This is a comparison page for Sega Rally and Rally Cross for the Saturn and Playstation 1. All written comparisons, movies, and JPGs were made while playing the games on the actual console and taken from the actual console through an S-Video connection.

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Comparison Comments

Graphics

Sega Rally(1995) runs at a solid 30 frames per second at an unknown but apparently higher resolution, with higher resolution (an exact size comparison is unknown) textures and higher color depth textures, but no dynamic lighting or transparency. The light and dark effects on the cars in tunnels and on the ground under trees is achieved through texture mapping, not light sourcing of any kind. Rally Cross(1997) runs at 320x240 below 30 frames per second most of the time, with gouraud shading on the cars and the track, and transparent smoke effects.

Both games feature noticable pop-up at all times, but it is significantly masked by track design and relatively far from the camera for racers of this level of detail. With the gouraud shading and transparency jacking up the color counts the movie files for Rally Cross should have been a much larger file if texture map color counts were equal. 3ivx Compression was used on all video files with the exact same settings, and audio is uniformly captured at 1411 kbps. This seems to demonstrate a significant increase in color per texture for the Saturn game.

Sound

Both games use digital voice samples and CD Audio.

Gameplay

Both games feature very similar gameplay, physics and AI. The biggest notable difference is that the cars in Rally Cross have roll physics and Sega Rally does not. However, Sega Rally's physics are advanced enough to compare to the later Gran Turismo games, which is to say that neither is probably doing more in the physics department all things considered. Load times are similar with Sega Rally being 8 seconds and Rally Cross being 11 seconds to the track from the previous menu.

Conclusion

Comparing a game on any one systems with development times over two years apart is tenuous at best, and deceptive at the worst. Comparing the same across platforms should produce horribly lopsided results in favor of the system with any technical advantage. Instead, what this comparison has produced is yet another stalemate in technical performance. Sega Rally and Rally Cross are both fine representations of their genre, with Rally Cross being by far the less technical of the two.

Graphically the odds are stacked evenly in both corners. Sega Rally has the image quality and framerate to challenge any racer of its generation, and Rally Cross competes but includes special effects like transparent dirt and gouraud shaded scenary.