EA Sports' NASCAR 08 for the PlayStation 3 is a challenging and naturally more-structured racing game. It's not for everyone, and the enjoyment one derives from playing depends on a number of factors. First of all, gamers who have played previous titles in the long-running NASCAR series will have an edge getting started. The developers put a lot of time and effort into making the gameplay accessible to new players, but the fact is, NASCAR racing is complicated. Yeah, it's mostly just one big left turn, but there's a lot of strategy and skill needed just to finish a race, much less win one.
To that end, the game features plenty of training opportunities for newbies. But despite the addition of customizable car-handling options, getting these racecars around the track without hitting anything takes a lot of concentration, luck and thumb dexterity. The steering controls for the six-axis controller are downright touchy, to the point in which it almost distracts from the enjoyment of the racing action. It's frustrating enough when you hit a wall or another car trying to negotiate all those left-hand turns, but I found myself running into things on the straight-aways as I just tried to keep the car pointed in the right direction.
Added to that, gamers who have played previous incarnations of the series or are NASCAR fans will have a good idea of how to go about things, such as how to qualify for race positions, when to make pit stops, how to negotiate caution flags and how to change car setups following practice sessions. New gamers to the series will have to figure all this out on the fly, so the learning curve here has to be rated high. There is help in the form of being able to pick the length of races. That allows for bypassing pit stops if the race isn't long enough to require them. The flip side to that is a less-than-realistic racing experience.
New to the series this year is a visual aid to help drivers get into, and stay in, another driver's draft. I found this somewhat helpful, but again, I also found myself concentrating so hard on staying on my opponent's bumper that sometimes I'd end up crashing.
As in previous NASCAR games, there are lots of modes to play in, from jump-in-a-driver's-carand-hit-the track to career mode, and gamers can race in the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series, Busch Series or Craftsman Truck Series. The tracks the real drivers must negotiate are available, and each has its own personality and offers different driving challenges.
Controller functions make sense and aren't too difficult to figure out, and one nice change for this year's version of the game is that the rearview mirror is no longer activated by pushing down on the left thumbstick; it gets its own button. I always found myself pressing down on the thumbstick in previous years as I tried to keep the car stable on the track, which would make the mirror appear and disappear and is annoying when you have, say, Jeff Gordon on your back bumper.
Still, some annoying quirks show up in this game that have bugged the series for years. I still couldn't create a car with a number under 100, which makes it difficult to feel like you've built a great race team when you're driving a car that looks like it just rolled off a local dirt track. I suppose there's some reason for this annoyance year after year, but I wish the game's developers would figure out a way to allow gamers to have more freedom over customizing their cars.
Also, you can drive as pretty much any of your favorite drivers in the series, but again this year, my personal favorite driver, Carl Edwards, isn't available. Never has been. Will he and his No. 99 Office Depot Ford ever be? Don't know.
All that aside, what I came away with after playing NASCAR 08 is that, despite the even touchier controls from its predecessors (although I may have to give a pass there because I played previous versions on the original Xbox) and the fact that this game is supposedly made for next-gen consoles and HD televisions, it just doesn't look that different from previous versions. It's almost as if instead of stripping the game down and rebuilding it for consoles that can do so much more, it's just a glossed-up version of previous iterations.
And that's too bad. I would call this game enjoyable to play, but it seems to fall short of capturing all the nuances and grandeur that stockcar racing offers. For rabid fans of the sport that don't own last year's version of the game or need it for their new console, I would grudgingly recommend it. If you're just looking to get your race on and have some simple fun by jumping right into the action, I wouldn't say this is the game for you.
