Burton's Bytes: A rally game that reeks class

WITH its insanely fast cars, beautiful scenery and prospects for spectacular crashes, you'd think rally driving would make a great subject for a video game.

But, apart from the Colin McRae series, games companies have always made a hash of it.

Maybe it's because rallying doesn't conform to the normal rules of motor racing. You don't compete on the road against your rivals, cars drive on dirt tracks and not circuits, and each rally is split over several days. Winning in the World Rally Championship (WRC) is as much about endurance and precision as it is outright speed. Which is why, his critics would say, Colin McRae only won the title once in his illustrious career despite being the fastest and most daring driver in the series.

Games that get rallying wrong invariably try to re-write the rules to make their software more conventional. The most obvious way they do this is to have you racing against other cars on the same piece of road (or track).

Sadly, as any fan will tell you, that just ain't rallying.

WRC 4 is different. Sony has gone to great lengths to acquire the official championship licence and its developers have toiled many hours to get the look and feel of this game spot on.

The resulting game is one of the most accurate motoring titles currently available for your PS2.

From the moment the game boots up everything about WRC 4 reeks class. The visuals set a new standard for realism on the PS2, especially from the in-car view where the rain, snow and mud splatters across the windscreen with frightening authenticity. Likewise, the replays of your best special stage efforts put the playbacks seen in Gran Turismo to shame.

Don't press the exit button when the PS2 replays your last drive because you can learn a lot by staying tuned. Examine the way your car takes corners, how hard you braked and when you should have kept your foot on the accelerator instead of lifting off. Do this and you will get better.

Petrol-heads can even call up a set of telemetry data readouts that play in real-time as you watch your car in action. Heck, you can even see the cars pitching on their suspension and the way your set-up has affected the vehicle's behaviour during the event.

If all this sounds like a load of old nonsense, then believe me, it's serious stuff.

Completing a full season unlocks other classes and different types of cars.

At first you'll struggle to be competitive. On the first event (the famous Monte Carlo) "my" Impreza was way off the pace until I started to get my lines into (and out of) corners right. By the end of it I'd climbed up into fourth - not great but a respectable showing and a decent enough start to a WRC career.

If you enjoy driving games or watch the WRC on Channel Four then this game is a must-have.

ONSPEED. Format: PC. Price: £24.99 annual subscription: BROADBAND is brilliant. Sadly, at the moment, it is also expensive and, if you live in a remote area, probably unobtainable without recourse to even more costly satellite technology.

Until now, anyone without broadband has been forced to soldier on with a dial-up connection and endure the feeling of wading through treacle such a system imparts.

When I heard about Onspeed - the new dial-up speed booster - I was sceptical. If I had a quid for every bit of vapourware that claimed to speed up my Internet surfing, I'd be a rich man.

On paper, Onspeed sounds almost too good to be true. Not only does it speed up your surfing by around five times, it costs far less than broadband and is an absolute cinch to install. All this from a programme that is small enough to fit on a floppy disk.

The secret is the sophisticated compression technology Onspeed uses to boost your connection.

Originally designed for the military (as was the Internet itself), Onspeed now uses this technology to compress the page you want to look at, then pipes it to your PC at phenomenal speeds.

The result is an Internet browsing experience that as good as (and in some cases better than) a broadband connection without any of the drawbacks.

The bench-marked improvement on my PC was so good I had to re-run the software just to be certain.

From crawling along the Internet slow lane, Onspeed catapulted my browsing into the world wide web's superhighway at amazing speeds. The different was completely amazing.

To use the software you pay an annual subscription of just £24.99, install the software and away you go. The programme does everything it needs in the background - all you see are pages that load almost instantly and super fast response times.

About the only thing that isn't dramatically speeded up are downloads of already compressed data - so big MPEG movie files will still take some time.

When you have finished, the programme tells you how fast your connection has been and how much time you have saved by using Onspeed. It gives you a warm glow to think how much money you are saving on phone bills by slashing PC surf times.

If you live in a remote area - like the Yorkshire Dales, Teesdale or Weardale - and are having to make do with a dial-up connection I can't urge you strongly enough to give Onspeed a try. It's the most impressive piece of Internet software I have seen - ever. If you enjoy the Internet I can't think of a better way to spend 25 quid.