Underappreciated gem
I couldn't find it here in Italy so i ordered it in USA, 4 or 5 years ago. And i'm currently not playing it just because my racing wheel is broken!
I'm a racing sims fan and this game has still one of the best offroad physics simulation in videogames. I'm not kidding, the car handling is fantastic, whether driving on mud, grass or sandy terrain. There's a real difference between driving a 2 and 4-wheel drive car, and the huge amount of HP of the most powerful pick up make it impossible to play the game without an analog device.
Controlling the car via keyboard is frustrating: this aspect of the game should have been tuned better.
But then comes the track editor!
It is very easy to use and quite powerful, i think it represents the best part of the game, some 80% of the whole product, actually. The whole process of creating the core of your own track, testing it and then finely tuning its shape to smooth the corners and the jumps it's totally rewarding (i'm a motocross rider and i love to make finely crafted double jumps!!). And the best part of all this is that the computer controlled cars can "learn" your track and play in it with their surprisingly good A!! I've never find anything like this, simple and deep at the same time.
Yes, the graphics is quite...rude, but after you get used with it everything will be just fine.
Sound effects are good but, again, we must talk about the awesome physics and the "engaging" track editor.
One last thing: you could experience some problems when playing the game with a recent PC: i needed to spend some time tweaking it to let the wheel and the sounds work fine under XP, but i didn't need dosbox or any other software in particular.
So, if you like racing sims and the graphics isn't the most important thing in a game, please try this game and tell me what you think: am i crazy or tons of gamers in the world missed a little masterpiece?