Top Gear Rally Playthrough (Actual N64 Capture) - Part 1

[Note: This playthrough and the below description were originally posted on Youtube in 2014.]

This is part 1 of my capture of me playing through the Championship mode in Top Gear Rally for the Nintendo 64. This is not an emulator. This footage was captured directly from my Nintendo 64 using an actual Top Gear Rally cartridge. I'm using a manual transmission, like always.

Since I already completed World Driver Championship, I figured I should upload another game from the same developer: Top Gear Rally. Top Gear Rally was a continuation of the Top Gear series from the SNES (I played the first two games back during the SNES days), but instead of street racing, this title focused on off road rally racing.

I first saw previews of this game in Nintendo Power, and I decided I should get it since I liked off road racing and since I enjoyed playing the original Top Gear with my uncle. I had hoped that the both of us would be able to complete the Championship mode together like you could do in the SNES games, but sadly, this wasn't the case.

Because of hardware limitations, only one player could play through the championship. The two-player mode was just a vs. mode with no AI racers. So we never got to play through the game together. Also, the controls in this game were extremely difficult, so my uncle didn't really enjoy playing it. I don't blame him. This is the most difficult-to-control racing game I've ever played.

Top Gear Rally was the only Nintendo 64 game I received for Christmas of 1997, and I didn't receive any more Nintendo 64 games until Christmas of 1998, so I had a full year with just one new console game. Needless to say, I made the most of it and played the crap out of this game.

Overall, Top Gear Rally was fun, but in a way, it was also disappointing because the controls sucked, there were only four main tracks (plus one bonus track), and the Championship mode no longer supported two players. But the game seems to have a decent following, so hopefully people will enjoy this playthrough.

On a related note, I recently spoke to Tobias Reich (http://retrogaming.hazard-city.de/) and he gave me a better method for deinterlacing my retro console captures. I was previously using the built-in deinterlacing filter in Sony Vegas, but that was blurring my footage, so I was having to sharpen the videos quite a bit to counteract that. However, that was apparently causing a slight quality loss.

Tobias showed me how to deinterlace my footage in Virtualdub without affecting the quality, so I no longer need to sharpen my footage. My retro captures should technically be higher quality from now on. Oh, and Tobias confirmed something I had suspected before, which is that Youtube compresses 720p videos at a higher bitrate, regardless of the source resolution. I suspected this was the case back when I uploaded my Metroid Prime playthrough.

With my new deinterlacing method, I can now render in 720p without any quality loss (Sony Vegas was previously causing 240p captures to become blurrier if I rendered in 720p instead of 480p, probably because of the internal deinterlace filter). So I'll be uploading all my footage in 720p from now on to prevent Youtube from killing the quality.

In this first part I completed the first season (Spring) in the first year of the Championship mode.

Recorded with the Hauppauge HD PVR and the official N64 S-video cable. I used a Toshiba model D-R550 DVD Recorder to upconvert the N64's native 240p signal to 480i so that the Hauppauge could capture the console's audio/video signal.

I'm using a standard N64 controller.