This game blows all other Nascar games out of the water, and its a 5 year old game!
User Rating: 9.8 | NASCAR: Dirt to Daytona GC
Atari and Infogrames did good making this game. It might not have all the drivers, and it might not have all the tracks that you see the good ol' cup boys running every weekend, but this game puts all other Nascar games in their place. You get a good amount of gameplay options, everywhere from running a single race, a season, or a complete career. You can adjust race length, AI difficulty (it has a custom slider bar, in addition to the basic general AI settings), whether or not you want your tires and gas to slowly burn away, and so on. You can even choose between 4 different series, all running under the Nascar flag. (Quick note, you run 4 in this game, NASCAR has 13 different series' running under their flag). In career mode, you start out in the dirt with a very modest amount of money, and a very very basic car. You run the dirt and as you make money and woo sponsors you up grade your car. Win the championship, and go to modifieds. This repeats going into the Craftsman Truck Series, and finally into your goal, the Winston Cup Series, the series you hear about week in, week out. Throughout the different series', you have some 40 car setup options to toy with in order to make the car run even faster so as to annihilate your opponents.
As far as graphics go, one must remember this game is 5 years old, so its not as flashy as the newer games out there.There are some slight issues with draw distance, but otherwise there isn't much different from what you see in todays games.
Sound? Well... you get *a* song, and it loops over and over while in the menu and the such. And during races, you get, well... the sound of the engines, and your spotter. And you don't even get your spotter until the truck series, really. The song you get is a country riff. Not too bad, but it can, and probably will wear on you after a while.
As far as value goes, I picked this up for $10 about a year ago. I've played it more than both Nascar 05 and 07 combined, and I've put hundreds of hours into both games, and payed $40 for each of them. So if you can find this game cheap, its worth picking it up. Its old, but its realistic enough to keep folks going.
