Top Gear Rally

Top Gear Rally is a rally game for the Nintendo 64, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance. The Game Boy Color version was released under the name Top Gear Pocket, although the European release uses the original name; the Game Boy Advance version was released in Japan under the game Top Gear Rally SP. It features five tracks. It has a feature that allows the user to give their virtual cars custom paint jobs. Although the name stayed the same, the developers changed between consoles. As a result, the games are very different depending on the platform, but they have similar features such as the paint shop.

Nintendo 64
On the Nintendo 64, Top Gear Rally features a realistic physics model with functioning suspension. Road surfaces, including their imperfections, were modeled to give the player the feeling of actually driving a car. The game has a single-player mode and a two-player mode via split screen.

Each vehicle in the game differs from the others in terms of engine power, tire grip, suspension stiffness, steering tightness, and drive-train (such as front-wheel drive, rear-wheel drive, and four-wheel drive). Vehicles can be damaged, although the damage does not affect performance.

Neither Kemco nor Boss Games Studios had licenses to use real car names, though all the cars are modeled after real vehicles.

The game features a soundtrack consisting of music with roots in the trance genre. The electronic XM music was composed by Barry Leitch, who also worked on the prior Top Gear games for the Super NES. The Japanese and European releases of Top Gear Rally had a different title tune than the North American version. The Japanese and European releases utilized electronic music while the North American version was more mild and dramatic.

Windows
Top Gear Rally was also ported to the PC and released in 1999 as Boss Rally.

Game Boy Advance
The Game Boy Advance version has 3D graphics considered impressive for the system. It was released in 2003.

Development
The development team opted to limit the multiplayer mode to two players because simultaneous four-player racing would have forced them to compromise on either the draw distance or their target frame rate of 30 frames per second.

Reception
The Game Boy Advance version received "generally favorable reviews" according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. In Japan, Famitsu gave it a score of one seven, two eights, and one seven for a total of 30 out of 40.

Sequels

 * Top Gear Rally 2
 * Top Gear Overdrive