this was a balancing tactic for the home market, but it does make accessing and unlocking lakeside a bit harder to get. the saturn version itself is no slouch, and it plays perfectly beyond a lack of analog control. for me I love seeing a technical showpiece on a 32-bit console, and sega rally is one of the best looking 240p racers you can find. I even found the 30fps framerate to be consistent, even if I obviously prefer 60 in the arcade. it's worth trying each out just for fun, and I found my knowledge from the arcade transferred perfectly to saturn, indicating the accuracy of the port without question.

it's really hard to describe how good this without just recommending the game outright. the car feels like putty in your hands with how much you can squash and stretch and how you can snap it like a rubber band around corners. that it manages to make the car feel so buoyant while maintaining a semblance of accuracy is an absolute miracle. it also shares basically every good trait about other sega racing games: the blue sky aesthetic, great music, sick cars, and jaw-dropping early 90s graphics. it's sadly not packed with content, but thankfully there's later entries that expand the course set and car selection drastically. unquestionable classic for me that indicates sega's raw technical might in the early 3D space.