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 are -in one word- superb. The game features great dashboard view and racing tracks with different weather conditions (just look at the snow dropping at your windscreen), realistic view of the driver shifting and turning the wheel (supported only on the Amiga, ST and PC versions). The game's visuals include a mix of 3D and pseudo-3D objects such as houses, trees etc but only with 16-20 colors on-screen. The Amiga version is actually an Atari ST direct port! Comparably, the MS-DOS version is way different in graphics (more detailed) and the game looks like it's being re-programmed for the IBM-compatible computers. The Amiga (and the ST) versions occasionally have framerate problems but this is not enough to ruin the experience. The game is very playable and fun in every aspect! Soundwise, the game has some fantastic sampled engine effects, a digitized co-driver voice and a cool, 70s style, intro music in high sampling rate (as usual).
GAMEPLAY SAMPLE VIDEO On our video below you may watch the Amstrad CPC, Atari ST and Amiga OCS versions of the game.
CPU: Motorola MC68000 7.16 MHz MEMORY: 512KB of Chip RAM (OCS chipset - A500), 512 KB of Slow RAM or Trapdoor RAM can be added via the trapdoor expansion, up to 8 MB of Fast RAM or a Hard drive can be added via the side expansion slot. The ECS chipset (A500+) offered 1MB on board to 2MB (extended) of Chip RAM. GRAPHICS: The OCS chipset (Amiga 500) features planar graphics (codename Denise custom chip), with up to 5 bit-planes (4 in hires), allowing 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 color screens, from a 12bit RGB palette of 4096 colors. Resolutions varied from 320x256 (PAL, non-interlaced, up to 4096 colors) to 640x512 (interlace, up to 4 colors). Two special graphics modes where also included: Extra Half Bright with 64 colors and HAM with all 4096 colors on-screen. The ECS chipset models (Amiga 500+) offered same features but also extra high resolution screens up to 1280x512 pixels (4 colors at once). SOUND: (Paula) 4 hardware-mixed channels of 8-bit sound at up to 28 kHz. The hardware channels had independent volumes (65 levels) and sampling rates, and mixed down to two fully left and fully right stereo outputs