By Brad Cook

Your Peugeot 206 slides on the gravel as you navigate a tricky right turn. You struggle to keep it from slipping off the side of the road as your co-driver calls out: “Six left 30 into two right care”. Knowing you have an easy left turn ahead of you, followed by another difficult right turn, you stomp on the accelerator, pushing the four-wheel drive car hard through the first, reaching 85 miles per hour in the process, and then slowing down dramatically to take the next one.

Unfortunately, a brick wall along the outside edge of the second turn scrapes the left side of your car. Your damage indicator barely registers the incident and you press on, determined to make up that precious half a second lost in the process. You skid the Peugeot to a stop at the end of the stage, stopping for the first time to admire the scenery. Lush stands of pine trees populate the nearby mountainside. Overhead, a cloudy sky threatens to rain on the proceedings.

You sigh, unhappy with your overall time, despite cheers from the nearby crowd. There’s little opportunity to dwell on past mistakes, however, because you must repair some slight damage to your car and move on to the next stage of the rally. There’s little rest for those in search of a championship.

Around the World in 300 Stages

Colin McRae Rally Mac places you in the thick of rally racing, a sport that throws some of the toughest terrain in the world at you. Broken into stages, each rally takes you from gravel and dirt roads onto blacktop and back again; winding its way across bridges, through tunnels, over jumps and along the edges of precipitous mountain passes. You could find yourself driving through rain or snow, adding to the peril.

The competitions also bring you to nine countries: the United States, Japan, Sweden, Australia, Finland, Germany, Spain, the UK and Greece. Little touches in each abound, from realistic scenery and signs in native languages to the rustic farms and quaint urban areas you’ll pass along the way. You might even notice a sign that says “Bigfoot Xing” in one of the US stages.

Colin McRae Rally features 300 stages of competition, with more than 20 different classes of rally events, including Challenges, Cups, SuperCups, Shields and Championships. You start the action with many of the stages off-limits, along with most of the 34 cars found in the game, but you can unlock everything by progressing through career mode, which starts you on the bottom rung of the rally circuit and challenges you to work your way to the top, where you’ll face off against Colin himself.

If you’d rather be Colin, enter championship mode. Or, if you want to practise any of the stages or complete rallies, select the challenge area. The game also features racing against up to eight human opponents over a LAN or via the Mac-only Internet service, GameRanger.

The Keys to Your Rally Success

No matter how you play the game, you have access to many options that enhance the experience, such as different weather patterns and times of day. A realistic damage model reveals each ding and scratch endured during the race — slam into obstacles too hard and you’ll see serious physical problems, such as cracked windows, bent hoods and missing bumpers. A word of caution: black smoke pouring from the engine is a bad sign.

You can always start again with a fresh car in challenge mode, but during the real competitions, you’ll need to repair the vehicle between rally stages. Each fix takes a certain amount of time, and if you go over sixty minutes, you’ll get hit with a penalty during the next stage. You can also upgrade your car with enhanced features, such as ceramic brakes, and configure its tyres, steering, gearbox and other set-up options to accommodate the terrain found in the upcoming stage.

And that co-driver we mentioned in the beginning? His cryptic statements are actually the key to your success. He tells you how difficult each upcoming turn is, on a scale between two and six (six is the easiest), along with the distance in metres until the next one. He also points out jumps, gates and bridges, corners that tighten on exit or that you shouldn’t cut across, and other hazards.

Think of him as your eyes and ears when you’re in the car. Pay attention to what he tells you and you’ll excel. Ignore him and you’ll spend more time repairing your car than racing in it.

On Your Marks, Get Set… A racer and his co-driver get ready to compete.

It’s a Little Dusty Out Here. Trying to negotiate a curve.

The View From Inside. A driver’s perspective on the action.

Choose Your Vehicle. Check out each car’s specs before you make your decision.

System Requirements:

• Mac OS X version 10.4.8
• 1.6GHz Intel or PowerPC G3 processor
• 256MB of RAM (512MB recommended)
• 64MB video RAM (128MB recommended)
• 1.3GB hard disk space (4GB recommended
• DVD drive; Gamepad or steering wheel recommended