| skill. It will take a good
deal of feather-light touches on the gas and brakes, and soft subtle steering
inputs, but you can do it. You can even force a pushing (understeering) car into
an oversteering situation without your backend passing you. The best part is that
the whole time you feel 100% in control. That is, until someone collects your
rear end or you hit some dirty air, then you're off on a ride.
Of course,
you aren't going to be able to finesse your car around the track if you haven't
mastered the true heart of any racing sim: the set-up. NASCAR SimRacing
gives you an amazing number of options and settings for your car. You can change
everything that NASCAR allows a real crew chief to change. If they can do it in
the pits, so can you. In fact, EA has even thrown in a separate application that
allows you to track and monitor your car's telemetry data throughout a race to
help you fine-tune things, often in mind-numbingly deep detail. For example, you
can adjust tire pressure, bump, rebound, spring rate, camber, caster, and ride
height for each corner of your car's suspension. In the case of ride height, the
adjustments can be as small as one one-thousandth of an inch. You can literally
spend hours, and even days, tweaking a car for a given situation.
You
can save several settings per car, per track. You can have a custom qualifying
setting that maximizes speed at the sacrifice of tire wear and dicey handling
and then switch over to a more tire friendly, and easier handling, race set up.
You can even go wild and create settings specifically designed to accomplish various
personal goals such as top speed, fastest lap, or if you're really a nut, best
fuel economy and tire conservation. It's really amazing just how deep you can
go with it.
There's no point in spending all this time getting your car
just right unless you plan on spending a lot of time turning left. NASCAR SimRacing
gives you all the tracks and races from the Nascar Nextel Cup 2005 season. You'll
have all your favorite drivers along as well. One odd thing is that there is no
Pocono Raceway here. It's a bit disappointing as I live just 10 miles from the
track. Also, as usual, licensing rules and various laws have restricted some of
your favorite drivers' cars to showing placeholder graphics. Rusty Wallace's Lite
Beer car for example has the "lite' removed and "Rusty" slapped down in its place.
A good bit of this isn't EA's fault. Federal laws prohibit marketing certain products
to minors or placing ads for them on 'toys'.
You can choose to go into
testing mode where you can tweak out any car you like or quick race where you
can enter any race at any track using any of the NASCAR drivers. But the heart
of the game is career mode. You'll start off as a new team with a little over
$1 million in the bank and a car. By default you'll start off in the craftsman
truck series, the lowest of the three NASCAR leagues. If you don't want to tinker
around in the minors you can opt to start in the "National" Series (it's the Busch
series but see above for that whole "beer" thing) or go all out and try to make
it in the Nextel Cup Series. I'd suggest you start at the bottom and work your
way up to Nextel stardom, if only because you'll need the time to learn how the
career system works, and to raise enough money to stand a chance.
Briefly,
career mode lets you control every aspect of your team. You control the purse
strings on everything. Sure, you can custom tailor your car/truck in terms of
paint scheme, but the real meat here is the management aspect. It's not as deep
as some career modes in other sports titles but it does capture what it's like
to run a NASCAR team fairly accurately. You will have to decide how much money
to spend on R&D for your team, and then you will need to decide where that R&D
money needs to be spent; speed, aerodynamics, or a half-dozen other areas. In
order to keep your team racing you'll also need to make money, and that means
sponsors. Of course, no one will shell out the big bucks for an unknown, so performing
well in races and building up a fan base will have a direct impact on your team's
bottom line. Oh, and no popular driver worth his cool-suit would be caught dead
without a slew of licensed products. Yep, you can license everything from die-cast
versions of your car to mini-helmets and the whole range of typical NASCAR swag.
This contributes to the cash on hand, which adds to your team's competitiveness,
which can raise your driver's popularity, and this of course brings us full circle.
Once you think you have it all figured out and have a handle on schooling
the AI (which can be wonky on occasion), EA has included an amazing multiplayer
mode. Knowing that NASCAR fans are a community and they want to race against other
fans in huge, full field, online races, EA has given NASCAR SimRacing fans
the ability to participate in hardcore, full field, full length races. This mean
you could spend a Sunday afternoon staring at your monitor as you and 42 other
racing fans go at it while your real-life heroes take each other on in the real
world version of your track of choice. I never managed to get into a full 42 car
race, but the races I did find ranged from 4 to 19 cars and none ever showed signs
of lag.
Everything is rendered in rich detail. I've visited many of the
real world tracks and I can honestly say there's not much missing in their virtual
counterparts. With NASCAR SimRacing running on a P4 3.4ghz with over a
gig of ram and a Radeon 9800 XT card with 256MB, the frame rate stayed rock steady
even at maximum detail and a 1280x1024 resolution. This is a must with a sim racer
as tiny inputs must be reflected quickly and accurately onscreen or the whole
thing is shot. Even during major collisions with 42 cars onscreen as parts and
tires went flying and smoke pouring out in all directions, the graphics engine
never dipped below 60 FPS. In some clear running areas, I saw the FPS counter
hit over 120 on several occasions. EA has a frame rate counter built into the
game; just hit ctrl-f to pop up the window in the upper right corner of the screen.
They've also thoughtfully added a 3D setup application that will help you tweak
the game's settings for the best effect on your system.
From an audio
standpoint, it may seem that there can't be much to think about when it comes
to NASCAR. Anyone who has ever been to a track knows it's pretty much just one
loud, constant roar from green to checker. EA has gone the extra mile however
and provides drivers with the in-car sounds in very realistic detail. You'll hear
your crew chief and spotters calling out tips and alerting you to traffic and
track conditions all around you. You'll also notice that turning to look out either
window while driving from an in-car view will shift the engine noise accordingly.
Look left and the engine noise becomes more noticeable to the right, for example.
EA has also packed in the now-standard EA music system that displays the song
info in a pop-up box at the lower left of the screen. This doesn't really add
or take away to the game but I do find it interesting that the majority of the
music here is alternative rock, not the southern rock or hard country I was expecting.
A minor disappointment in the audio is the announcer. Sadly, no driver names are
given, only car numbers. NASCAR is all about the fan's attachment to their favorite
drivers and having an announcer call out "the number 2 car" instead of "Rusty
Wallace" feels a bit like being cheated. The Pit Row lineup is especially disappointing
in this respect as you get an endless list of "On row one, we have the #2 car
and the #23 car" for all 43 cars. Who cares? Give me the names or shut up already.
Overall: 9/10
If you're
a long suffering NASCAR sim racing fan, your pain is almost over with the arrival
of the appropriately titled NASCAR SimRacing. With members of the original
Papyrus team adding to the talents of the guys at Tiburon, EA has finally erased
memories of the past and set a new benchmark in the genre. This title will satisfy
all but the most die-hard sim fanatics, and even a few of those will have to admit
that EA has a top performer both on the trailer and on the track. [
top ] |
Attention
all my Papyrus NASCAR Racing brethren: within NASCAR SimRacing, EA has
finally built a better sim. For those unaware, Papyrus has long been the gold
standard of racing sims, both NASCAR and IndyCar (prior to the whole nasty, CART/INDY
split). Long before EA shocked the world with their NFL exclusive deal, they crushed
NASCAR racing fans by gobbling up exclusive rights to NASCAR. This was great for
console fans, but most hardcore PC sim fanatics went ballistic. EA's NASCAR PC
sims had always done their best work in the trailer. They looked good, but when
you took it out on the track, they didn't measure up. 
