Installments
There have been five games released in the Sega Rally series. Two games were developed by Sega AM3, one was developed by Sega, and two were developed by Sega Racing Studio. The original game was designed by Tetsuya Mizuguchi. Sega Rally Championship was released on SEGA's Model 2 board and became very popular in the arcades, so that SEGA ported it to their own gaming system of the time, the Sega Saturn.
This port was of excellent quality and looked much better than PlayStation racing games of the same era. It ran in smooth 60 frames per second (50 frames in Europe due to the PAL system) and looked very much like the arcade original. Exceptions are non-transparent windows, since SEGA's Saturn could not generate transparencies in 3D graphics, as well as the draw distance, which was shorter than in the arcade game. Also, the screen resolution had to be cut in half. A PC port based on the Saturn version followed about one year later. It looked exactly like the Saturn version until SEGA released a patch for Microsofts DirectX 5 renderer. This patch modernised the graphics heavily. However, it made the PC version look far less related to the original arcade game, since it used a smoothing texture filter and brighter textures. The biggest difference between the original and its home versions is the option to drive three laps on each of the four implemented tracks instead of only one lap. Good players could also unlock an extra car: the Lancia Stratos. In the arcades there were only a Toyota Celica and a Lancia Delta to choose from.
Sega Rally Championship 2 was released on Sega's Model 3 hardware. A port was released for SEGA's Dreamcast console and belonged to the very first games of the system at the Japanese release in November 1998. However, the Dreamcast version suffered from an unstable frame rate and wasn't as successful as its predecessor. The arcade original featured only four courses, while the port had between one and three courses for each of the five implemented environments, all wrapped up in a so called 10-year championship. Again, a PC port followed. Sega Rally Championship 2 on DC and PC featured a lot of tuning options for the cars, including choice of tires and suspension, which could not be found in the arcades.
Sega Rally 3 was released in 2008 and is a condensed version of Sega Rally Revo for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. So this time the port went the other way around. Sega Rally 3 was released as Sega Rally Online Arcade for Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2011 and came full circle from consoles to arcades and back again.
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