GM Rally

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NOTE:
Not to be confused with WR Rally.
GM Rally
How about a rally videogame that violates the principles of the rallying?
Genre(s): Racing
Platform(s): Microsoft Windows
Release Date: January 23, 2009
Engine: Chrome Engine 2
Developer(s): X-Bow Software
Publisher(s): 1C Company
Country: Russia

GM Rally (also referred to as General Motors Rally) is a rally racing game developed by X-Bow Software and published by 1C Company. The game features vehicles from companies that are part of the General Motors family of vehicles, like Chevrolet, Opel and Saab. It was the last game developed by X-Bow Software before closed its doors only a few months later.

Gameplay

The player can choose between the vehicles of the three aforementioned companies to race in rally championships that are mainly set in France and Spain. After winning a championship, a new set of vehicles and tracks will be unlocked, in a very similar way like Colin McRae Rally or DiRT.

Why It Drove Into a Tree

  1. To address the elephant in the room, this game is not even a proper rally game. Three of the main characteristics of the rallying is that the competitors don't run on a circuit, but instead in a point-to-point track that contains many checkpoints between them, the start and finish lines and that all of the competitors have their turns to race on the track and the presence of a copilot that indicates the pilot the approaching directions of the stage, but in this game none of the available tracks are formed under this mold, instead, they're closed circuits that require the player to complete a certain amount of laps while competing against three opponents at the same time, and as you may expect, there is not any copilot to help the player with the directions, instead, some mute signs will appear in the top part of the screen while driving.
  2. Another point that proves that the developers didn't even bother in making a very single research task is that they included the Saab 9-2X as part of the vehicle roster of the game. In case that you don't know, the Saab 9-2X is not even a proper vehicle of that company, instead, it's a rebadged Subaru Impreza that was sold by General Motors between 2005 and 2006, because GM wanted them to make a single badge-engineered car instead of an original car.
  3. Even the frontal and back covers from the game are misleading and very poorly made:
    • The front cover tries to imitate the style of the covers of the first Colin McRae Rally games by showing up a car during a race, and while it could be a simple, but a great idea to inspire the players to buy the game, this is completely ruined up because of the poor and exaggerated dust cloud effect that comes from the back part of the car, which looks more like a sandstorm or an immense fog instead of a dust cloud.
    • The car of the front cover of the game consists of a Saab 9-5 with a very particular green and white paintjob. The aforementioned car is available in the game, but the paintjob is not, and it's not even part of the alternative paintjobs available for the car.
    • The presentation of the back cover is extremely poor, the font used for the description text (Arial) looks very unprofessional and the bland background used for the rest of the cover doesn't help to make it look better, looking more like if a kid decided to make its own version of the cover of a game in Microsoft Paint.
    • The collage of images taken from the game are placed poorly in the space of the back cover, as one of the images is not even placed in a firm angle, and as a result of this, the image ends up obstructing a part of the descriptive text.
    • The images for the lower part of the cover are not placed in a greater position, actually, all of the three images are not placed symmetrically, and they have different sizes, like if the editor couldn't crop one of the images, get images of the same size or modify them to have the same size and decided to place them wherever he could.
    • The lower part of the cover claims that the game has "25 original tracks on the Mediterranean coast, including France and Spain", but in reality, the game only has a small bunch of maps that look exactly the same, just with some route changes and decorations, and all of them are based on France and Spain, there are no other countries available in the game, contrary to that the game tries to say.
      • In the same part of the cover, the game also claims that the game has "realistic damage models and authentic car behavior on the track", and from far, this is the worst lie of the cover, not only because in the real game the damage model is broken and the physics are a complete janky mess of coding, but because this shows up that the developers tried to fool the player so desperately to sell their game.
  4. Aside from the misleading nature of the name and licensing of the game, the first presentation that it gives to the player is extremely poor:
    • The main menu at first sight seems attractive, but the problem is that in the upper part of the main menu, the full name of the game is repeated several times just to fill up the background space, probably in an attempt to make the game look more attractive, but not only that, the video that plays in the background of all of the menus consists in a single showcase of three vehicles that only lasts for a few seconds before it repeats again, and on top of that, every time that you go to another menu, the video and the main theme of the game will reset from the beginning, something that will get very annoying and awkward when you're traveling through the menus.
    • The default font used for all of the texts in the game (including the logo) is Impact. This font is not exactly ugly, but the problem is that it looks very unprofessional and unfitting for a game of its genre. The fact that the aforementioned font is used mainly for internet memes just makes it much worse.
      • Not satisfied with that, some of the texts of the game suffer from a considerable amount of spelling and spacing errors. For instance, when you're going to buy a car, there's a part of the text box that is not spaced adequately, leaving you with something like "DO YOU REALLY WANT TO BUYChevrolet Aveo?".
        • As it could be seen in the previous point, for some strange reason, the name of the brand and the model of the car are not fully uppercased, while the rest of the texts of the game are.
    • Another thing that is extremely annoying is that the music that plays during the main menus is the same for all of the menus, and even before beginning a race, the same music will play over and over, the only times where it will change is when you finally start up the race.
    • The first glitch that can be encountered in the whole game can be triggered by just passing your mouse over the available options of the menu quickly, this will cause that the sound effect that plays when you do that to get excessively distorted and ear-raping.
  5. When you create your first profile, the game allows you to choose between five different characters, but none of them have any kind of unique feature that could differentiate them aside from their presentation image and every character start with the same amount of money and configuration, which means that this mechanic is practically useless, but it gets even more useless when you see that the image of your character only appears when you load the game, since there is no other occasion where you can see your character.
  6. Although the main menu of the game has a "Save" button, it is misleading because a normal player would think that it serves for saving the game's progress (Despite the fact that the game mentions that it has an auto-save function), but in reality, it serves for viewing the saved replays. The problem is that this button is practically useless because the game will never actually save your replays in a 90̬% of the cases, probably because of the poor programming of the game.
  7. Due to the age of the game, it's very prone to experience a lot of technical problems in modern operating systems, being the inability of the game to autosave your progress and configuration the most common one, and this problem can be fixed by just configuring the game to run under the Windows XP compatibility, but after doing this, for some strange reason, the game will experience a lot of annoying problems related to the performance of the game regardless of the computer specs of the player. These problems usually manifest in the shape of painfully long loading times before starting a race, random freezing issues during the races and inexplicable crashes during the loading screens or the races. The worst part of this is that apparently there is no solution to fix all of these problems, and as it was stated before, these problems happen regardless of whether your computer is bad or good.
    • Another thing is that the game lacks native screen support and the maximum resolution available is of 1600 x 1200, which is excessively outdated for the time it was released, as many games already had 1080p support, and some of them even had 4K support.
  8. For a game released in 2009, the graphics look absolutely terrible. This is mostly caused because the engine it was built onː Chrome Engine 2, was severely outdated by the time it was released, but even with that, the game uses an exaggerated amount of motion blur, a very cheap-looking high dynamic range and many other ugly visual effects that just help the game to look much worse than it should. However, the worst offenders are the sun flare affects that will blind and dazzle you after playing for a few minutes and the excessively muddy textures that look like if they were made in 2000 and subsequently ported to the engine of the game.
  9. Even the few animations that the game has are terrible, the door opening animations that can be displayed while tuning or checking a vehicle are somehow acceptable, but the problem resides in the gameplay: every time you turn your vehicle to the sides, it will start to spaz out constantly, and this just gets even worse when you also brake while turning. You can even think that the developers didn't bother in making the turning animation smoother and more fluid and just made the display animations.
  10. Almost every single camera view of the game is extremely awkward and there is an exaggerated number of problems related to them:
    • The third person camera is very inconsistent with its placing, at first it's placed in a decent position where the player can perfectly see everything that surrounds him, but after increasing the speed for a few seconds, the camera will start to get exaggeratedly far from the car, and when you brake the vehicle, the camera will get very close to the back part of the car, and depending on the type of vehicle you chose, sometimes the camera can clip through the model of the car.
    • The far third person camera has practically the same issues as the normal third person camera view, but in this case, the default placing of the camera is more awkward.
    • The cockpit view is not very well placed either. In a very similar way to the first-person view from The Fortress of DR. Radiaki, the camera is placed in a very awkward angle that reminds of a driver wearing a neck collar, but the problems doesn't end up there, the interior of the vehicle aside from the speedometer is completely darkened, even if you place the car in such a position that the sun flares can land directly on the front part of your vehicle, the interior will still look very dark.
      • Adding the fact that you can't look around the interior of the vehicle (Something that can be done in most of the Codemasters racing games), it's very probable that the developers decided to place the camera in that way and darken the inside of the vehicles to hide how poorly worked are the vehicle models.
  11. Driving is not much better than the graphics. For starters, all of the vehicles of the game have an excessively slippery driving model, even if you're driving on asphalt, the vehicles will have a lot of problems while taking closed curves, and if you're driving offroad, the vehicle will be almost impossible to control adequately at high speeds because most of the times your car will drift like crazy in a very unrealistic way if you take a slight curve, similar to what happens with the Unearthed: Trail of Ibn Battuta driving physics, and if you are very unlucky, you can even trigger a bug related to the collision detection of the game. The cherry on the top of this disaster is that even the AI is severely affected by this god-awful physics, since it's very common to see your opponent's crashing and drifting like crazy while racing.
  12. If the horrible driving physics were not enough to torture the player, the controls have a considerable amount of input delay, and it can be perceived in a better way when you use the brakes, taking almost an entire second just to finally brake the entire vehicle, but this also affects the steering controls, and on top of that, the controls for steering the car are much more sensitive than the accelerating or braking controls, making the driving much harder than it should regularly be, and due to this, the learning curve for learning how to play the game is excessively high.
  13. The artificial intelligence in the game is so stupid and lackluster that you might think that it's artificial stupidity instead, mostly because the opponents are never a real challenge for the player because of how slow and terrible they drive, and in a similar way like Cyberpunk 2077, if you block the way with your car, the opponents will just stop without trying to advance or to crash the player's vehicle to continue with the race, however, in some other cases, they can be a complete headache because they will constantly crash and make PIT maneuvers to the player's vehicle, and given the very broken physics of the game, this can be an issue of life or death.
    • As it was mentioned in a previous point, the AI is very prone to suffer because of the terrible driving physics of the game, since the opponents tend to have serious problems while racing, especially while taking sharp curves, braking and going at high-speed numbers.
  14. It's very hard to keep your vehicle at full health because even if you make the slightest scratch in some of the parts, the car will get seriously damaged and fixing it will obviously cost you money, but due to the terrible driving physics and delayed controls, it's very hard to keep the vehicle stable and in one piece during a single race. Another thing to mention is that the vehicle shows up physical damage, which in theory should add points to the level of realism of the game, but this element goes down to the drain when you see that the vehicle will get damaged entirely and not by zones, for instance, crashing the frontal part of the vehicle will also damage the back part, and sometimes only the back part will get damaged while the frontal part seems to be untouched.
    • Not to mention, even fixing a minimum percentage of damage will cost you a lot of money in comparison to what you tend to win after finishing a race, and depending on the zone that was damaged, it can cost more or less money, being the engine and transmission zones the more expensive ones.
  15. As it was mentioned previously, repairing your vehicle from the damages can cost you a lot of money, almost to the point that a 70% of your earnings after finishing a race in first place will end up in repairing the damage of your vehicle in case that you damaged it (which is very probable), however, in most of the cases it's not necessary to repair your vehicle to continue with the races, but there are some times where the game will force you to repair your vehicle, this could make sense if your vehicle was seriously damaged, but in many cases the game will force you to repair minor technical damages or even aesthetical damages that don't affect the performance in any way, and what's worse, sometimes you can even continue racing with a seriously damaged vehicle.
  16. You can upgrade your vehicle with certain modifications in the garage menu, for example, you can change the turbocharger, the tires, the brakes, the engine development and some other parts that are supposed to upgrade the performance or the visual aspect of your vehicle, but unlike the repair menu of the vehicles, these parts are now completely unorganized, which means that the subparts that belong to a specific part of the vehicle (Like the multiple parts of the engine) are now included in a single section instead of having multiple ones that could make the navigation easier and more intuitive for the player, making the game look very unprofessional, and what's more, some sections have a lot of individual parts and their different variations, which makes the navigation even more tedious and slow than it should already be.
  17. Almost all of the vehicle upgrades are excessively expensive, some parts can even surpass the repairing prices after a race and even the prices of some of the vehicles of the game. The worst part of this is that all of the upgrades barely make any increase in the performance of the vehicle, and since you can only buy a new car, which is something that you'll have to do after you complete the first championship leagues, upgrading your current vehicle is rather pointless.
  18. The collision detection is a complete janky mess since all of the vehicles have a hitbox that is too wide, something that can be noticed during the beginning of the races, as you won't be able to pass through the middle of two cars if they're not separated enough, but the hit detection just gets worse with the sidewalks and bridges, they seem to have a much taller height than the rest of the surfaces despite looking of a low height. especially for the bridges, and if you try to drive on them, in most of the cases your car can either get very damaged, crash in a very abrupt way or, in the worst of the cases, overturn. Vehicles also seem to be affected by insignificant objects that a normal car could easily run over and keep going forward, like traffic signs or fences, which seem to completely stop your vehicle if you try to run over one of them.
  19. The respawning function can be triggered by pressing the "R" button by default, this could be useful when you've crashed, you're having problems with your vehicle or you're too far away from the route you were taking, but this function lasts five seconds to take place, being almost useless because of that excessive amount of time, and on top of that, there are even more problems related to the respawning:
    • The respawning cannot be canceled at any time once you press the "R" button, which means that if you pressed the previously mentioned button while racing, you'll lose all of your momentum when you finally respawn, something that can put you in a very un-advantaged position or situation of the race.
    • If you try to run over the spectators of the race or your vehicle overturns at certain point of the race, the respawn will be almost immediate, but as soon as your vehicle respawns, the game will penalize you by making your car unable to move for five seconds. Aside from being very annoying and unnecessary, there are some cases where your vehicle will not immediately respawn after overturning, and when you finally respawn, you have to forcefully wait until the penalty timer runs out, something that can take up to ten seconds or more in the worst cases.
  20. Taking a shortcut to gain some advantage will cause the game to trigger a forced respawn that cannot be stopped or avoided at any time, many games tend to do this to prevent the players to gain an unfair advantage against the opponents, like Assetto Corsa and Grid, and it could be great if it wasn't for the fact that the game is very inconsistent with this, in many cases the game will never activate the respawn , which means that the player can take as many shortcuts as he/she wants, but other times the forced respawn can be triggered even if you get a bit out of the road, wasting your time and, in some cases, making you lose the race.
  21. There are only two countries featured and a total of 25 stages in the whole game, which is a very limited number of countries and stages available in comparison to other games of the same style, or even of the same genre. To name a few ones, Colin McRae Rally 04 featured a total of 8 countries and 52 stages, and its sequel, Colin McRae Rally 05, featured over 70 stages spread over 9 countries, however, this is the least of the problems when you see that every single stage featured in the game is a lame asset flip derived from the same base, just with some minor decoration, landscape and route differences, and what's worse, some of the maps are literally the same previous map you played minutes ago, but with a different route to race on. If you remove every repeated stage, you'll end up with a total of only 8 stages, in which four belong to Spain and the other four belong to France.
    • To add even more salt to the wound, all of the names of the stages are extremely uninspired and seem more like those generic names that are mostly used in cartoons, for instance, there is a stage that is simply called "Tierra de los Matadores" (Bullfighter's Land), which sounds more like a generic term to refer to Spain, however, the most ridiculous and non-sensical ones are the names of the French stages, names that can range from "Virages Gaulois" (Gallic Bends) and "Soleil de la France" (French Sun) to "Brise Française" (French Breeze).
      • There is a French stage that is named "Champs Egyles", "champs" means "fields", but "Egyles" has no apparent translation. It's very probable that the name was intended to be something like "Champs Égyptiens" (Egyptian Fields), since "egyles" has a lot of resemblance with the word "egyptians", but even if this was the case, there is no reason to call the stage like that, as it takes place in France and not in Egypt.
        • Even if "Egyles" was intended to not have a proper translation and be an original French name, the term is very uninspired and underutilized in the rest of the game.
  22. For some strange reason, the developers of the game didn't add a function to allow the players to race at nighttime, instead, the tracks just have sunrise and sunset daytimes, which makes the stages feel even more lackluster and empty than they already were.
  23. Just like what happens with the stages and regions, the game only features a total of 12 vehicles divided into four classesː Group A1, Group B1, Group C1 and Group S1, and as you can probably assume, every brand featured in the game has only one vehicle per class.
  24. In the real life rally championships and other games of the same genre, the classification of the vehicles are based on the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile regulations, which classifies every vehicle according to their weight, engine size and powertrain, but in GM Rally the classification of the few vehicles available barely makes any kind of sense because 9 of the 12 available vehicles of the game have a front-wheel drive and share almost the same stats, but even with that, they're divided into this non-sensical classification that it's just there to add some cheap attempt of variation, the only classification that could make sense is the Group S1 cars, which consists entirely of four-wheel drive vehicles.
  25. There are practically no incentives for the player to complete the championships so he/she can unlock and buy the vehicles from the higher classes, since all of them have almost the same stats as the vehicles from the lower classes, even the four-wheel drive vehicles have the same power as an Opel Corsa from the group A1.
  26. The quality of the sound effects is extremely poor and cheap. It has been said that the ear-raping sound effect bug of the buttons from the main menu that is triggered when the player passes the mouse repeatedly is the most known failure of the audio design, but the rest of the sounds are not much better, moreover, some of them have a worse quality and programming.
    • Every single vehicle has the same engine sound, which sounds more like an old blender instead of a real car, even the SUV's have that horrific engine sound, making them look extremely out of place, and what's worse, this engine sound is directly ripped from the Golf 1 from GTI Racing, a game that was developed by Techland and uses the same game engine as this game, compare them by yourself.
    • The sound that comes out of your tires when your car drifts or steers to the sides is very screechy and ear-raping, even comparable to the sound that is caused by scratching a plate with a fork.
  27. The game has an abysmal number of bugs and glitches that can be triggered even from the very first menu of the game, as it was mentioned previously, however, the remaining number of bugs and glitches are not much better than the previously mentioned one, and some of them can even make the game entirely unplayableː
    • Every time you start a race, a random song from the game's soundtrack will start to play during the race, but if for some reason you decide to restart the race, the music will not start at any point of the race and the only things you will hear are the obnoxious sound effects of the vehicles. To make the music play again, you have to pause the game and then exit the pause menu, but even with this, it's not completely sure that the music will play in order, sometimes you'll have to do the process two times, in other occasions the player will have to stay in the pause menu for a few seconds and, in the worst of the cases, a complete restart of the race will be required.
    • Graphics are very prone to suffer from flickering textures, especially on the roads and distant trees, regardless of your graphics card, configuration and general hardware.
    • After finishing a race, if your vehicle suddenly turned or drifted right before getting to the finish line, there is a very big chance that the horrific sound effect that plays when your car turns or drifts will keep playing in an endless loop until you get to the menu of the game, pretty similar to what happens with Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness and its endless death sound loop when you pause the game right before Lara Croft dies.
    • Apparently, you have the option to view and save your replays after finishing a race, but due to the poor programming of the game or a major bug, the game will not save most of the replays, even if the game indicates the opposite.
    • Some people have reported that trying to use or even connecting an Xbox controller or a steering wheel will cause the entire framerate to break completely, which means that the game will run excessively jerky, and the already awful controls will get even worse and more unresponsive.
    • If you're unlucky enough, the game will not allow you to complete the rest of the championships, regardless of if you have completed the previous championships in order or not, however, this bug seems to appear with more frequency if you completed a race of another championship without finishing the previous ones.
      • The worst part of this bug is that the game will never allow you to complete the next championships no matter how many times you finish the previous challenges, and to make things even worse, the game does not have a manual save function, instead, it uses an auto-saving function that takes place after making a single change or winning a race. In other words, if for some reason you get this bug, you can practically say goodbye to your game file, because it will never allow you to complete the game, and there is not a method to fix this yet.
  28. It's clear that the developers of the game just tried to make the less effort possible to sell their game and receive the money, not only because they programmed the game in such a way that it borders on the unplayable, but also because they stole an excessive amount of assets from Xpand Rally and GTI Racing, games that belong to the same company (Techland) and run under the same engine developed by them (Chrome Engine 2).
    • Several config files from Xpand Rally and GTI Racing can be found in the game folder of GM Rally, this might just be a coincidence, but the content of their respective files is exactly the same without any change that could differentiate them from each other.
    • The graphic style of GM Rally is almost the same as the one from the first Xpand Rally game, the only difference is that the visual effects from GM Rally are much worse and look more outdated, especially when you compare their respective release years (2009 and 2004 respectively).
    • The sound effect of the buttons from the menu are exactly the same as the ones from the menus of GTI Racing, being the absence of the ear-raping volume bug when passing the mouse over the buttons repeatedly the only notorious difference.
    • As it was mentioned previously, every single vehicle of the game has the engine sound of the Golf 1 from GTI Racing, and the worst part is that the developers didn't change its pitch to hide the fact that they were stealing assets from another unsuccessful game, they just copied and pasted it in their game without making any changes.

Redeeming Qualities

  1. Every part of the vehicle in the repair menu is divided by sections and each subpart is also shown up on screen, and all of them have a brief description about their function. For a very low budget and amateurish game like this, this is a very nice addition, however, most of them barely make any difference in the performance of the vehicle, only the main sections (Like the engine, the transmission and the bodywork) are relevant for it.
  2. Aside of the inappropriate track design for the setting of the game and the fact that the tracks use almost the same environments and assets for the two countries where the game takes place, the level design is very well constructed and has a notorious continuity.

Reception

Ratings

Aggregate score Score
GamePressure 6.2/10 (Pre-release score)[1]
6.9/100 (User score)[2]
GameSpot 3.9/10 (User score)[3]

Given the very obscure release and distribution of the game, GM Rally hasn't received a lot of attention from the gamers and critics, and the few ratings that it received come mostly from the users, however, the only website that apparently gave the game some kind of score was GamePressure, giving it a pre-release expectation score of 6.2 out of 10. In the same website, the game has an average user score of 6.9 out of 10 based on 125 votes.[1]

In the GameSpot's website, the users have given the game an average score of 3.9 out of 10. Most of them just reviewed the game with the score system of the website, however, an user named "lewuz" wrote a very detailed review of the game, in which he rated the game with a 3 out of 10 and criticizes the useless mechanics that the game offers (Like the driver selector), the poor durability of the vehicles, the low prizes after winning a race and the high repairing and upgrading costs, the lackluster level design, the very poor AI of the opponents, the outdated graphics, the lack of a copilot and the bad audio design.

Videos

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Trivia

  1. As ironic as it sounds, GM Rally is currently one of the rarest PC games of all time. Physical copies cannot be found on any online store like eBay or Amazon and it's probable that its physical release was limited to a few copies in the Russian Federation. A Steam version was published worldwide in the same year of the release of the game, but as it tends to happen with licensed games, it was delisted a few years later, to be more specific, between the last months of 2010 and the first months of 2011, and from then, no one has ever sold a single key for a Steam copy of the game. The only proof of its existence is this community section of the game and its record on SteamDB.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 GamePressure: GM Rally - PC
  2. ↑ GamePressure: GM Rally - PC
  3. ↑ GameSpot: GM Rally Reviews

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