Category: PS & PC Games → Colin McRae Rally 04 Game PC Full Rip.

Earlier this year, Codemasters brought its most recent entry in the highly praised Colin McRae Rally racing series, Colin McRae Rally 04, to the US with apparent exclusivity on the Xbox. Initially, the game had been released on the Xbox, PS2, and PC in Europe, but for the game's North American retail release, Codemasters decided (for some reason) to just bring the Xbox version out. However, crafty PC driving fans with the gumption to investigate Codemasters' Web site soon learned that the PC version of the game could be acquired in North America--albeit exclusively through the Codemasters site and for a price that was more than twice the cost of the Xbox version's budget price tag. For what it's worth, however, the fact that the Xbox version of the game is as cheap as it is still remains something of an unexplained anomaly. Aside from this, though, the PC version's equally excellent driving gameplay, better graphics, and added, competitive online mode make the game every bit worth purchasing.

Colin McRae Rally 04 on the Xbox struck an incredibly fine balance between realistic and easily playable driving mechanics, and the PC version is no different. The game features four different car types, including four-wheel drive, two-wheel drive, Group B, and a bonus category. You will feel a pretty significant difference between the cars you play from different categories. For example, four-wheel drive cars are the much more traditional brand of rally racers; two-wheel drive vehicles are designed to be more like day-to-day cars that have been customized for rally purposes; and Group B cars are a notoriously fast bunch that were quite popular in rally racing during the 1980s but were eventually banned due to the many serious accidents they were involved in. When driving a two-wheel drive car or a Group B car, there is a very noticeable difference between them in both handling and speed. There are a little more than 20 cars in the game, and each and every one feels different and varied enough to make it enjoyable to drive time and time again.

Colin McRae 04 features support for all manner of controller types you could possibly want to use, be it a keyboard, an analog controller, or a driving wheel. The keyboard controls are probably the most unwieldy of the bunch, simply because the cars are so touchy when it comes to handling corners. Analog and driving-wheel controllers are probably your best bet, since we had the least-harrowing experiences trying to control our cars with these types of controllers. The driving-wheel method also gets a slight leg up on the analog method, because the game just feels much more realistic when using the wheel controller.



Minimum System Requirements

OS: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
Processor: Pentium 3 @ 750 MHz
Memory: 256 Mb
Hard Drive: 3 Gb free
Video Memory: 32 Mb
Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
DirectX: 9.0
Keyboard
Mouse