As for the sense of speed, it ranges from poor to pretty good. The first car you have is very slow, and doesn't accelerate well. If you stick with it though, the bonus cars you'll earn go much faster. If the control was better, the sense of speed with some of the bonus vehicles would probably be close to that of Ridge Racer. The sense of speed is often diminished, however, when more than one car is on the screen. The whole game slows down when this happens. Sliding into a wall (which is a very common thing) will also put a stop to the brief moments of intense speed.

As I progressed through the game, I found that Top Gear Rally's vehicles wipeout very easily. Hit just a tiny bump at the wrong angle, and the whole car will flip over. Move just a tiny bit up the angled slope along the road, and most likely the car will lose it and roll over. This is a mix of realitic and arcade qualities, but I found all of the wipeouts and sudden halts annoying after a while.

You can drive off the side of the road, and sometimes discover shortcuts, but for the most part, this is a very small part of the game. Also, if you happen to enter a shortcut at the wrong speed, or at the wrong angle, the change in course will probably prolong your drive rather than shorten it. It also isn't as strategic as MRC is (the cars travel almost the same on-road as off-road).

Despite the game's flaws, the regular rewarding of new vehicles really kept me playing. Each vehicle really is more interesting than the last, and it seems that there are enough of them that the game will take a while for most people to complete. The different weather conditions in the game are also nice, but aside from greatly reducing visibility, they don't affect things too much. Still, they add variety to the one-player mode, which is nice for any racing game.

Top Gear Rally requires a Controller Pak to save your progress. Unfortunately, without the Controller Pak, you'll have to start from scratch each time you play. That means only two cars to chose from, and only one track to race on.

Some of the other Controller Pak options are really cool. You can actually paint the surface of your car and save it to 62 pages on a Controller Pak. This one paint job can be loaded onto all of the cars you use. The anti-aliasing and mip-mapping of the N64 make even novice works look professional. It's just plain fun to be able to design your own car like that. All racing games should have this feature!

Top Gear Rally also supports a ghost car feature similar to Mario Kart’s, but every time I tried it, the game froze. I don't know why. The game wouldn't even tell me how many pages were required to use this feature, so maybe that was the problem.

The Rumble Pak support in Top Gear Rally is only OK. The jolts as you hit the wall are way to pronounced and get annoying quickly. On the other hand, the ever so subtle twitch as the car slides around a corner is very, very cool. It's just what I imagine it'd feel like to slide around a corner.

The fact that the game supports the Rumble Pak is nice, but the way the Controller Pak management was integrated into the game along with this support is not so nice. Every time you want to save, you must remove the Rumble Pak and insert a Controller Pak. The game doesn't recognize a Controller Pak plugged into another socket like MRC. This constant swapping got annoying enough that I just began to boot up the game with a Controller Pak and I forgot about the Rumble Pak entirely.

Top Gear Rally is a pretty solid racer. However, the unique control and setting mean that it's not for everyone. With the paint your car feature, nice visuals, and a fairly decent sense of speed, Top Gear Rally is probably worth renting. If your a racing fan and are thinking of purchasing Top Gear Rally, I strongly recommend a rental first, just so that you can be sure that it's the kind of racer you're looking for.