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Feral Interactive has never been shy about publishing racing games. The company has published racing games like F1 Championship Season 2000, Total Immersion Racing, and more recently, Ford Racing 2. Today the company is announcing what may be the company's most ambitious and highest profile game yet: Colin McRae Rally 2005. Arguably the best racing sim available on the market today, Colin McRae Rally 2005 is all about in-your-face adrenaline racing.Colin McRae Rally 2005 has a great laundry list of features including 30 cars, 20 individual rally events, 300 stages, and 9 international locations. Needless to say, when this baby comes out later this fall, this is the one racing game to get for the Mac. Colin McRae Rally 2005 includes a number of gameplay modes to keep you busy, the most exciting of which is career mode. In this mode you start out in the lower leagues of club rallying and work your way up in rally events including Challenges, Cups, SuperCups, Shield, and Championships. By earning points in career mode, you can unlock additional career events and many of the unlockable rally cars available in the game. The game also includes a simpler championship mode and a multiplayer component. In the online version you race against eight other players. Your online competitors are displayed as brightly colored "ghost cars" and fade in brightness as they get closer to you. For technical reasons, the Mac version will support Mac to Mac online and lan play. Graphically Colin McRae Rally 2005 is mouth-wateringly great. Stages feature interactive scenery, so if you push too hard and hit a tree, you'll see it shudder from the impact and drop leaves from the branches. Collisions will also result in a dazed effect, where your vision will be blurred for a very short period from impact. Lighting effects, in particular, are extremely well done with dramatic orange sunsets and bright sunny days. The game also includes support for pixel and vertex shaders, so the Mac version will look fantastic on video cards that have support for those. Other nice touches include sparks flying off the car when scraping against metal. Colin McRae Rally legendary damage engine is so good that even light touches can scratch the paintwork. Panels and components can be deformed and removed in a realistic manner, showing the mechanical components of the car in extreme detail. There are two damage modes in the game: normal and advanced. In normal mode, you can take plenty of chances with your car and still be able to make it through the stage without any major damage. Advanced damage is a bit more unforgiving and is meant for expert drivers. Colin McRae Rally 2005 also features over 30 vehicles that include the Volkswagen Golf MK5, Toyota Celica GT-FOUR, Lancia Stratos, Alfa Romeo 147 GTA, Alfetta GTV Turbodelta, Mitsubishi Lancer Evo VIII, Peugeot 206, 205 T16 Evo2, and VW Beetle RSi, to name a few. Each car is modeled realistically and each car "feels" different from one another. Even cars in the same performance class handle differently. The game also includes nine different rally events including the UK, Sweden, Finland, Australia, Spain, Japan, Greece, USA, and Germany. Each event includes eight drivable stages, and some events include additional enclosed super special courses. Each rally event is finely detailed and different from one another, so you won't get bored driving each course over and over. What we've covered so far is just a small sampling of what's in Colin McRae Rally 2005. As the game gets closer to shipping, we'll be posting a more in-depth preview of the game. In the meantime be sure to check out the screenshots and some of the QuickTime trailers of the game by clicking on the links below.
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