XT Rally (2005) - Every PC Rally Game
0XT Rally by Villaseca Spielmann, 2005.
This was a small rally game released via the Trymedia/Trygames system, protected by the ActiveMARK DRM, which gives you 1 hour of gameplay, then locks the software, meaning you needed to purchase the game to keep playing. Unfortunately ActiveMARK is now no more, meaning if you find this game online you'll either need to keep creating virtual machines to run your 1 hour trial on, or follow a complicated guide to work around ActiveMARK, which I can't even begin to follow!
So, what about this game? It has 3 cars (that perform the same), and 3 tracks (valley, hill and desert locations). The original xtrally.com site (now long offline) allowed fastest times to be uploaded to a global scoreboard. It also contained two extra tracks, but archive.org didn't manage to archive them, and after speaking to the main developer, he doesn't still have them either, so I think they're lost to time!
It's a very arcade affair, and isn't particularly amazing on the graphics or sound front. The game uses the old Direct3D Retained mode, so it's pretty clunky on modern hardware. It also seems to run at around 30 fps internally (despite FRAPS saying it's nearer 60 fps drawing to the screen), so it looks a bit jerky here!
This wasn't the last rally racing game that the team worked on, we'll come to the others a bit later on...
This is part of the Every PC Rally Game playlist, which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYDobL0b26ugFuXASCIC9qmFb9_k4_fqU