Sega Rally is one of those series that most people, outside of a small niche of Rally Racing game nerds and Sega fanatics, have forgotten about (or never even heard of). With bombastic music, unique settings for each track, and bright blue skies the arcade original and Saturn port sunk its fangs deep into us. The more technically inclined fans fell in love with the game for being one of the first racers that had unique surfaces with corresponding grip and handling differences. The next big title in the series was Sega Rally Championship for the Dreamcast, a game that split much of the fan base. Some thought it a fair entry equaling the majesty of the original while others pretty much despised the game and what it had changed from the first title.

Earlier this year Sega Rally Revo was announced for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC, and (unbeknown to me) the PSP. After spending quite a bit of time with the demo released on Xbox Live I was ready for the next Sega Rally game to be released, then I received the PSP version for review. After reading Ryan’s review (and from my previous experience with the game) I was ready and hoping to prove his score wrong. Unfortunately, he had a far better experience than I have. At first I couldn't figure out why this was until, and then I looked at the developer.

It turns out that Sega Rally Revo for the PSP wasn't even developed by the same team as the other versions, but was farmed out to Bugbear, the studio behind the Flatout games. My guess is that somewhere along the way SEGA Racing Studio (the developer for all other versions) stopped communicating or sharing information with Bugbear because the PSP version is completely different from what was released on the home console and PC. After learning this, I tried to think of the game much like I used to think of Game Gear ports, or even arcade titles (I have fond memories of the GG version of Samurai Shodown, okay?). So rather than comparing SRR to other versions I'll try to evaluate it in a vacuum, as though this was the sole version released.

When first loading up SRR the player has the options of a Quick Race, Championship, or Time Attack. Poking around in the Quick Race menu there are 15 tracks broken into three areas in five different settings; Safari, Alpine, Tropical, Arctic, and Canyon (uniquely labeled as Safari 1, 2, and 3 with the others following suite). A nice selection of different tracks with seemingly interesting locations. Going onto the Championships there are three different areas; Premier, Modified, and Masters. Each Championship has four different leagues; Amateur, Professional, Expert, and Final. Each League has different rally races to choose from, and the player must select a vehicle for each. While some vehicles come with predetermined wheel choices, most allow you to select from Road, Rally, or All-Terrain tires.

The rally races try to change things up each time with an assortment of the different locations, three in each. While one race may start with a Canyon track, then an Alpine track and finish on a Safari track, other races will have completely different track selections. This keeps the game feeling fresh after playing for a long period of time and completing many races in a single sitting. After winning specific rallies or leagues the player will be rewarded with new vehicles. But after a few rewards of this manner I began to notice some things.

The AI is initially very easy, and for a while I was finishing first in most races. After completing most of the leagues from the first Championship the AI got no more challenging until the finals. I picked the same car that had carried me through most of the rest of the championship and was constantly being left in the dust by other cars. I tried to do my best but still ended up finishing outside of first more times then not. Then after I completed the whole final league I unlocked the yellow car I constantly saw finishing first.--See, I would have taken better note of the vehicle earlier but when the stats are released at the end of each race the competitors are always labeled AI 1 through AI 5. On top of that the texture quality of the cars is so low that aside from either very recognizable logos, or huge text I couldn't figure out what they were. I even had problems reading the image text in the vehicle select screen for the car and constantly found myself looking up at the vehicle information. "Information" may be a little deceptive though as there wasn't much of it outside of the name.--I decided to pick the vehicle that took first place and re-race the whole league. Low and behold I smoked all the other vehicles and took home the gold.

Now I never claimed to be an observant person, but around this time I realized just how oblivious I'd been. See when I picked that car and blew the competition away I wanted to see the normal car statistics for it, things like maximum speed and gear ratios and all that fun stuff. But they're not anywhere to be found in the menus. Nothing, anywhere. Seriously. Instantly things changed when moving on into the next Championship as I had to try almost every vehicle to figure out which was the fastest, and which performed better under each terrain with what tires. This was starting to take a lot of time and one thing became very apparent to me: loading.

45 seconds is a long time. In that amount of time I've gone to the bathroom, ate a bagel, took a shot of vodka, combed my hair, watched three commercials, fed my fish, got something to drink, watched fourteen cars pass while stuck in traffic, and also waited for Sega Rally Revo to load. Seriously, I thought that this was done with. The PSP has been out for over two years now, developers should be able to avoid these excessive load times. This loading happens between each race, so for each league there's approximatly three rallies each with three races meaning that I sit through the loading 9 times. Based on the average time of a race in the game, I've spent roughly one quarter of the time playing it waiting for the game to load.

This is the point where I need to pull the PSP version out of the vacuum because it does have many things missing or removed from the other versions. Most notably is the music, which is a bit over the top in the console/PC version and here is much more like Musak. The originally vibrant and detailed locations have been muddied (not with the good kind of mud) and stripped of any kind of depth or interest that the originals contained. And, while perhaps this may seem like a godsend to someone like Ryan, the AI has no intelligence. Most of the time the opposition cars are set on a pre-defined path that they do not deviate from. When the player gets in the way of these paths they will frequently find themself with a car stuck into their rear quarter panel so it can attempt to stay its course. This makes the game exceptionally boring, and slowly I could bear less and less in each sitting until I received sweet relief by finishing this title.

Overall: 3.5/10
Even for a portable racing game, you can't go much worse picking up a random title than grabbing Sega Rally Revo. The PSP actually has a decent selection of racing titles, though not many focus on rally racing. If you're looking for more Sega Rally on the go, then you're not going to find that here either. With everything this game does wrong, the abominable loading times just push it over the edge into the poor side of the rating scale. This release mostly just stinks of terrible porting and a poor choice of outsourcing. Awful textures, muddy graphics, boring music, brain-dead AI, races that boil down to who has the fastest car, and 45 seconds of loading between each race... Sega seems to reaped what it has sewn.