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 good on the 8bit CPC but I guess we needed a better color selection. The game is played from a nice dashboard view and it has a realistic (for the CPC's hardware) view of the gear shifting and wheel turning. Although the animation is very slow, the game is great fun to play. A very nice intro tune is also included and there are a few sound effects like the car's engine and crashing or braking sounds during gameplay.
GAMEPLAY SAMPLE VIDEO
On our video below you may watch the Amstrad CPC, Atari ST and Amiga OCS versions of the game.
CPU: ZiLOG Z80 4MHZ MEMORY: 64 KB or 128 KB of RAM depending on the model (capable of being expanded to 512k using memory extension boards) GRAPHICS: Motorola 6845 address generator, Mode 0: 160x200 / 16 colors, Mode 1: 320x200 / 4 colors, Mode 2: 640x200 / 2 colors, A colour palette of 27 colors was supported SOUND: The CPC used the General Instrument AY-3-8912 sound chip, providing 3 channels Mono Sound (via internal speaker) but capable to offer Stereo Sound provided through a 3.5 mm headphones jack (with pretty impressive outcome!). Also, it is possible to play back digital sound samples at a resolution of approximately 5bit. This technique is very processor-intensive though.