Conan McGuinness Global Rally Grand Prix 95

Conan McGuinness Global Rally Grand Prix 95
Release date	1 April 2021
Type	Game
Genre	Racing
Creator	Bagbeer Entertainment
Language	English
Command	rally95
Controls
⏎ Advance through menus

Conan McGuinness Global Rally Grand Prix 95 is a computer game that the player can download to the player's Mikropekka computer through the Con-Line BBS.

Suggested to be a recently released rally racing game from 1995, Global Rally Grand Prix 95 is depicted to have the largest filesize of all Con-Line BBS games, at 16980kB (16.98MB), thus taking an upwards of two in-game days (or 3h 55m 50s of real time) to download through the home's dial-up connection at a maximum download speed of 1.2kB/s.

The challenge in the game lies not in the game itself, but the download process, as downloads must be performed continuously in a single go with various difficulties emerging when downloading a game as massive as this. During downloading, the player must avoid blacking out while drunk or reloading their save as the download progress will be cancelled and reset; sleeping also does not speed up the download progress, merely pausing it instead. The required long hours keeping the computer turned on and connected online will also rake up high electricity and phone bills, which the player will need to pay on time during downloading or risk power or phone line cuts that cancels the download. Likewise, thunderstorms can disrupt power to the computer, so planning ahead by checking the weather forecast on the TV's teletext system may be necessary. Due to the remote risk of a house fire from leaving the computer on for a very long time, it is also advisable to have a fire extinguisher on standby.

When downloaded and executed, the game is revealed to be struggling to run on the player's computer due to inadequate hardware, mainly insufficient RAM. The cinematic intro and menus are the only aspects of the game that function in some capacity; the full-motion video intro plays at a very low framerate with skipped frames, while the player's only tangible interaction with the game is with the menu system, which has options for vehicles, racing modes, and game settings. When the player attempts to start a race, the game will crash or the computer completely freezes, depending on what graphical settings are chosen.

Due to its non-functional state and official release in conjunction with April Fools' Day, the game may be regarded as a joke game in My Summer Car, poking fun at players who blindly obtain new games with far higher hardware requirements than their computers support.

Trivia

• When entering a race in single-player, your computer will completely freeze and you will unlock the "Engine started!" achievement.
  • If the game's options aren't turned down to the minimum (everything either Low or Off), the computer won't freeze and you won't get any achievement - the game will simply quit to the command prompt and print a Not enough memory message.
• This game reveals the manufacturers of the rally cars seen during the Rally Sprint Race (the Victro Orca, Hayosiko Pollo and Corris Costo), as well as their technical specifications.
• The professional rally cars in the intro cutscene and menu are represented by all three car models featured in the Rally Sprint Race, notably sporting unique liveries and co-drivers, and the Costo featuring rally wheels like the other two car models. They also bear the same racing number (#95) and license plate numbers (RAL-95) in reference to the game title. Their liveries, which do not physically exist in the game world, are more directly inspired by well-known rally cars in real-life:
  • The "McGuinness Beater for Sale" Orca is based on an "Andrews Heat for Hire" Opel Manta 400.
  • The Pollo's Hayosiko livery is a composite of geometric red-and-white Toyota rally liveries from the late-1970s to the early-1990s, such as on the TE71 Corolla Gp2, Celica Twin-Cam Turbo, AE86 Corolla GT Coupe, and ST165 Celica GT-Four. Elements of green in the livery stripes evoke Toyota's later "Castrol" liveries into the 1990s prominently featured on the ST185 and ST205 Celica GT-Four.
  • The Costo's "Debol 8" livery is based on the Ford World Rally Team's "Mobil 1" livery for the 1992-1996 Ford Escort RS Cosworth rally car.
• "Bagbeer Entertainment" is a play on Finnish developer Bugbear Entertainment, which developed Rally Trophy, Flatout 1 and 2, and Wreckfest.
  • Asking someone to go for “Bagbeers” (: Pussikaljat), is Finnish slang for going out with your friends somewhere to spend time, and buying a plastic bag full of alcohol drinks (usually beer) for consuming.
• The game is a nod to PC-based rally games from the mid-to-late 1990s, which often incorporate then graphically demanding 3D engines, full motion videos, and CD-quality audio. Among its likely inspirations include Bugbear's Rally Trophy (2001), with the name - most notably the Conan McGuiness part - and the menu design being based on the original Colin McRae Rally (1998), and contemporary PC-based rally games with similar presentation, such as Pixelkraft's Network Q RAC Rally (1993), and Magnetic Fields' Network Q RAC Rally Championship (1996) and International Rally Championship (1997).
• Despite suggestions of its technical complexity with full-motion video and CD-quality music and sound effects, rally95.exe's 17 megabyte size is insufficient for a game of this kind, as they realistically require tens to hundreds of megabytes and were more practically distributed on compact discs (which supported up to approximately 600 megabytes of data). It is likely that the game's filesize was scaled down substantially by ToplessGun to allow downloads of the game to be possible but still difficult with the computer's low internet speed.