Toyota Celica GT Rally is a 3D racing game in the likes of Accolade's Test Drive, developed for the Atari ST, Commodore Amiga and PC (MS-DOS), Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum. This game took the racing genre of the era, into another dimension.
Review
STORY / GAMEPLAY Toyota Celica GT, is quite decent for the 8bit and one of the most realistic driving games for the 16bit home computers. Your task is to drive your Toyota Celica and beat your opponents (time is the most important), through 30 demanding levels from rainy England to snowy Finland and the sandstorm hit Mexico! Your only weapon to this is your skills in driving and of course the guidance from your co-driver (much useful when low visibility is countered such as when racing under snowy conditions. On the 16bit versions, the co-driver will give some guidance, but should you want every bend and turn indicated you'll need to carry out your own co-driver preparation. The way the co-driver is acting can be altered the way you want by selecting the racing map area and instruct where your co-driver should indicate the soft or hard turns! The game also supports reversed steering, an impressive for its time addition in the racing games genre! The gears can be manual or automatic. Toyota Celica GT is one of the most impressive rally games ever released for the home-computers of the 90s!
GRAPHICS / SOUND Toyota Celica's graphics look great on the ZX with the player driving from the car's dashboard and a realistic (for its time) view of the gear shifting and wheel turning. Although the animation is very slow on the ZX, the game is great fun to play. The ZX version has a nice intro music and a few basic sound effects that cover the car's engine, brakes and crashes.
CPU: Z80 @ 3.5 MHz MEMORY: 16 KB / 48 KB / 128 KB GRAPHICS: Video output is through an RF modulator and was designed for use with contemporary portable television sets, for a simple colour graphic display. Features a palette of 15 shades: seven colours at two levels of brightness each, plus black. The image resolution is 256x192 with the same colour limitations. SOUND: Early models (48k) had sound output through a beeper on the machine itself. This is capable of producing one channel with 10 octaves. Late models (128k) fetured a three-channel audio via the AY-3-8912 chip, MIDI compatibility