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Snow Rally Canada :: News 


Allen Gall
Games Editor
Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine
 allen@pocketpcmag.com

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Guide to Reviews

"Platform" tells you what version of the Pocket PC operating system you'll need to run the game. If you see a +, it means the game also runs on newer devices.

PPC2000 Pocket PC 2000 devices (iPAQs, Casios, Jornadas, etc.). Since these devices use several different CPUs, check with the developer about your specific device.
PPC2002  Pocket PC 2002 devices (iPAQ 3800s, Toshiba 740s, etc.).
WM2003 Windows Mobile 2003 devices (iPAQ 2215s, 5500s, etc.).
WM5.0 Windows Mobile 5.0 devices (Dell X51, X51v, etc.)

Ratings are based on a scale of 1 to 4:
1=poor
2=fair
3=good
4=excellent



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The game I played most this week: Snow Rally Canada

 

Let's Race: Snow Rally Canada

So here we have another attempt at a racing game from OmniG Soft. Those of you who’ve been in the scene for a long time (and by that I mean since 2001-2002 or so) know that OmniG has a very spotty history. Their early racing games, such as Mini-Sportsbike, Mini-Aquabike, and Mini-TransCanada had poor graphics, sluggish frame rates, and were very shoddily constructed overall. It seemed like they were starting to find themselves with decent titles like Owen’s Monster Truck and Chopper Fight.

Snow Rally Canada is their newest racing game, and it has more in common with their earlier titles than Owen’s and Chopper. Like its predecessors, it’s a straightforward racing game. A little too straightforward, actually: you get only one racing mode; there’s no championship, career, time trial modes, or the like. OmniG’s titles often seem more like games built around a graphics engine than well-planned games that make use a graphics engine, and SRC definitely falls into the first category.

That’s not to say that SRC is as bad as OmniG’s early titles. Far from it: in the big scheme of things, it’s still one of the company’s better titles. The graphics run full screen and have an acceptable (though not great) frame rate. One curious fact about the game is that the screenshots look very good and give the impression that the game is 3D accelerated. An easy-to-miss note on the game’s description indicates that the game’s screenshots are rendered in OpenGL/ES.

What they fail to mention, however, is that the game itself does not support OpenGL and has graphics roughly similar to OmniG’s other non-accelerated QVGA titles. This is a nasty little trick and a very disingenuous one at that. As Werner’s says in the Pocket Gamer thread regarding the game, if they have an OpenGL version of the game they need to release it. I’m guessing that they don’t. So why on Earth do they have screenshots that don’t accurately represent what the game actually looks like?

Remember what I said earlier about OmniG’s games tending to be focused too much on graphics and too little on the fundamentals of game design?  The game’s other elements are not that well thought out, and the package as a whole just doesn’t mesh: the perspective is a little off, though, and when combined with the fact that the draw distance isn’t great, often makes it hard to anticipate turns.

The arrows on the screen help a little, but they’re not substitute for having an on-screen map. The controls are merely OK, and unfortunately, there’s no way to remap them. The physics are also mediocre, and the lack of collision detection on objects around the track (trees, flag poles, etc.) is actually a blessing since it’s pretty easy to veer off track given the two issues I mentioned above. Without different race modes, there just isn’t enough there to engage the player.
 
Title: Snow Rally Canada Developer: OmniG Soft
Genre: Racing Demo: Y
Platform: Pocket PC 2002+ Price: $19.95
Discuss this game Rating (of 4): 2.6

 

News - So it goes.

 

A number of things made Kurt Vonnegut a great writer. Sure, he was funny, entertaining, and his prose style was accessible and divided into easily readable chunks. But what made him great was that his work was ultimately humanistic, wrapped in a layer of dark comedy and pessimism familiar to everyone. So while on the surface he continually acknowledged the utter crappiness of the world in which we live, the essence of his work always hinted that transcendence was possible.


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