Tag : nascar 09

Company : Electronic Arts List Price : $59.99 Amazon Price : $44.99 Used Price : $59.98 Average customer review :

Features

• Learn From a Champion - Four-time NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Champion Jeff Gordon guides you through the game’s major features and advises you throughout your career. Use his advice as guidance in preparing to challenge the best drivers of NASCAR, including Gordon himself.
• Two Distinct Driving Models - allow anyone to sink their teeth into the ultimate NASCAR racing experience. The Normal handling model provides a much more forgiving experience, while the Pro model gives you a taste of what it’s really like to get behind the wheel in a NASCAR Sprint Cup race
• Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Career Mode - Sign lucrative contracts, earn a reputation, and accumulate valuable performance points by dominating in three authentic racing series, including the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series, the NASCAR Nationwide Series, and the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series.
• All-New Sprint Driver Challenges - Make a name for yourself and build a reputation through a wide variety of racing challenges, highlighted by one-on-one battles against the sport’s biggest stars.
• Own the Track - Take control of every track on the map by posting the best stats at every sanctioned racetrack in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. The Own the Track map will show you what tracks you dominate and which tracks you need to take back from your friends.

Product Description

Ever wanted to be a Nascar star? Race your way with unprecedented adaptability and customization in NASCAR 09. As the sport’s newest prodigy, NASCAR’s four-time champion Jeff Gordon takes you under his wing and guides you through some of the key aspects of the game. Use his advice to your advantage when racing in Career mode or the Sprint Driver Challenges to earn reputation and become a NASCAR champion yourself. Create a racing credential, design a customized car, and get ready to race for premier contracts as you work your way to the top with NASCAR 09.

Customer reviews

Best NASCAR game yet
This game is very easy to just pick up and play if you don’t want to get involved with the meat and poatoes of the game.

You have the option of starting from the ground up in all three major NASCAR series-CraftsMan Trucks, NationWide, and Sprint Cup.

On the other hand if your thing is unlimited tweaking of every possible thing on the car and TONS of “paint booth” things you won’t be disappointed. This game is 100% better than last years.

You can look forward to endless hours of fun. The multiplayer is very smooth also, as can be expected with XBox Live

New fan to NASCAR games… overall I’m enjoying my experience.
First of all this review is written by a newer fan of NASCAR games. I’ve played a little in the past but nothing seriously due to not really liking the title. I thought the past games were boring, however this game seems a little different and more fun. With that said, my attitude may have changed not because of the game but because of my recent attitude towards NASCAR. I have a favorite driver now so it makes following the sport a lot more fun. As for the game, overall the game is fun and there are some neat features to it such as the things you can do in the garage to customize your car for race day, the graphics during gameplay are amazing and the different options such as career mode and season mode are great!

As for things I dont like about the game, I wish EA could be a little more creative when it came to coming up with the generic sponsors. There were a couple featured sponsors such as COKE that are cool however the no-name sponsors that EA Sports made up were mostly dorky and it was hard to pick out sponsors to put on my car and make it look good. I’m sorry I dont want sponsors such as “Pat and Son’s lumber” on my car. I understand the game needed to put some of the lowerlevel dorky sponsors on there to make it realistic however there were too many of them which makes it hard to make a customized car look good on the track. Basically EA needs to improve on the sponsor graphics and take more into account how the overall sponsors’ pictures look - they look too cartoonish and unsporty to me.

Another thing about the game I didnt care to much for is that the handling of the car while racing is hard especially when rounding a corner of a track. I’m banging into everyone and I’m not even trying to. I had to turn off black flag options (being disqualified for reckless driving) to even finish a race. This was frustrating. It was hard to pass other cars with out at least tapping them a little. To be all honest this may be due to me being a new fan of NASCAR games and I’m not use to this style of racing in which braking and patience is a must. Also I know nothing about adjustments to a car to make it handle better so all of those features to tweek a car are worthless to me. I wish there could be an option in which the comupter could take care of that based on my driving style… that would be neat.

With all that said, the game is worth playing and I am enjoying it. No major gripes…..

A much improved iteration
NASCAR games are typically underperformers and far from the kind of simulated experience I’ve wanted for so long. Here the game developers have sought to fix some of those issues.

There is more realism to how the cars handle. Tire wear and fuel issues are also more realistic (you actually get a fuel gauge this time) and pit stops offer more opportunities for adjustments (i.e. you can adjust air in only one tire). Also, this time each individual corner affects the car differently. In previous games, each corner was treated as a clone of the others with only a few exections (the “egg” shaped tracks, Pocono, etc.)It is also nice that the AI can no longer plow into you with seeming overwhelming force with little you can do to resist their aggressions. This means you can now drive in a pack much more easily - and isn’t that what NASCAR racing is all about?

Off the track there is a lot more going on this year. One of the big let downs in previous games was the lack of anything to do when not racing. Here there is a lot going on in the garage. I happen to like Jeff Gordon, about as much as any driver (not my fave, but he’s OK) so it didn’t bother me to have him around as a guide through the game. I can imagine some die-hard Gordon-haters moaning and groaning about it. Don’t worry, Jeff is not the only driver you encounter in the game. Also, when Gordon speaks it’s in very brief snippets. He acts as more of a menu for getting around the garage. In NASCAR 09 you can do more with the car in the garage. Actually, the biggest change is that there is a garage. You can spend tedious hours (which I enjoy) working on your paint scheme. It’s not quite the paint shop in Forza 2, but it does offer more than past editions.

The coolest part of this game? Spending XP points to level up your ride! This gives the game a RPG flavor. I’ve never seen anything like that in a racing game.

One major complaint is that you still cannot get anywhere “rim riding” - that is, taking the high line around a track. To go fast, you need to stick to the bottom during turns as much as possible. Go high, get passed. So, if you are planning on driving in a Kasey Kahne style, or like Dale Jr. has been recently, you are basically setting yourself up to lose. This is a little annoying, because even though there may be two or three racing grooves for traction, the bottom one is the only one that gives consistent speed. If you’re not in the bottom groove, the speed goes to the other cars on the track. By default, that makes every track a one-groove track. You can always duck down to the bottom to pass and return to the top later. But be careful, as with previous versions of the game if you hit the apron you are almost certainly going to spin. It’s ridiculously slippery down there, so don’t plan on making Kyle Busch manoeuvers down on the apron.

Pros:

- Better car “feel” creates a way more interesting experience

- Better graphics

- More adjustments to the cars

- More to do off track

- Cockpit view looks much better

- Anytime you get to spend points to level up, you got yourself and addicting game

Cons:

- Same old terrible generic rock music (I just turn it off completely)

- Must traverse the bottom of the track to gain spots, no “rim riding”

- Some key info is hard to see, such as the telemetry screen that you can pop up during a race. You can’t read it while driving, but it’s there. You will also crash while trying to look at the deep-bottom-right side of the screen, where your track position and lap number are shown.

Things to make you pull your hair out:

- When a caution flag is throw, you lose control of you car. So, even though you could drive off to a safe spot, the game locks you in harms way. This way, on-coming cars will pile up into you and set you down pit road for what should have only been a solo spin on the front stretch

- You will get in a crash. It will often times not be your fault. The game doesn’t care, you get penalized. A.) You will get shuffled to 43rd position (I thought NASCAR froze the field when the yellow came out?!) B. You will then get black flagged for rough driving if you so much as ding another car after a crash. Suddenly, the game programmers get fastidious about rules.

- When the caution comes out, you have to wait as the field does a complete lap before you can enter the pits. During this time, a driver normally talks to his crew chief about adjustments, etc. In the game, you just watch the car go around, then hit pit road, then get a 3-5 second window to make pit decisions. Hey, programmers, why not use that time the player spends watching the car drive around to allow for decision about what’s going to happen on pit road? Duh!