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Youve got to hand it to Sierra Sports; when their
mainstream FrontPage football and baseball games started losing ground to an increasingly
crowded field, they reevaluated, changed their tack, and in a brilliant stroke became the
preeminent purveyors of good ol boy computer sports games. Forget football, baseball and hockeySierra
Sports now cranks out games about bass fishing, deer hunting, and stock car racing. These,
of course, would be the featured events if anyone ever wanted to tailor a triathlon for
the male population of Anywhere, Deep South, U.S.A. And
youve got to give Sierra credit for not condescending to this market. I mean, they
could have produced poorly-made hunting and fishing sims and flooded the Wal-Mart market,
but Sierra Sports games have been consistently excellent. From Trophy Buck to Trophy
Bass Fishing, their games have been good-lookin, fun, and pretty realistic. NASCAR Racing 3, the latest in Papyrus stock
car racers, follows in that tradition. Its a hell of game thats both enjoyable
enough for the casual fan and realistic enough for the hardcore NASCAR aficionado And its also a big improvement
on NASCAR 2, no slouch of a game itself. While first reports out of Sierra had NASCAR 3
using the CPU-intensive Grand Prix Legends engine, the powers that be wisely decided that
a mass-market NASCAR game probably shouldnt demand a cutting edge machine, so
Papyrus ratcheted up the tried-and-true NASCAR 2 engine. The results are more than
satisfying. First, NASCAR Racing 3s graphics are much better than
NASCAR 2s. You can crank your screen resolution up to 1024x768, and at that res the
game looks very, very, nice. Its still not the most beautiful racing game on the
market, but it runs smoothly at high res, and the Papyrus team has done an excellent
balancing act between performance and appearance. Cars look great as they whiz by, and the
28 tracks are especially impressive. From Indy to Talladega to Las Vegas, each of the
tracks is painstakingly rendered. Theyre more than just oval tracks; while driving
at Talladega, you can see the rolling hills of Alabama in the distance, in Las Vegas, its
the desert. The
sound has been improved as wellnow its 3D, and its a real treat to hear
directional engine sounds as you blow by cars. Force feedback has also been added, though
not very forcefully. The games physics engine has also
been tweaked. Though you can still have a blast playing on arcade setting, real NASCAR
geeks will want to turn the realism up to 11, and at that level youll find NASCAR 3
to be a very challenging and realistic sim. Youll also find that youll need to
fiddle with your cars settings to remain competitive, and NASCAR 3 has a great
garage feature that allows you to turn your sluggish ride into one nimble racer. Once youre
into the garage, youll be able to adjust your cars tire pressure, spoilers,
suspension, fuel level, weight bias, gear ratios, wheel lockeven grille tape. If all
of this sounds uncompromisingly arcane, not to worryNASCAR 3s manual does a
superb job of explaining what all of this means and why its important, and also
includes a guide to each of the 28 tracks, along with suggested setups for each one. Though the game features 45 Winston
Cup and Busch Grand National drivers and cars, if you want to customize your car even more
you can always access NASCAR 3s paintshop feature. Its quite easy to use, and
its nice to have a car in ones own distinctive colors. Once youve set up your car, its
off to whatever track you choose to race on. If you play in arcade mode, youll only
be able to race. But if you play in realistic mode, youll be able to run practice
laps until youre ready to qualify, after which youll be able to take some warm
up laps until youre set to race. Especially at the higher difficulty levels, its
a very good idea to get the lay of the tracks and a solid racing strategy down, because
once the race starts things start to happen very, very, fast. Driver AI is mostly very good and often
unpredictablethe bad guys will race four wide, and can be very aggressive, so youve
got to watch out for the other guy once you hit the track, and while a little bumping and
grinding is part of NASCAR, too much will find you spinning out. Even at easy difficulty
settings, a short race can be difficult to finish without cracking up Nevertheless, most
races tend to be tense, fender-to-fender high speed fun. NASCAR 3 also supports multiplayer
online play on WON, and when it works, its a great deal of fun. Unfortunately, with
a 56.6 connection youll find yourself spending a great deal of time searching for a
game without latency problems. Bottom line: NASCAR 3 is the best
NASCAR racing game out there. With improved graphics, sound, and physicsand a suite
of options that allows a wide range of playersfrom the least promising of beginners
to the next Jeff Gordonto enjoy the game, this games the one to beat. |