Re-Volt

blog Racing May 7, 2015

1 6870

Genre: Racing

Release Year: 1999

Developer: Acclaim Studios London

Publisher: Acclaim

Age Rating: Everyone

Playability Status: Perfect

Tested On: Windows 8 x64

Availability: Copyright retained - Out of print/unavailable

Fancy tearing up the track and terrorising the neighbours cat? In Re-Volt you will drive various RC cars around courses loosely modelled on the real world, but without all that pesky realism or kill-joy authority figures telling you that you can’t race your toy cars through supermarkets or city streets. The game was well received on release and despite it having been out of print for several years it still has a small but dedicated fan following online, making it well worth a spin if you can find a copy.

Installation

Re-Volt should install on modern PCs without any difficulties. Simply insert the games CD into your computers optical drive and follow the on-screen prompts. If the games autorun program does not start, browse to the CD in Computer/This PC and manually run the “Setup.exe” program. Installation may take a moment or two to start, so don’t panic if the installer seems a little slow at first.

Towards the end of the installation, you will be asked if you want to install DirectX 6.1. You should skip this step since the version on the disc is somewhat outdated.

Patching

Re-Volt is another game that has been kept alive by a fan community long after official support for the game dried up. To play the game on your modern PC, install the fan-made patch that is available here. Simply download the patch and then run it, the patch installer should detect where you have installed the game and apply the patch automatically. Once you have installed this patch, no further compatibility settings or options are required, so simply go ahead and start the game.

Tweaking visual quality

As with most old games, you should be able to crank up all the visual quality settings to the max, even on a more modest modern PC. From the games main menu, Choose “Options” and then “Video settings”, to access the basic video settings, as shown below.

The first thing to do here is set your screen resolution. This should match your monitor if possible. In the screenshot, the game is configured to run in 1080p. Re-Volt was not originally a widescreen game but with the latest patch it can support widescreen resolutions like 720p or 1080p just fine. Make sure that “Maintain Aspect” is selected so that the graphics do not become stretched. Textures should be set to 32 Bit and the Brightness and Contrast settings can be changed to taste.

The game has some advanced visual settings too, to change those, select “Render Settings” on the menu shown above. The options that then appear are shown below.

Since this is an old game, you should be able to set all the visual options to their highest or best quality settings even on a relatively modest modern machine. Simply copy the settings shown in the picture above to set up your game for the highest quality graphics possible.

Configuring controllers

Re-Volt recognised our Xbox 360 controller without any particular issues. All we had to do was reconfigure the games controller settings so that the analogue triggers controlled acceleration and braking (or reversing as it is in this game). To do that, go to the games main menu, select “Options” and then “Controller Settings”. You can then choose controllers for all players and reconfigure button mappings. Note that if you configure the 360 controllers Start button as “Pause”, you will need to press Start on the controller to navigate back through menus. This is a little counter-intuitive but nothing you can’t get used to.

Multiplayer and other notes

Re-Volt supports local, LAN and Internet play and is a fun little game to play with friends. We haven’t tried the games online multiplayer options, but it should be possible to organise matches with friends using a tool like the excellent Evolve. Sadly, although Re-Volt is listed as supported by Evolve, we couldn’t get the in-game overlay to work. This does not exclude you from using Evolve to set-up multiplayer matches of course, it’s just not as convenient.

If you do need an in-game overlay tool for taking screenshots or videos, the old XFire overlay still works with the game.

The game includes its own track editor and there are lots of user created content available for free. Check out Re-Volt Zone for tracks, cars and other mods.