DRIVERS, START YOUR ENGINES

Once back to the Main Menu, I chose Race Modes and Testing Session to get an idea of the car's highly touted physics model without having to worry about rules and other cars. I chose Daytona International Speedway as my opening testing ground, set the weather to 70 and clear and proceeded to the track. The game loaded the track in a few seconds, and I was presented with a screen that listed drivers, best lap and options for car set-up in the garage via the Easy Tweak and Advanced method.

In the Easy Tweak Garage, the car can be adjusted via four independent sliders that control down-force, balance, suspension and gearing. A great touch, especially for anyone who's intimidated by the plethora of setup options in the Advanced Garage. The changes you make with the sliders do affect the setup values in the Advanced Garage as well, so this is not an independent or dumbed-down tweak area for novices. This very well could be the best place to start a base setup until it comes time to fine-tune it. Entering the Advanced Garage area, I was met with several screens that handled tires, suspension, weight and drive-train options. A new option in the aero adjustments section that I had never seen before in a stock car game were options for flaring the left and right front fenders. This was marvelous, allowing actual aero tweaks for handling and speed.

I decided to take my first laps on the track at Daytona. My first impression was that the track appeared dark, and while the graphics were very clean, the color differences in the pavement were minimal. No racing groove was evident as I left pit road and drove down the front straight into turn 1. Moving the car up through the gears, I could hear several ambient mechanical noises just under the wonderfully deep sounding engine tone. I'm not sure if they were mechanical movements in the chassis, the drive-train, or what have you, but they certainly added to the total atmosphere of the game. As I roared up closer to full speed and entered turn 3, the car suddenly pushed straight up the track into the wall. A controller calibration problem was my thought, so I exited the track, went back to the controller options and saw that the range of steering was correct. I ran back out on the track and once again the car climbed the hill and scraped the wall. I ran several more laps wondering if this was related to tire temps, but the problem remained. I finally realized that I needed to adjust my entry line and get off the gas to keep the car low in the turns. The only way I could determine if it was the game or me was to put other cars on the track, so off to Quick Race I went.

Once I chose to start the race, I was presented with a grand display of all the pageantry that comes with Nascar races these days. The cars lined up on pit road, the Goodyear blimp high in the sky, a formation of fighter planes in flight overhead as the announcers talk over the images with great anticipation of the race. Once placed inside my car, the engine came to life and I noticed for the first time several icons on the left hand side of the screen. One had a yellow flag in it, one had a car with an arrow behind it, and another had a wrench with a red line through it. I paused the race and found that these are Race Information icons. The flag shows you the current race condition, which is good because there are no flags displayed at the flag-stand at any time, not even the checkered flag. The car with an arrow behind it indicates that you are to follow this car…and trailing from that box to the car in front of me was a blinking red line that resembled a Fox telecast. This line stayed glued to the back of the car you're supposed to follow until the green flag drops. This is rather annoying, and you cannot turn it off, at least not that I could find. The wrench icon was a pitting icon and the red line through it indicates the pits are closed. I was flabbergasted that a game with such intent on realism would suddenly drop the ball and place icons and markers on the screen for information. The race begins and after running several laps in a tight pack there is no contact between myself and the other drivers. I'm impressed with the AI at this point. They recognize the player as another driver on the track and neither ignores the player nor do they move aside for him. It's racing hard, the way it should be. Several laps later, I'm following a car into Turn 1 and for several laps I have been taking note of the AI's braking points. Although my lap times were comparable to the AI cars, the braking points were significantly later than the AI cars, and they were able to accelerate at a much faster rate out of the turns. On one particular lap however, the AI car slows sooner than expected and I plow into the back of the car with enough force to have turned his car around, and caused significant damage to mine as well. Instead the AI car pulls away with a small rounded indentation in his rear bumper and seemingly no damage to mine. Near the end of the race, as an AI car is passing me, I get loose and spin down into the grass on the front stretch. Although I never came back up on the track, another AI seems to find me sitting close enough to the apron and plows into my right front fender. I decide to pit, fix any damage and get fresh tires for the closing laps. With all the other teams' war wagons and pit signs present on pit-road, it's tricky finding your pit stall. I'm driving the #3 Oreo car and yet I can't see my pit box. Then I suddenly realize I have the only box that doesn't have a number on the pit sign, which also isn't dropped down to help me find my stall. This kind of oversight makes me wonder about the beta testing and quality assurance that went into this game. It's simple things like this that makes a good game great. As I hit my mark in my stall, the game switches from the cockpit view to an external camera with a great animation of my pit crew going to work on the car. From this vantage point I realize the damage on my car from the impact in the grass resulted in nothing more than a paint scuff on the fender, which is quite disappointing. Once again the developers have taken the player from being inside the car, feeling like they are in a real race, pulled them out and made this all a game again. No sooner had I finished my thought, I was back in my car and given the "GO, GO, GO" to leave pit road. Even while repairing the damage, the pit stop lasted only a little over 15 seconds; not very realistic in my opinion.

I re-entered the track to line up for the restart (behind the flashing red line again). The green flag waved and we were off with 2 laps to go. While attempting a tight pass in turn 3 my car collided with the car on the outside of me. The AI car did not budge more than an inch and I bounced off and kept going. I pushed it again in Turn 1 and this time I hit the AI car in the left rear quarter-panel. Ordinarily, this would have caused his car to spin up the track and into the wall, but not here. It seems that the AI cars are very solidly glued to the track. It takes a significant blow to move them, much less spin them. As I crossed the start/finish line taking the checkered flag, the game took control of the car, switching once again to an external view of my car, and then transported me directly to the results screen. I was expecting to see some sort of celebration in victory lane, but instead I was taken to see the results, and once I pressed OK, I was back to the main menu.