World Rally Fever: The Road to Victory Finale

 Part 1  |  Part 2 |  Part 3

31/08/11 - Currently banging my head against Kyoto in the Pro Cup. If I don't make some progress soon, I think I'm going to throw in the towel here. - JiliK's Backloggery

I'll level with you guys here. A few days after I scrawled this on my Backloggery, with no progress to show, I did throw in the towel. When I started writing this feature up, I hadn't actually touched this game in almost nine months, and as much I saw the need to finish it now that I'd started this, I really didn't think I was up to the task. The Hawaii tracks aside, this cup started off with easily the two most insane courses I'd encountered in the game up to that point, and as much experience as I had playing this game, I just wasn't able to crack them.

I planned to take on the Pro Cup again at some point before I finished this feature, but then something happened that not only got me back playing the game immediately, but also kept me motivated all the way to the final chequered flag: someone beat me to the punch. Out of the blue, another YouTube user started, and finished the game over the span of like, a week, handily beating my efforts and leaving my precious nerd cred in tatters. :D There was only way to redeem myself now: I needed to beat this fucking game for once and for all, no matter what it took.

France (Pro)



Remember how I mentioned this game's love for putting walls where they just don't belong? Well, this track's the poster child for that. The four interlocking walls halfway around the track are the main culprit in this respect, requiring some very tight, careful manoeuvring to take at speed; something that only came to me after a lot of trial and error. The sets of walls jutting out from the side of the track look harmless enough in the video above, but I found myself being rammed between them much more than I'd like by the the AI, loosing precious acceleration in the process.

Being the first track in the cup and as such, the first one I managed to master, it was pretty much vital to grab first place here before proceeding in order to have any hope of winning

Kyoto (Pro)




The Pro-Am version was bad, but this is that on crack. As if the tricky area with the indoor wall wasn't difficult enough to squeeze through the first time, in fine Human Centipede fashion they grafted another identical area onto it, giving you twice the walls to weave around and exponentially more opportunities for the even more aggressive AI to ram you into them. If I came out of the starting grid anywhere in the top three, I could be guaranteed to be slammed into the first wall by the cavalcade of turds behind me, coming to a dead halt and spending the next half a lap in seventh or eight place if I was lucky and a distant eight place if I wasn't. Eventually I adopted a strategy of stopping outside the area and waiting for the AI horde to pass me by before going in. It might have left me in eight, but at least I wasn't so far behind the pack that I wouldn't make any progress for half a lap.

The sliding doors also returned from the Pro-Am track, this time in greater numbers. But after racing on the track a few times, I noticed something interesting that helped me negate a lot of the frustration they previously caused: I noticed that every time an AI racer passed through them, they immediately flung open for them. Rather than setting the disc on fire after learning the game was even more cheap than I had previously imagined, I used my new-found knowledge to piggy back on my adversaries through the freshly-opened doors as much as I could. Something I couldn't do if I got left behind after that first bloody indoor area.

New York (Pro)



16/06/12 - Time to take this one home. Feeling pretty good about the France and Tokyo Pro tracks now. Working on New York at the moment. - JiliK's Backloggery

As a returning area from the Rookie Cup, I was hoping that this track wouldn't be too bad and really it isn't. The trickiest section is by far the the one with the three gaps in quick succession. I had a lot of trouble here trying to nail down the timing of the jumps here. After a lot more trial and error, I managed to finally suss it out, even discovering that if if I ignored the final gap, my momentum at that point would take me across it. With the AI's penchant for leaving that bullshit confusion power-up (that only they have access to btw) right in the path of my jump, that was quite a helpful discovery.

Other than that section, the only problem with this track is its relatively short length. Without long laps to catch up after making a mistake, there really isn't much room for error here.

Himalayas (Pro)



22/06/12 - Still working on the Pro Cup. I'm pretty close to beating it now, if only I could avoid being constantly screwed over by the AI characters. - JiliK's Backloggery

And here it is, folks: the end of my winning run through the Pro Cup. A run I only discovered I wasn't recording a few seconds after this race started. Eleven and a half years after my only glimpse of this track on the back of box, I was finally hurtling towards victory on it.

For the last track in the game, this is an astonishingly straightforward one. With the Himalayan setting too, you could easily see them cramming all sorts of bullshit into this one from falling rocks to avalanches to narrow, twisty paths with falling rocks and avalanches collapsing onto them. That's what I was expecting anyway. In reality though, the obstacles here come in the form of trio of jumps more generously spaced out than in the previous track, and a cave area that may be narrow and may have some rocks to manoeuvre around around, but it's in no way as insane to get through as sections of the first two tracks in this cup.

The gaps early on do take a little practice to get around successfully, with rocks placed in some quite evil positions within their vicinity and a cliff on the left side of the track, but once you don't screw up there, it's not too hard to grab at least second on this track. Whether that gives you enough points to wrap things up is another matter of course. I'm not sure if it's noticeable, but I cut out a part here where I paused just before the finish line to try and figure out just that. Even though I'd had a blistering run through the previous tracks, and I was pretty convinced second place would be enough, I had to be sure; I was too close to finally beating this to screw up now.



26/06/12 - Done and dusted. In your face, Chuckie J!

Indeed, second place was more than enough; I had a whole extra point to spare! Having crossed that finish line, I'd finally laid the first entry in my backlog to rest. Almost a year after starting this campaign, having spent a solid week of playing this for hours, night after night after night, I couldn't have been more excited about that fact. Who ever thought an obscure racing game I picked up at random a decade ago would turn into such an ordeal? :D

World Rally Fever: The Road to Victory Part 3

So, after tussling with the insane final track for days, I managed to seize victory in the Amateur Cup. Next up was the Pro-Am, one that I'd only dabbled with back in the day that, for the first time in this campaign featured a track I'd never been on or even seen before. And even more worryingly, another bloody Hawaiian track. This wasn't going to be easy.

Utah (Pro-Am)



The cup kicks off with a reasonably easy track, though my rustiness here stops it from being a complete cakewalk. Well, that and Chuckie J. being an asshole as usual. :D The only genuinely tricky section here is the dino skeleton about halfway through, which took quite a bit of practice and quite a bit of restraint with the accelerator to get past without stalling.

Kyoto (Pro-Am) 



Kyoto is a different matter altogether. While the rocks littering the sides of the track can prove hazardous (as you'll see above :D), the trickiest parts here are the two indoor areas. The second one features this ridiculous wall slapped in the middle of it, between two narrow doorways, requiring some insanely tight manoeuvring to get through at speed; exactly what you need to do to stand a chance of placing well here. The first one isn't much better with a pair of doors that open and close in a pattern that doesn't necessarily coincide with you needing to get past them. It's entirely possible here to find one of the doors slamming shut as you hurtle down the track towards it, requiring you to brake to avoid hitting it; something which never seems to impact the AI racers, who'll happily speed past your stalled car as the door edges open.

Hawaii (Pro-Am)



 15/08/11 - Eff me, I'd forgotten about the second Hawaii stage in the Pro Cup. That's where I'm stuck at the moment. - JiliK's Backloggery

Here we go again; another five laps around an track so narrow that you need to lube up your kart beforehand. :D Though honestly, despite the contradictory video evidence, I didn't find this one as hard as the first. There was a ton of different bullshit to navigate around on that track, keeping you constantly on your toes, constantly changing your strategy for each obstacle. Here the track alternates only between wide, open sections and narrow corridors of trees, so you always know what's coming up next. And once you've mastered getting through the wooded sections you've pretty much mastered the track, even if that's easier said than done.

Sorry about the lack of sound effects here, but there's no way I'm going back to do this again. :D

Italy (Pro-Am)



17/08/11 - Managed to get to Italy in Pro-Am for the first time ever tonight. Still struggling with Hawaii, but the cup's firmly in sight now. :D - JiliK's Backloggery

Things could have gone really pear-shaped here if Italy turned out to be a track in the same vein as Kyoto or Hawaii, but thankfully it on the easier side of the game's courses. The video above is my very first run through the track. A run I was feeling quite confident about until I ran afoul of the track's only obstacles: a set of cranes swinging huge crates across the road. Although you've got a much better chance of avoiding these than Kyoto's sliding doors, you've really got to stay sharp to make sure you don't receive a face full of splinters as you approach them.




21/08/11 - The Pro-Am Cup is toast, only four tracks left to go now.

Out of the four tracks, Kyoto and Hawaii were the two stumbling blocks, but once I'd finally got to grips with them, the cup soon followed, unlocking the Pro Cup to me for the first time ever. *gulp*

On to the Grand Finale!

World Rally Fever: The Road to Victory Part 2

When we last left my World Rally fever campaign, I was feeling pretty optimistic about things. When I embarked on this campaign, I was afraid that beating the game would be an insurmountable task, but with the Rookie Cup under my belt with relatively little effort, perhaps that wasn't going to be the case after all.

Much like the Rookie Cup, I'd played through the Amateur Cup quite a bit in 2001 and even a bit in 2002. At the time I had completing the first two tracks down to a fine art and I'd certainty raced the final track several times with the prospect of a cup victory very much in contention. Why had I never beaten it? I didn't remember, but I was about to get well acquainted with why as I set my sights on cup number two.

Tokyo (Amateur Cup)



We kick things off with a pretty straightforward track; one that I've raced on dozens of times back in the day. Even with a lot of experience here though, the trucks that randomly cross the road can still be quite a pain in the ass to avoid. Unfortunately, they won't be the last randomly occurring obstacles we see in the game either. Awesome music though; easily the best tune in the game here.

Utah (Amateur Cup)



Man, I used to be able to destroy this track. It wasn't without a lot of practice, but the tight bends, the narrow track, the piles of tyres, even the freaking dinosaur skeleton, I was able to tear through all of it and cruise into first without breaking into a sweat. Coming back to it ten years later, I got to re-experience just how freaking hard this track actually was, which is extremely freaking hard. :D It took quite a bit of fresh practice here before I was even placing high enough to proceed, let alone coming first. Not one of my finer performances above, but I was definitely getting there at that stage.

Scotland (Amateur Cup)



Overall, this isn't too much of a step up in difficulty from the first Scotland track, for the most part anyway. There are two quite risky jumps over water about 3/4 of the way around the track though, one after another. Both of these require you to avoid some unhelpfully-placed obstacles, the second one also requiring you to line up your jump so that you can swerve around a bend while in the air. Tricky stuff, but surely a high-level player like myself would have no problem pulling those types of jumps off, without say, colliding into a bunch of rocks...

Hawaii (Amateur Cup)



Utah may have been tough, but the Amateur Cup's final challenge is a fucking nightmare. There's really no respite to be found anywhere here. First of all, the whole track is extremely narrow, which is bad news for overtaking - given how aggressive the other racers tend to be, it's usually best to give them a wide berth least they bounce you into a nearby obstacle. And obstacles you'll find aplenty here: the whole right side is a wall of momentum-killing greenery; the whole left side is bordering a fucking ocean and in no less than three points during each lap, you need to weave through an even narrower path between these existing hazards, and a set of trees, bushes or hedges in the middle of the track, requiring such precision to navigate that you feel like you're performing a high-speed endoscopy or threading the world's most insane needle. Ah, now I remember why I didn't beat the Amateur Cup.

07/08/11 - I've almost got the Amateur Cup, I just need a bit of luck to finish 2nd or 3rd in Hawaii. Holy crap, that's a badly designed track. - JiliK's Backloggery

I didn't come this far to give up now though. What helped me eke out a passable result here I think was lowering the CPU cycles in DOSBox, slowing the game down. That helped me out quite a bit to get through the more obstacle-ridden parts of the track, not without crashing, but at least crashing a little less often. In the end I think it was still more luck than skill that finally got me through this bloody track.



07/08/11 - I got through Hawaii somehow to finally grab the Amateur Cup. I'm halfway through the game now and further than I ever got in 2001/2. - JiliK's Backloggery

And with Hawaii mastered, well sort-of, World Rally Fever's Amateur Cup was in the bag. This was the furthest I'd ever gotten in the game, but after that last track, I was feeling a lot more sketchy about the two cups to come. I would have felt even more so if I'd known where the next cup would have me revisiting.

On to Part 3

World Rally Fever: The Road to Victory Part 1

If I were to point to a game that marked the beginning of my massive backlog, World Rally Fever would probably be it. I picked it up in the crappy game section of a local toy store along with Pokémon Yellow in the early Summer of 2001. I played it a fair amount throughout the Summer, nudging my way onto the winner's podium of the game's first cup. By the time Autumn rolled around though, I found myself suddenly swamped in cheap, second-hand PC games, my brother and I had grabbed from a few on-line auctions and classified ads.

When I was only able to get hold of one game every four or five months before, I squeezed every ounce of goodness I could from it. Even if it was bastard-hard or utterly unfathomable to figure out, I'd still sit down with it again and again and try my best to make any progress I could, because what else was I going to play? Now though, I had a crapton of stuff to play. I didn't need to push myself to get past World Rally Fever's fairly challenging later tracks any more; I had Grand Theft Auto and Caesar III and Cannon Fodder to play. And those were only the beginning of a deluge of cheaper budget and used games that grew and grew, year after year, as my disposable income increased and the availability of cheaper games increased. As the number of games I had shot up, so did the amount of them left unplayed, ignored or forgotten sitting on my shelves, but World Rally Fever was the first of them.

With my effort last year to tackle my backlog coinciding with the tenth anniversary of me picking up the game, I knew I had to take a shot at beating this. With wired 360 pad in hand, Joy2Key running away in the background, I set off again through World Rally Fever's first track. This time though it wasn't to test DOSBox's compatibility for the umpteenth time; it wasn't to capture a YouTube video for Listal. For the first time in ten years, I sat down to actually play the game. The only thing that was going to stop me this time was the game itself beating me over the head with it's immense difficulty.(And holy shit, did it beat me. :D)

So, come with me as we take a trip through this forgotten mid-90's racer, as I attempt to finally lay the first entry in my gaming backlog to rest. First stop: Scotland.

Um, before we board for the highlands though, I should point out that none of these videos are from a single run through any of the cups. Most of them were captured as I played through the game last summer, my aim being to get a winning performance to post to YouTube. That only worked out up to a point however, as we'll see later. :D They'll definitely give you a good idea of what I was dealing with though. Now that that's out of the way, the Rookie Cup awaits:

Scotland (Rookie Cup)



As first tracks go, Scotland is no Mario Circuit. There's ample opportunity for calamity with both sides of the tracks dotted with stones. The main obstacle to look out for here is the water. trying to drive through it or colliding with the grass after a botched jump are both going to do a number on you. I've raced this track so many times now though, that cruising to first place is never a problem here.

I've got to apologise for the video quality and lack of sound effects here. This is one of the handful of WRF videos I uploaded to YouTube in the early days of my blog. I didn't actually know the game had sound effects at the time and I was unfortunately relying on Windows Movie Maker for my video editing needs. It really doesn't help that YouTube compresses everything to crap either. I might upload newer versions of these tracks at some point, but the newer videos are stretching my terrible upload speed to capacity at the moment.

Rio (Rookie Cup)



A couple of slightly tricky bends aside, this is a much simpler course than Scotland. I'm a big fan of the upbeat music in this one. Some really impressive fake ads dotted around the track too. Oh, and I've just noticed the super low-res Christ the Redeemer in the background. Awesome! :D

France (Rookie Cup)



Here's where the pain begins. :D France give us out first taste of the developer's penchant for putting walls on race tracks where they just don't belong. And one of them has a absolute bastard of a corner leading up to it. Will I be able to pull another victory out of the bag after an early wall-based setback?  Will I ever manage to take that bloody corner without colliding into it? All will be revealed between multiple sheep blugeonings.

New York (Rookie Cup)



Yeah, I think you guys will immediately see why I held off starting this feature back in September. As for the track itself, it may not be as tough as France is, but with gaps to jump, destructible railings and some more precariously positioned walls, it really makes you work hard for that trophy.

 

06/08/11 - Beat the Rookie Cup tonight for the first time in ten years. Next up, the Amateur Cup, though Utah is proving to be my undoing ATM. - JiliK's Backloggery

Thinking back to playing the game in 2001, I remembered having a pretty tough time even beating the Rookie Cup. Having clinched it without too much effort this time, I have to admit I was feeling pretty confident heading into the Amateur Cup. I had obviously forgotten about the Hawaii track. But World Rally Fever was about to deliver a refresher course...

On to Part 2

World Rally Fever Save File - Pro Cup Unlocked

Given that it's ten years since I bought it, I decided to dig out World Rally Fever again a few weeks ago and have a go at finally beating it. I managed to clear the rookie cup back in 2001, but never got any further. Playing it now, I can see that that's mainly because it's bloody hard.

I've got a bunch of videos recorded and a little bit of a write-up planned for later, but  having finally unlocked the pro cup within the last hour, I thought I'd upload a copy of my save file so anyone who wants to check out the final cup can do so without enduring the keyboard-flinging frustration this would otherwise involve.

Get your copy here, you filthy cheater (full instructions included).

Video: Running World Rally Fever in DOSBox 0.72

While I was able to get every other DOS game I had running with DOSBox a few years ago, there was one that just flat out refused to co-operate. That was "World Rally Fever", the kart racer I was harping on about a few weeks ago. It really ticks me off when there's something I can't get working, no matter what I try. >:|

Thankfully those saviours of retro gaming, the DOSBox team managed implement the functionality needed to play the game earlier in the year. Joy unbounded, I could finally play it for five minutes before leaving it to gather dust on my shelf again for years. :D

At the moment the version of the game I have is only playable by using one of the in-development (CVS) builds of the emulator, though I imagine that the next version will be able to run it in the same way. While it's probably playable in many of the later CVS builds, the one I'm using is from 06/01/08 and it runs the game very well on my PC.

The other day someone on YouTube asked how I managed to get it running, so I decided that it might be a good idea to put together a bit of a tutorial on the process for anyone that's wondering how to do it.

I've put up the CVS build of DOSBox I'm using here: http://www.mediafire.com/?xoubk29hbd5zgvb

You can download DOSBox from the DOSBox site.

World Rally Fever Video

World Rally Fever is a old DOS racing game from Team 17, the Worms guys. I picked it up as a blind buy in 2001 and I was presently surprised by it. It's not the greatest racing game in the world, but it's good fun and I have a soft spot for the soundtrack.

I was searching on YouTube a few weeks ago for some videos to add to the game's Listal page and I was disappointed to discover that there weren't any with the music intact. So, I went and made my own. I had to rip the music from the CD and add it to the video mind you, but it's now there for your enjoyment.