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 graphics are -in one word- superb. Note that the MS-DOS version is technically different compared to the original Atari ST and Amiga versions and it looks like it's being programmed from scratch! In general, it features a great dashboard view, fantastic levels with different weather conditions and several 3D objects such as houses, road signs, trees etc! The PC version runs either in VGA (256 colors) or EGA (16 colors) both featuring cool visuals (see pics below), with smooth animation in a full 3D environment. But there a few visual features missing from the MS-DOS version (such as the realistic view of the driver gear-shifting and turning the driving-wheel, found only on the ST and Amiga), but here the background details are way better with more colors (when running on VGA mode) and extra objects in 3D! Also, the game runs faster than the ST and Amiga due to the higher CPU clock of a 386/486 based PC. The sound on the DOS version is good and supports Adlib and Sound Blaster compatible cards, featuring either in-game music or sound effects (such as car engine, breaking, crashing etc) but the Amiga and ST versions are a bit better (featuring a better music and some extra sampled sound effects such as co-driver’s speech indicating the turns and curves!)
CPU: Various processors from Intel,AMD, Cyrix, varying from 4.77Mhz (Intel 8088) to 200Mhz (Pentium MMX) and up to 1995 (available on this site) MEMORY: 640Kb to 32MB RAM (typical up to 1996) GRAPHICS: VGA standard palette has 256 colors and supports: 640x480 (16 colors or monochrome), 640x350 in 16 colors (EGA compatability mode), 320x200 (16 or 256 colors). Later models (SVGA) featured 18bit color palette (262,144-color) or 24bit (16Milion colors), various graphics chips supporting hardware acceleration mainly for 3D-based graphics routines. SOUND: 8 to 16 bit sound cards: Ad-Lib featuring Yamaha YMF262 supporting FM synthesis and (OPL3) and 12-bit digital PCM stereo, Sound Blaster and compatibles supporting Dynamic Wavetable Synthesis, 16-bit CD-quality digital audio sampling, internal memory up to 4MB audio channels varying from 8 to 64! etc. Other notable sound hardware is the release of Gravis Ultrasound with outstanding features!