Mario Kart is essentially its own genre and Mario Kart 8 is the absolute pinnacle in terms of track design, handling, art direction in the series. Nothing comes close. It set the standard in 1995 and continues to do so while remaining fresh and relevant to this day. Sega Rally, had its chance and failed, not once (2006) but twice (Revo). You could skin it as any other title and it still would have made zero impact on gaming history.
I remember the draw of the original arcade was that you has to fight the controls, master the handling, drift like a pro, fight the inertia, adapt to the different terrains and traction with particles flying around and the helicopter blowing dust in your view. I didnt get any of that charisma with the sequels.
How did SR Revo move the genre forward? It didn't. It died. It was forgotten. Not a single game picked up where that flavour of gaming left off. Probably because is wasnt a direction anyone had any interest in. Did the original Sega Rally make a monumental impact in gaming? Absolutely. For the first time ever we had texture mapped realistically modelled cars with realistic handling. Gran Turismo picked up the realism baton and ran with it. Crazy Taxi and need for speed ran off with the arcade baton. Sega rally, the game that both games evolved from became irrelevant and its sequels didn't change that.
Sega Rally Revo did nothing to change that. It pretended it existed in its own little bubble despite the fact everything the original did had been taken to the next level in various forms by all the other competition.
Its not that i didn't want a new Sega rally. I really did, but I always had Sega Rally down as a revolutionary trend setting title. I expected the same. We didn't get that. We got a cheap cash in designed to keep the franchise alive. People didn't but it. It will probably never resurface. Revo tried too hard to 'be' Sega Rally and in the process failed to capture anything that made it the revolutionary title it was.
Just go on to Youtube and check out some of the videos from 1995 and people reactions to the original title, how their jaws drop, how incredulous they are. Sega were at their peak and everyone executions were sky high. Then check out the muted responses to Revo in 2006.
Revo wasn't a bad game, it just wasn't Sega rally. only. If they really couldn't build anything fresh and revolutionary on the old Sega Rally model, better just to do what all the other competitors did and take the best of what it started and develop it into something awesome and innovative. In my opinion, the weather, graphics and handling of Drive Club are innovative and will probably be remembered fondlier than Revo.
I didn't mean that it moved the genre forwards in terms of everything else borrowing from it. That sometimes just doesn't happen (Perfect Dark and Shenmue are two other situations that immediately come to mind). Sega Rally Revo represented an actual step forward however in the way the car interacts with the road surface... which is a pretty big fucking deal for a racing game. That other games (even those that
should take stuff like this into consideration) don't have it is a failing on their end, not Sega Rally Revo's. There's no good reason (outside of possible performance considerations) why Motorstorm games don't have actual track deformation (despite receiving praise for its faked graphical effect). Same goes for the Dirt series, Forza Horizon etc. These games all truthfully represent a rather significant step backwards in an area that should be core to their concept.
Gran Turismo is a completely seperate thing, and has pretty much nothing to do with Sega Rally, and took essentially nothing from it. That you're actually offering up Need for Speed and Crazy Taxi of all things as other examples, makes me think that you see the series in a very different way... some overall representation of racers for the time itself. This was kinda hinted at when you claimed that Sega Rally was AM3 besting AM2's Daytona USA. It didn't, because it wasn't even trying to accomplish the same things. Daytona USA is also one of the most successful arcades of all time, in a way that Sega Rally, at no point ever was. These are subgenres, and Sega Rally competes with Gran Turismo and Forza, no more than Wipeout or Mario Kart do. And certainly not fucking Crazy Taxi... are you mad?
Even when you remain the pinnacle of your genre, you won't garner the same reactions in the future that you do at first. Gran Turismo, whilst still a big deal, does not ellicit the same response that it used to, and it hasn't really since GT3. Virtua Fighter has been the best fighter at the time of pretty much every release it's ever had, but nothing will cause the same sort of reactions that we saw from Virtua Fighter 1 through 3. These games were hitting during the infancy of 3d graphics and mechanics. They provoked a reaction in people that nothing does today. Not Crysis, not The Order, not Driveclub, nothing.
Now as for Driveclub, tell me what it's actually doing that's really innovative for a racer (rather than just looking pretty). PGR4 despite not being dynamic represents nearly everything Driveclub entails, and even a decent amount that Driveclub doesn't. PGR4 knows what an actual puddle is, and icy roads... along with the weather that exists in Driveclub. Driveclub's claim to fame is basically just making the rain look good, it's behind PGR of 2008 in essentially everything relating to the game's mechanics. I don't even know what you're trying to imply by including the handling as innovative... the game essentially sold itself on trying to provide the same simcade balance that PGR popularised, but has a handling system so comparably damaged, that it's quite possibly the number one reason cited for why people don't enjoy that game in general. If you like it, then fine... but it's not a step forward for the genre, it's numerous steps back. It's funny actually, because when the game gets compared with those that actually are moving the genre forward (like say Forza Horizon 2), most people will defend Driveclub by exclaiming how it's not trying to be the new shit, and harkens back to simpler times of racers gone by. Basically that Driveclub "pretended it existed in its own little bubble" whilst the rest of the genre moved on.
At least Sega Rally Revo had some real progression at it's time of release, that actually
was new, and is still not matched.
P.S. Sonic Racing Transformed is better than Mario Kart has ever been. Mario Kart is a good example of a game that's very much stuck in the past, regardless of how well it still performs (much like Nintendo in general tbh).
