reviews

7
NASCAR 09 - 360: America Is All About Speed. Hot, Nasty, Badass Speed.; Posted About 1 month ago by 00.19

Name: NASCAR 09

Genre: Racing

Platforms: PS2, PS3, Reviewed on XBox 360

If it’s summer, you better believe it’s time for NASCAR. EA Sports brings us yet another of their yearly franchises, and just in time, too. I was starting to get that itch I get around this time every year to come out of retirement, and strap myself into a virtual stock car. I may be as casual a NASCAR fan as you can possibly be, but that’s never stopped me from enjoying the video game translation of America’s most popular sport. Despite Jeff Gordon being the coverboy, this year was certainly going to be no exception. Last year was the first time 360 owners got a chance to see what EA could do with a next-gen NASCAR. Well, they almost got it. The game had some horribly flawed AI, and the online was a disaster at best. The good news is with another year to work out some kinks, NASCAR 09 is better than 08. The bad news is it isn’t better by much.

There are a lot of things NASCAR 09 has going for it. The cars look phenomenal this year. Honestly, if you walked into the room, and you didn’t know I was playing the game, you would mistake what you saw on screen as the real thing. It also helps the tracks themselves are rendered impeccably. EA has gone to great lengths to recreate each and every track down to the last detail, and it shows. When the car is moving at 180 MPH on the track, the sense of speed is captured pretty well. It’s very hard to have a racing game with a convincing sense of speed, but NASCAR 09 conveys the feel of driving a Car of Tomorrow so close to the real thing, you’ll think you’re watching an in-car camera during a real race. While the tracks and the cars look great, all the ancillary things, like the infield and stands, will keep you grounded in the reality that this is just a game. Sure, there are RV’s parked around the track. Sure there are grandstands, and a little man waving the colored flags at the finish line. But when all of those things are so obviously given less attention to detail, it can almost take you out of the experience. The same is true of EA’s other sport franchises, where the crowd is so 2-D cookie-cutter it’s almost insulting. The biggest little issue I have though is the rear-view mirror. The cars look so choppy and obviously fake when viewed in the mirror, it’s a little jarring. Why can they look so great passing you, but not behind you?

Just once while I’m driving in front of the stands at Dover I want to be able to hear the crowd cheering. The crowds do cheer for more than the last lap, EA. I guess that being my only complaint on the sound design is a pretty minor one though. The rest of the game has some of the best racing sound design outside of Gran Turismo. The individual car sounds are best heard during practice or qualifying, but the game’s sound really stands out when all 43 cars are out there on the track. The more speakers you have the better, but even with just the two I have, my living room could’ve been mistaken for a super speedway. When a car is passing you, you can almost feel its presence up high. Sure the sound effect they have when you are in another car’s draft is a little exaggerated, but it has to be for you to be able to pick up on whether or not you’re in the draft lane. I depend on that sound pretty heavily, and you will too, since the HUD is probably the biggest eyesore I’ve seen implemented in a game. In past versions, the HUD has been a full-screen affair, putting things like tire wear, gas gauge and a drafting gauge in the four corners. This year, for whatever reason, EA decided to make the HUD a rectangular box smack in the middle of the screen. It’s poorly designed, and makes seeing what’s transpiring on the course more difficult than it needs to be.

When you finally get beyond all the glitz and glam, you’ll find it’s nothing more than window dressing for the gameplay problems NASCAR 09 throws at you every turn. While I can’t stand Jeff Gordon in real life, the virtual Jeff is probably the best “innovation” EA added for newcomers this year. The short tutorials he offers are completely skippable for veterans, but do a nice job walking players through the ins and outs of how to get the most out of the game. Probably the most fun part of the game, for me at least, were the Sprint Driver Challenges. I highly recommend everyone try at least a few of these 77 tests out before embarking on a career, as passing each tests rewards you with performance points and rep. Performance points can be used to upgrade your garage in specific race areas (speedway, super speedway, road course and short track), while your rep allows your created racer to sign with better sponsors. Sadly, those features sound better in practice than they are in execution. Once you get a few races into your Craftsman Truck Series career (the only way to make it to the big leagues is to work your way up from the bottom), you’ll find no penalties or true rewards for having high rep or better garage ratings.

The most disappointing part of racing continues to be EA’s complete lack of improving the AI drivers from the last version. It’s not like they weren’t aware of the problem fans had with the AI, so I don’t understand why virtually nothing changed from 08. Gone are the days of individual driver aggressiveness (which is one quality that made NASCAR 07 so fun), and we’re left with 42 drivers who couldn’t be happier that you want to pass them. Every driver gives way to you no matter what difficulty level you’re playing on. In fact, the only thing changing the difficulty does to the gameplay is make it harder for you to keep up with the pack when you’re alone, and make you spin out more often. But don’t worry about the rest of the pack, they’ll hardly even notice one another unless you bump one into another. It’s a little frustrating when you’re driving the only car that can mess up. You’ll find yourself winning so much on Veteran (normal difficulty) you feel obliged to move up to a higher difficulty, only to get really pissed off at how steep the curve is once you get there.

The less I say about online the better. If you can actually get into a race lobby, which at times can take upwards of 20 minutes, you’ll be stuck waiting for the other racers to complete their practice laps. Good luck if you start in the back. It’s hard enough for real drivers to catch up to the leaders in a 42-car race. When there’s no one around for you to draft with in a 14-car race (you’ll be lucky if there are that many people to race with. I often found myself racing with just 8), it’s virtually impossible to catch up unless there’s a caution flag. Which the guy in last will usually cause by driving backwards around the course since he’s so disgruntled. Or just an idiot. EA boasted about their new car paint-scheme creator, but when you do get to race someone with a custom paint job, all you’ll see is a grey car with numbers driving around in circles. Only the person who created their paint scheme can ever see it, making it one of the more pointless additions to any game with online play ever.

It’s a shame EA couldn’t make something more out of the shell NASCAR 08 was. Instead, they just put a spit shine on the cars and changed the roster a bit. It took the 2K series selling well for EA to do anything new with their Madden franchise, so maybe NASCAR needs a little kick in the ass, too. For die-hards and newcomers alike, this is a decent game. Die-hards will groan about the AI, and the lack of a true race feel, while newcomers will be frustrated by the incredible gaps between difficulty levels. I find myself somewhere in between. I enjoy these games every year, but find myself wanting more from a franchise that has such a huge fan base. If you’re looking for something to play one weekend, and you’re in a racing kind of mood, definitely give this a look. I wouldn’t commit more than a weekend to it though. Why should you? EA certainly didn’t commit a great product, just a serviceable one. I’ll say this like I do every year, “Maybe next year is the one.”