2015 is shaping up to be the year of the Rally Sim, with DiRT Rally, Sebastien Loeb Rally Evo, and WRC 5 all due to be released within a month or two of each other. While DiRT Rally is already available on Steam in early access format, we’ve heard very little about Milestone’s Sebastien Loeb Rally Evo. Originally, I’d been pretty excited about the title, until DiRT Rally dropped on us out of nowhere.

After a few weeks spent with DiRT Rally, it’s hard to believe the guys behind WRC 4 and MotoGP 14 could build a serious competitor – and preview footage released today seems to back that belief up. Despite being labelled pre-alpha as a form of damage control for the inevitable negative comments, I just don’t think what we’re seeing today will change all that much compared to the release version in a few months:

Now, look at what Codemasters has managed to put out, with the game still heavily in the early access phase:

Coupled with the news that DiRT Rally will come to both the Xbox One and Playstation 4, Milestone is already at a disadvantage.

So Milestone released a few more previews of Sebastien Loeb Rally Evo today, showing Loeb’s Citroen DS3 at one of the game’s Australian special stages.

Rally fans, including myself, will be thrilled to see the relative size and scaling of the game’s environments, particularly the width of the stage itself. Rally games such as DiRT 3 and Milestone’s WRC series have often been criticized for the relatively easy stages found in the games. WRC events typically take place on claustrophobic backroads, and no game has been able to accurately reproduce how little room for error there is when driving in the WRC. Most stages in DiRT 3 are astronomically wide, and WRC 4, Milestone’s most recent rally game, lacked a great deal of roadside objects. You could cut the course frequently and without any sort of repercussions because stages often took place in flat grassy clearings among mountains and other impressive scenery.

The hype meter is off the charts. Really looking forward to this game.

Milestone, best known for their work on the WRC and MotoGP series over the past four or five years, appear to have put out a clunker. Early adopters of RIDE, a spiritual successor to Polyphony Digital’s Tourist Trophy, are incredibly upset with the game’s state upon its release a few days ago.

The fact that the negative reviews mention obvious third party marketing tactics to improve the reception of the game points to RIDE being something avid motorcycle fans should avoid.

Ever since starting this blog a few months ago, I’ve received a steady amount of criticism for being a whiny bitch who doesn’t like anything and has a vendetta against Project Cars. And iRacing. And every other game that isn’t Assetto Corsa.

Why? Well that depends on who you ask. And it’s to the point where I won’t even bother clarifying anything because some of the rumors are more entertaining than the truth.

What I will say is that for all the negativity and angry responses I receive on places like Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook from my fellow pretend race car drivers, there’s an equal amount of positive comments coming from places I’d never expected. The detailed statistics I can view through the WordPress dashboard only tell part of the story, but it’s safe to say my little platform for me to spout shit spread around like the party pictures of Reh-… I’ll stop there before the Canadian government comes after me and politely tells me not to make a joke like that again.

So when I checked Facebook today and saw a certain announcement on VirtualR, I was pretty goddamn happy.

On January 18th, I posted a rather boring, mundane article about the announcement of Sebastien Loeb Rally Evo, an uncompromising rally simulator by Milestone set to be released for the PS4 and Xbox Juan. After introducing the title by copy/pasting the description given at VirtualR, I complained that the game was only coming to consoles – why would you develop a spiritual successor to RBR for a freaking console? I mean, I like the PS4, it’s easily the best console ever made, but that’s what you play Madden and NHL on.

Since that article was posted, this blog has spread around, the sheer numbers being pretty damn impressive, as well as some of the names who’ve gotten in contact with me to vent about the state of the industry and where racing games stand as a whole. It’s been a neat experience and a bit of an eye-opener for someone who literally just hit the CREATE FREE WORDPRESS PAGE button and combined VirtualR with TheDirty, using a writing style of mine that previously was reserved for court exhibits.

So it’s not a stretch to assume someone at Milestone read the January 18th entry and went “wow, we’re really fucking retarded” because:

I don’t know, maybe I’m just a narcissistic asshole who wants to take credit for everything… Maybe there was a petition on some German sim site asking for a PC version of Rally Evo  and it had like 20,000 signatures, or maybe the Steam forums for WRC 4 exploded in traffic when Rally Evo was announced to only be a console sim, but I know what’s in my Facebook and Reddit inbox.

Thank you Milestone for listening. I’m jacked. WRC 4 was so glitchy on the PC I had to buy a copy for my PS3, but WRC 4 was fun when it worked aside from the shitty stages with 50,000,000 hairpins and the fucked up differential settings that made the cars bounce off the rev limiter like in Grand Theft Auto IV. Fix that shit and you’ll have a killer rally sim because RBR’s old as fuck and installing 15GB of mods every few months gets old after the fifth time.

On the plus side, it helps me brush up on all the French I took in High School because Canadian schools are like that. Je telecharge les filmes adultes avant le travailer.