This week, viewers, I made an exciting discovery. But more on that in a minute. First, I’d like to talk about the weather.

A couple of days ago I was playing World Rally Championship on the PS2. It’s a perfectly competent and decent rallying game very much in the Colin McRae style, if rather lacking in flair, but it made me really depressed. The main reason was that the game’s been released in November, but the first two rallies you’re likely to play are both set in snowy, misty, bleak conditions that, chances are, you’re already going to be pretty sick of from looking out of the window.  After spending a pretty gruelling half hour slogging up the sides of mountains in Monte Carlo and across freezing Swedish tundra swathed in fog, I felt so miserable it was all I could to to sit through the lengthy loading delay and start the next rally, which fortunately took place in a rather sunnier climate. Which got me to wondering, does anyone ever think about this kind of thing?

So many games get off to easily-avoidable bad starts like this one (my personal pet hate is when the game insists that you slog through the “training” stages even if you’re quite prepared to just jump in, start saving the world and take what comes) that you have to question whether publishers actually run their games past anyone before they bung them out, or if they just shunt them into the shops the minute the developer says they’re finished. I know which I suspect.

But anyway, on to my exciting discovery, which conveniently also cropped up while I was playing World Rally Championship. (I keep typing “World Rally Championshop”, which would be a very different, and possibly rather more exciting, game. But I digress.) The thing I discovered was this: The identity of the hardest people in the world. Want to know who it is? Then stay tuned, and we’ll tell you after this short break.

Actually, there are a couple of candidates for “world’s hardest people” in World Rally Championship. You have to give some respect to the hardy spectators, who not only stand outside in appalling conditions all day, braving razor-sharp chunks of flying gravel and certain hypothermia for the occasional glimpse of a mud-spattered Subaru sliding past, but also don’t even flinch if some idiot drives a rally car straight into them at 95mph. (Hit a spectator in WRC and you just stop dead with a clang, as if they were made of titanium with foundations stretching 20 feet into the ground.)

But the world’s hardest people of all, it is revealed in World Rally Championship, are rally navigators. As is the way with rally games, your race is constantly accompanied by directions from your co-pilot, warning you in detail of every twist, turn and jump that’s coming up on the track. But none are so dedicated to their task as are the ones in WRC (who I suspect are actual real-life ralliers, but my knowledge of the subject is wafer-thin so don’t quote me). The Monte Carlo course, for example, takes you through the heart of the Alps (or possibly the Pyrenees. My geography knowledge is, if anything, even slimmer than my command of rallying personalities), with terrifying drops of thousands of feet off to the side of the track. And encouragingly, the game allows for your car to go plunging right down said drops should your steering be sufficiently incompetent.

Should you do so, though, rather than the ear-piercing scream or mouthful of invective that you might expect from your doomed companion, your navigator will calmly continue to warn “Long left five, caution over crest, tightens” even as you plummet down the mountain, bouncing to your death from rocky outcrop to rocky outcrop. There isn’t even a flicker or a wobble in his voice as you approach the fatal impact, not a hint of fear or reproach. Just “Hairpin right, followed by very long easy left”. Now that’s hard.

At this point, viewers, I was going to make a really pertinent and coherent point about how the pursuit of “realism” in games only ever seems to mean the really tedious aspects of reality and none of the dramatic ones, and how it shows how fundamentally frightened and boring the souls of most game developers are, so desperate is their need to pretend to exert control over the uncontrollable forces that are nature, reality and life. But wouldn’t you know, we’ve run out of room. Maybe next week, eh?