Not the best in the series. A couple of hits within the game but also a couple of misses. Solid racing game nonetheless.
The other race option you have from the main menu is the "Earn Your Stripes" mode. Before you start this mode you run a series of test races that determine what league you will start out in. Once you have run these races you start off in the designated league by signing a contract from the various options available. Once you've signed a contract (and earned a nice little signing bonus!) you start to run your races. On top of the regular season points races you must participate in, there are two other types of races that come up from time to time that you can choose to run. The first is a Charity Race. There are only six cars in a charity race and although you don't earn any money for charity races, a good placing can give a big boost to your skill points (more on them soon). The other type of race that comes up now and again is a Showdown Race. Basically, if you get in to it with another driver on the track and really get him angry, he will eventually challenge you to a 3 lap race to settle the score. Again you don't earn any money on this type of race, but a win gives a big boost to your skill points. As for the regular season points races, the higher you finish the more money and season points you earn, of course! Also, depending on how you perform on the track, the more skill points you can earn. You earn skill points by driving in particular ways during a race. Skill points are divided in to six categories; front running, on the charge, experience, race strategy, flair/charisma, and precision. There are 12 levels you must reach with your skill points before finally maxing them out. The more skill points you earn the better your driver becomes. Another way to get ahead of the game is to upgrade your car. Depending on the league you are racing in there are up to five levels of upgrades available in these six categories; durability, efficiency, steering, engine, braking, and tires. As you upgrade these categories the better and better your car will become. I highly recommend totally upgrading durability first! Especially if you drive like a maniac like I do. The more of a pounding your car can take the better. So that's about it for this mode. Basically it's like Franchise Mode in the EA sports games where you can play as many seasons as you want in a row. So you are not just limited to one season in the Earn Your Stripes mode, it can go on and on for as long as you like. This is the bread and butter of this game, it was really well done.
The next option from the main menu is the "Game Modes" option. Within this option you will find four separate modes. The first is the "Season" mode. You pick a league and a driver and then begin a season. I'm not sure exactly what they were thinking with this mode. I think the season only consists of 15 or 16 races and there is no Chase for the Cup at the end of it. It's definitely worth playing at least once, but it didn't really feel like a normal NASCAR "season" to me. The second mode is the "Chase for the Cup" mode. Basically you choose a driver, pick where you want to be in the order of the 12 drivers competing for the Cup, and then run the 10 races that make up the Chase for the Cup. This mode made a little more sense than the season mode did, that's for sure! The third mode is the "Race Online" mode. Pretty self-explanatory, race online against a bunch of strangers. The last mode is the "Test & Tune" mode. Here you can pick a car, give it some tweaks, and see how it responds in terms of it's performance.
The last main option from the main menu is the "My NASCAR" option. Here you have three options to choose from. The first is the "Medallions" option. Basically, for the unlockable content in this game they employed a medallion system. On each track in the game you can unlock up to five medallions. On each track you can unlock any of four medallions under these categories; "First Place Finish", "Pass 20 Cars", "Lap 5 Cars", and "First Place Without Rewinding". Once you unlock all four of these medallions on any one track, you unlock a fifth bonus medallion. You can use these medallions to unlock Chase Plates for each track. I think the chase plates give you automatic pole position for races on the track in question, but to be honest I never looked in to the chase plates! I make it by on skill alone, baby! Oh, and driving like an a$$hole too, I love to wreck people. As for the "rewinding" I mentioned under the last medallion category, it is a new feature to this game. You have the option, just once per race, to rewind the events at any given time, for a few seconds. So let's say you are running out front near the end of the race and you have a big miscue in a turn and lose a few places. You can press and hold the select button and the race will be taken back a few seconds and you can try things again! To be honest, I think I only ever used this option once, but it is a pretty cool idea. Anyways, the next option is "Best Laps". Here you can view the top lap times on every track in the game. If you've got the top lap time it will be highlighted in blue. The third option is the "Custom Car Garage" option, which I never really spent much time on, but it is a pretty cool feature. Here you can create your very own car, choose the sponsors and paint schemes and make it your very own ride!
Now, before every race you of course have the option to customize the race, and your actual car, to your own preference. For the race you can choose the difficulty you want to race under (I think there are 3 or 4 difficulty levels), how long you want the race to be (here I think you have 4 or 5 options), and of course if you want the car to take damage or not, suffer tire wear, pit stops, etc. As for your car itself, before the race you have the option to tweak it just how you want it. You can change quite a few options including tire pressure, downforce, suspension, gear ratios, etc. I only ever really changed the gear ratios around before my races, that seemed to be good enough to compliment my driving style and get me the good placings I wanted.
As for the actual gameplay, graphics, etc., I found everything to be spot on! They really mastered the control of the cars quite a few years ago on their earlier installments of the game, so there were absolutely no issues the gameplay. And the graphics continue to get a little bit better with each subsequent release of the franchise. As this point they've perfected the actual racing so much that in order to really make the next game that much better than the last is to add some really innovative game modes and options that haven't been thought of before.
My overall opinion of this game is really good. However, I think I still like the '05 edition a little bit better, mainly because of the unlockables. In the '05 edition the points you earned to unlock the bonus content was used to unlock bonus cars, bonus tracks, and a whole slew of alternate paint schemes for all of the various cars in the game. That was totally missing from the NASCAR '08 game. First, there was none of that same unlockable content to begin with, and second, with the new medallion scheme of unlocking things, it made it a lot harder to get to the unlockable content (almost downright impossible in my opinion!). I admit the medallion scheme was a good idea, in theory. But the "Lap 5 Cars" medallion is so hard to get on over half of the tracks in the game that it makes it almost impossible to unlock everything. I found that getting the "Lap 5 Cars" medallion was somewhat easy on the superspeedways like Talladega because the cars were always running in packs at very high speeds, so if you cause a bit wreck, you can usually get around the track one more time and pass at least five cars before they have a chance to pit and get back out there. Same goes for the short tracks. Although you're not traveling at nearly the same speeds, if you cause a significant wreck and stop a lot of cars on the track, because the track is so short you can usually get around one more time before they've sorted everything out and got everybody straightened out and running again. However, on the mid-sized tracks (and that would be most of them!), it is downright impossible to cause that perfect accident that will get you the big wreck you need in order to earn the medallion. It happened to me a few times out of sheer luck, but that's all. The only way you could really do it would be to run full length races, run at the front, and hope that by the end of the race you'd catch as least five cars! But let's be honest, very few people have the time available to run full length races in this day and age. The medallions should have been set up so that you could gain them on any mode, using any combination of options, in the game. The other thing I didn't like about the game was how you couldn't race on every track with any of the racing leagues, you were limited to whatever tracks they actually race on in those series, no more and no less. I think you should be able to run on any track, with any vehicle available, it is a video game after all! Other than that the game was really good. Like I said the gameplay and graphics only continue to improve, little bit by little bit, and the addition of the "Earn Your Stripes" and "Custom Car Garage" modes only enhance the racing experience on this edition of the game. Hopefully they'll sort out the unlockable content issues for the next year though!