Every PS1 Game – Spyro the Dragon
I love free demos. The best one recently was Metaphor: ReFantazio. Released a few weeks before the retail game, it was the full intro to the game and more: it took me seven hours to beat. Back in ancient times, retail stores would have kiosks with a console, TV, two controllers, and a game (in the cartridge era) or demo disc (in the CD era). Like an arcade, but free! They were especially exciting for me as a kid during the 90’s, allowing my penniless adolescent self to try a variety of games that I wouldn’t normally get to play. I have crystal clear memories of being blown away by the graphics of Star Fox at Toys R Us. When I went to Sears with my mom, I always made a beeline straight for the demo kiosk to play a round of Rally Cross on Playstation or Nights into Dreams on Saturn. And when I got my Playstation in 1999, unlike any of my Nintendo consoles, it came with a demo disc. On that demo disc was an extremely popular game from 1998 called Spyro the Dragon.
However, I found that Spyro demo to be unconvincing. Compared to the brand new Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on N64, or even the three-year-old Super Mario 64, this game felt sluggish as you tediously trudged through the bland demo world. The point of the game seemed to be just walking around and finding dragon statues. Yawn. But that wouldn’t be the end of my Spyro story.
(more…)A Proper Rally: DWA in the Sierras 2025
Ideally, you want your rally to have three things: fun roads, great people, and pleasant weather. But there is something extra that a great rally has which is hard to define; the so-called “X factor”. From the first DWA rally in 2017, that was the strongest attribute of DWA rallies. But something changed in 2020. On March 15 of that year, we convened in Sausalito under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge and embarked on an epic rally. Unfortunately, you may recognize that date as an important turning point for a different reason: that’s the weekend the world shut down due to the Covid pandemic. Coincidentally or not, the DWA rallies were never the same since; we still drove our beloved cars together on gorgeous California roads, but the summer camp vibes weren’t the same. Back at work on Monday, we didn’t feel the rally withdrawals. But that all changed in October 2025 when the Sierra Rally 5 kicked off.
On Thursday, October 2nd, I was picked up by my friend Jon in San Jose, and we began our journey east toward one of the most epic mountain ranges in the world: the Sierra Nevada. Containing the largest tree in the world, the tallest point in the contiguous USA, and the largest alpine lake in the entire USA, it has a few impressive stats to go along with its stunning beauty.
(more…)Every PS1 Game – Gran Turismo 2
So you’ve just released the greatest racing game yet created, which would go on sell more copies than any other game released on the Playstation. What next? Well, you get back to work and improve it in every single way, of course. Released almost exactly two years later, Gran Turismo 2 is based on Gran Turismo but every aspect was tweaked and expanded.
Gran Turismo came in a double-disc case because it contained a huge supplementary manual. Gran Turismo 2 also came in a big case, but it actually had two discs inside: they split Arcade and Simulation (previously “Gran Turismo”) modes into their own discs due to the addition of so much new content.
(more…)DWA’s New Rally Flavor: Classic (2025 Edition)
Variety is the name of the game in the Driving While Awesome community. We are centered around a general love of cars and driving, but everyone has their own idea of what brings the most fun and sense of occasion. As many of us are into performance, our choices gravitate towards higher performance late-model vehicles. However, even someone like me who drives a car from 2018 will admit that classic cars are just cooler. When the DWA boys decided to convert the “Classic Rally” from using the “classic” routes (from the beginning of DWA Rally history) into requiring “classic” cars (pre-2000, which is coincidentally 25 years old), it made perfect sense.
For people like myself, this was a challenge; some rally stalwarts decided to forego this event due to simply not having a suitable vehicle. As I love co-driving, I took this opportunity to co-drive the mighty VOLOLVO, the Nordica-liveried LS1-swapped 1997 Volvo V90.
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Star Road 
