NASCAR® Racing 3

This game is good.  I'll save the artful discussion for later, for those of you in a hurry, on your way out the door, ready to race down to the local EB or Best Buy for another lap around life's personal-entertainment track.  NASCAR Racing 3 provides most of what anyone would want in a racing sim.  A famous writer once said, "My tale has a villain, and The Devil is his name."  Well, this game tells a tale, too, but in it the 2,000 lb. mass of burning muscle is the hero, and it's also the pride and joy of Team YOU.

Which is to say the game's developer, Papyrus, knows that the key to any gamer's heart is customizability.  From camber angles to camera angles, NASCAR Racing 3 has a load of settings you can take a wrench to.  You decide your new sponsor is Fruit Loops?  Scan Toucan Sam and stamp him on the hood.  Change the colors of your team uniforms to red, green, and orange, too.  But whatever changes you make, make them to win.

Once you've selected which track to race on and which NASCAR celebrities to race against (just about all are included, with full stats, from Dale Earnhardt to Ricky Rudd and back again), and the weather conditions, and the difficulty, damage, and race-length options, what's left is the race itself.  The game's impressive manual gives you an idea of how to tune your car for each of the 28 included tracks.  There are also a number of preconfigured "setups" which you can load (or download from the Net), depending on what your strategy is for racing the qualifier, or a test session, or the actual race.

The action on the track is fast-paced and graphically rich.  Your point-of-view can be either from within the cockpit or from two external, "third-person" telephoto perspectives of different distances.  Many of the tracks have lush backgrounds, whether flat or mountainous, as well as grandstands packed to the brim with fans.  I would've liked to have heard those fans cheering, but I suppose the roar of my engine and that of the twenty other engines around me would've drowned the fans out anyway.  In fact, what sound there is in NASCAR Racing 3 is done so well that you can actually tell what side your opponents are going to try to pass on, even if they're in one of your blind spots.

I'll admit that the game's learning curve is somewhat steep.  Papyrus seems to have assumed that you've played one of their games before, as certain fundamentals, such as how to go about actually doing a pit stop once you've selected the changes you want made during that stop, aren't anywhere listed in the manual.  Also, the races don't end themselves automatically after everyone's crossed the finish line; if players don't hit ESC, they'll either keep racing around and around, or end up scratching their heads while their cars idle on the track.  A final gripe has to do with the controls.  Although you can customize which keys or gamepad buttons to use for accelerating, braking, shifting, and steering, the true-to-life physics of the game make it difficult to maintain your line with anything less than a steering wheel.  You can have the computer assist you with braking and shifting (Papyrus says you'll have better results if you learn to do these things yourself, however), but the game was clearly designed for hardcore race-sim fans who more than likely own the expensive steering wheel input devices.  I suppose it ultimately makes sense that you don't drive your own cars around town with a joystick or a keyboard, but it would've been nice if I could've made it around just one of the tracks, once, without bobbing from side to side while trying to drive straight with my D-pad.

The game's interface leaves little to be desired.  There's a post-race newspaper-style graphic with a snapshot of your car and a message that changes based on how well you finished, and there's an exceptional instant-replay system that allows you to view your race forwards and backwards from multiple angles, and to edit and save the replays should you so choose.  The options and standings menus are all clearly laid out and easily navigable.

As for the game's Championship Mode, the only major difference from Single Race Mode is that you have a schedule that includes all of the races from the real-life NASCAR Winston Cup and Busch series.  I would've enjoyed an economic model that allowed you to upgrade your car or buy a new one, however, or do something, anything, with the hundreds of points you earned for each race, buy a pizza even. But again, as this game was made for die-hard race-sim fans, what seemed to matter most was the racing itself.  The game also includes a Multiplayer Mode that makes it easy for you to meet up with and race people on the Internet, but I quickly found that NASCAR Racing 3's level of detail, realism, and speed are all enemies of the 56K modem.  I recommend considering cable or DSL before attempting Internet play, as the lag is commonly so severe that cars will drop off the screen only to reappear close enough to crash into moments later.

Papyrus did a fine job of creating a realistic, exhilarating racing sim.  NASCAR Racing 3 provides color and amplitude to the metaphor for the monotonous struggle to get ahead in life; we should all be so lucky to have 500-horsepower engines driving us around our daily tracks.  Forgive me for occupying the valuable real estate of your browser for the sake of pseudo-philosophizing, but I couldn't think of any other way to explain how this game won me over to NASCAR as a fan.  It's not that I ever had anything against the NASCARian lifestyle; I just never had time to get involved, what with all the football, basketball, and baseball going on.  So:  I recommend NASCAR Racing 3 wholeheartedly not only to NASCARians, but to fans of sports in general, as what this game offers most is a sense of competition, along with all the little details required to back up that offering.

Gameplay:  9.0

If Gran Turismo, for the PlayStation (that little grey thing that attaches to your TV and eats discs), is a 10 in the world of racing sims, then NASCAR Racing 3 is a solid 9.0.  I found the release copy to be virtually bug free, despite the fact that there are tons of user-customizable setup and gameplay configurations.  All the options transitioned smoothly into the actual race screens, with the level of detail serving rather than hindering the overall experience.  The game made me feel like I was in an actual cockpit, with a four wheels and an entire pit crew at my command.  The difficulty I had with the controls, not to mention the game's steep learning curve, were significant enough to adversely affect my enjoyment, however.

Graphics:  9.5

Sparks flew whenever I scraped a wall or curb, and the colorful, multi-emblazoned cars for which NASCAR is famous, spun out all around me with bumpers going here and there often enough to elicit the occasional "WOOO-HOOO."  The backgrounds were lush and evocative of America's wide open spaces, and the tracks themselves were nicely varied, from the cracks in the pavement of Talladega to the steeply banked oval of Nashville Speedway USA.  There were also incredible (10.0) smoke effects, and the tracks were worn away and realistically blackened to illustrate the thousands of driving lines that had been imprinted on them from many years' worth of burning rubber.  Unfortunately, there was no graphic for the pit crew's work, just a frozen 2D image accompanied by sound effects.

Sound:  7.5

While it was nice to have my crew chief audibly update me on my opponents' locations, and while I was duly impressed with the game's positional sound, there was no music to speak of, and the tire screeching and engine buzzing became only humdrum after I got used to them.  What's there is loud and crisp, but the game lacked much ambient noise.  There were no cheering crowds, no starting bells, no horns.

Difficulty:  7.0

After nearly 50 races I was still having trouble maintaining my line.  The game runs well enough with a gamepad (I used a Microsoft Sidewinder), but you really feel the lack if you don't have a steering wheel.  To say the least, anyway, it took me a while to catch on.  The game's customizability actually worked against it in the Difficulty category, too.  There were so many options and so many things that you could tweak that it was hard to tell just what it would take to win races consistently.  Even with the manual indicating what setups to try for each track, I still found myself disappointed that the slightest mistake could drop me so far back, and make it near impossible to regain my position.

Concept:  7.5

While the game certainly doesn't offer anything new or creatively original, it does a good job of doing what it does.  The paint shop was a nice touch, but as for the races . . . you start, you speed up, you take a pit stop or two, and then you finish.  Papyrus could have gone the extra mile and made this a truly original game by enhancing the ambience and giving the economic model some more depth, but they couldn't have made the all-out racing any better than it was.

Multiplayer:  7.0

Though I don't suspect it's the game's fault, the multiplayer experience left a lot to be desired.  I got into a few races but there was little organization to them, not to mention the fact that even with all the eye candy turned off, the cars still popped in and out of view.  I was very disappointed, to say the least, when one of these phantoms eviscerated my car after I'd worked so hard just to qualify and join an official race.  It's nice that NASCAR Racing 3 even offers a multiplayer feature at all, but I wouldn't expect anybody to rave about it until maybe Internet 2 is up and running nationwide.  The idea of being able to race 10 to 20 people online, just like in a real NASCAR event, is thrilling.

Overall:  8.5

Like I said, the game converted me into a full-fledged NASCAR fan.  I appreciated the work that went into making the driving aspect of the game super-realistic, I loved the multitude of configuration options, I thought the manual was smartly written and thorough, and I was amazed by the graphical precision of the cars and tracks.  The game's controls were bothersome, and beyond the racing elements (the cars, the adjustments, the track options), the game lacked depth.  I'd still recommend it to those who consider themselves sports fans; I'm looking forward to Papyrus' next iteration.

Installation:  Easy