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The long awaited and much anticipated Dirt Track Racing-Sprint Cars game has finally hit the shelves. After many delays and rescheduled release dates the World of Outlaws sponsored Sprint car game is here at last. The fans of the WoO's series now have the unique opportunity to race side by side, wheel to wheel with the legends of this highly competitive series.
DTR-Sprint Cars is the second game in this dirt series done by RatBag Games that features one of the most sophisticated forms of Motorsports anywhere around. At just over 1600 pounds and packing 800 ponies under the hood, a Sprint car is a rocket ship with a wing on it to prevent it from flying.
Included in this game are many of the popular drivers from the WoO's: Steve Kinser, Jac Haudenschild, Danny "The Dude" Lasoski, Stevie Smith and Slammin' Sammy Swindell, just to name a few. It also features a Career mode, Instant Replay and Multiplayer capability and the Game Spy server applet for online racing.
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
- Pentium II 266 with hardware acceleration or Pentium II 300 without.
- Windows 95 / 98
- 32 MB Ram
- 60 MB hard drive space
- 4x CD-ROM Drive
- Mouse
- DirectX 7.0 compatible sound and video card
Recommended:
- Steering wheel & pedals
- Internet connection
- Modem with 28.8 speed or better
- 3D hardware acceleration
- Patience for online gaming. ( This wasn't on the box, but it should have been! )
GAME FEATURES:
DTR-Sprint Cars features a fully adjustable AI that will satisfy most any level of competition that you choose, from novice mode to full hardcore simulation and everything in between. This includes damage, tire wear and the option to turn off the caution flag. Although I've not been able to recreate a blown tire or even a flat, the damage model does make the car drive erratically if you tag the wall or another car with too much force. With the tire wear option turned on, the cars do slow down as the tires get hotter and lose grip. However the tires are scaled for the length of the race you select, so a soft tire will still complete a 40-lap feature. This is not very true to life. It just seems a rational conclusion that if a soft tire turns to mush after 10 laps of racing then by the end of a 40-lap run, the car would be down to the rim.
The replay feature is an added bonus that was sought after by many of the original DTR fans. The replays are nice and give you the ability to save or view them in order to check online action to see how you got upside down or to critique your driving line. The camera angles are a little limited but for the most part the feature works well.
There are 20 tracks included. Some new ones were added from DTR but most are just the old tracks with some updated graphics and a different name to make them appear new. Some of the tracks are nicely replicated. The Knoxville, Eldora and Terre Haute tracks will knock your socks off. These tracks in particular are nice and wide and very well suited for Sprint Car racing. Some of the others are so narrow and oddly shaped that it is just not fun to race on them. For those of you that have bought DTR, the tracks from the earlier game and the add-ons can also be used in Sprints. Ratbag also added a feature to allow the driver to look left & right from the in-car view.
The Game Spy server applet that's shipped with Sprints will get you connected to race servers so you can join or host races. Or if you choose, you can easily host a race via TCP/IP configuration. Just find out what your current IP address is using your winipcfg.exe from Windows and send your IP address to your friends and that's all they'll need to join you. Just a word of warning here, if you don't have a fairly high bandwidth connection, the number that can join you and race comfortably is very limited. Very possibly the maximum will be no more than two through a 56k modem.
GAME STRUCTURE
When you first load up DTR-Sprint you are immediately prompted to select which video mode will best suit the hardware that is on your machine. If you're not sure what kind of equipment is lurking in your box or which setting will work best for your system, there is an "Auto-Detect" mode that selects the best options for maximum performance. The program also installs a command line editor that creates a little broader compatibility range for some other hardware issues and also allows the user to disable the intro movie and the video selection menu. Once you've selected all of the options and have your system configured to run, it's time to open the game and calibrate your controller so we can take this baby for a spin. Before you get too involved with running the program, it's always a good idea to go out to Windows and recalibrate the controller in the Windows Control Panel just to make sure you have it fresh in memory and working properly. I'm not sure if I just have a buggie configuration in my controller since mine is hand fabricated but with the original DTR and DTR-Sprints both locked each time I got to the input section when trying to calibrate my wheel. After a fresh calibration in Windows, it seemed to understand and the rest of the button and axis configuration could be completed.
I do like the layout for the options menu. Each page for the Video, Sound, Input and Game Options are clearly defined and allow you to fine tune the game and the software to suit your tastes. The game menus are nicely arranged and easy to follow, although getting to the garage or set-up menu from the track selection screen is cumbersome. The set-up is spread out amongst four pages instead of a single page, which is aggravating. It seems you have to click too many buttons to navigate between selecting the car, the track and the set-up pages. And then once you have that figured out, you have to wade through a few more clicks and pages to get your set-up saved or to load up an existing one. As in DTR you can't just import and export your set-ups to share with your friends. I'm not sure why it's so tedious to create a separate file for each set-up to reside in. Instead of having to rely on a third party coder to create a utility to extract the data. This is something I think should have been designed in the game from the very beginning. From a business standpoint I guess it make sense. Why pay someone to write code when you can get it done for free by someone else.
In my interview with Mark Bracken & Paul Murray, they stated that one of their goals for the game was to make it playable for all ranges. An intricate "balance issue" in trying to satisfy the hardcore sim-racer and yet at the same time not alienate the novice recreational user. That's the reason we have the performance slider, which adjusts the AI strength as well as the players' car handling. A reasonable person would expect a professional WoO driver to be pretty hard to beat with the AI strength and car handling set at 100%, yet people that visit our site are already asking how to edit the AI strength to speed them up.
MY THOUGHTS
I've been with this project from the very beginning when I was asked to test the physics model and provide input to the coders on the merits of my experience in dirt track racing, so I have felt for a long time that this was my baby. One I would hopefully be proud to put my name on and consider it one of the successes of my history in simulator racing. And yet, realistically, I'm just a small cog in the gears of this machine. The beta testing machine that is that provided the expertise that someone suggested was nessecary to make this game into a sim. Beta testing can be a rewarding experience when you get the chance to suggest the things that annoy you about other products and then see those suggestions met with enthusiasm and implemented. On the other hand, it can be very frustrating when those suggestions fall on deaf ears. I guess it's part of the deal but it's still frustrating. I can't tell you how many times I've been at the racetrack when someone has asked for help in one form or another. Almost before I've finished my sentence, I'm met with the argument as to why that won't work. Like I said, it's frustrating.
In this case it was the old lame excuse of not having enough funds or time to fix what we suggested. I assume that part of this mentality is forwarded from the publisher, Wizard Works that has a policy of selling games for twenty dollars. I'm not in the habit of stating the blatantly obvious but quality isn't cheap, it's priceless. Warren Buffet once said, price is what you pay, value is what you get when you pay the price. In those terms, DTR Sprint Cars is a value. It's a good game but by no means great. The sad part is that it could have been. All the tools were in place to make one of the best dirt simulations in the world. Anyone that has experienced the original DTR and opened the files in Sprints will find himself or herself in familiar territory. Most of the game engine that was in place in DTR was rehashed into Sprints. That's not uncommon in the software arena. Lots of software engines are reused. Taking Nascar Heat for example they have the old "Horn ball" option left over from Viper Racing in the configuration file. I had hoped to see something better from Ratbag. Especially since DTR had such success. I had really hoped Sprints would be a step above what we had. Our Beta group screamed, begged and pleaded for a revised Multiplayer code to help combat the lag problems that plagued DTR. There were even appeals for more than ten cars in the Multiplayer section. I would have been satisfied with the ten we had if it was in a stable online environment.
The group of tester we had were also encouraged to obtain release forms from their home tracks in order to create some more realistic tracks and graphics for the project. Unfortunately after I went to the track owner of my home track and submitted his release forms, I was informed that there would only be WoO sanctioned tracks created for the game. Which is funny because there's no such thing as a WoO "sanctioned track", at least not to my knowledge. Usually I don't mind being made a fool of, especially when I'm capable of doing that all by myself but in this case I wasn't too happy about this little charade. I was even more disappointed to see the same narrow, un-racable, one-grooved tracks that were in the old DTR. You know the ones: the tracks that have the wheel launching ramps that are presumably there to simulate a berm. I tried, to no avail to point out that this track design was not real nor conducive to the side by side racing that makes this sort of gaming worthwhile. Again this item was ignored. I hoped to see a track besides Knoxville where there was a cushion that was actually the fast way around the track. Or possibly some new tracks like the ones that Trevor Brady created that had two grooves that were equally fast.
I understand that at times some concessions to realism are made to promote playability and it should work the other way around as well. The Terre Haute track is a shining example of this. The real track has always had the reputation as being very rough and generally hard to manage because of the holes that develop during an event. In DTR-Sprints this is probably one of the raciest joints in the game. It's nice and wide, very smooth and a great track to compete on within the game. It just begs for one slide job after another. It is also one of the few track where the AI don't run all over you with their unorthodox driving lines. It's my favorite track with the exception of Brewerton and the old redone Jackson track (Southern Oregon).
CLOSING COMMENTS
It may seem from my review that I'm down on this game which I'm not. I'm just disappointed in it. I said earlier that I felt like this was my child. This was a project that I was asked to be part of in attempt to do something really special. It's kind of like the disdain that a parent feels when their kids misbehave. As a parent you are always proud of your children, just displeased when you know that they can do better. DTR-Sprints is a good game and with the abundance of fans that dearly love dirt racing and especially the Sprint cars, this title should and probably will do well. If this was the first in the series from Ratbag I'd probably be more forgiving. They could and should have done better.
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