NASCAR 08: EA's First Attempt on Next Gen, but Does it Deliver?

For years now NASCAR fans have been waiting for the opportunity to play a next generation NASCAR game. Well finally on July 23^rd, EA Sports released their first NASCAR game for the next generation consoles and the wait was finally over. As most titles on a new system, you know that certain things would be left out and the game would be different but how did EA's first year for NASCAR on next generation really do?

Well the big part of the game is the physics. EA has completely built the driving engine this year from the ground up and I must say it's a very good physics engine. The fact you can actually spin out if you don't enter the turn right or hit the gas too hard coming out of the turn. The game itself can be very hard to handle but thankfully EA has added a lot of assists and other options so the game will appeal to even the most casual audience. You can tune over 40 different options for getting your car right, which is a nice feature for myself. If you don't know anything on that, there are still four basic sliders like in past games to make the car drive better. You can have the Car of Tomorrow, the regular Cup cars, Busch Series, and Trucks. Modifieds are on the PS2 version still.

Other physics like car flips and accidents are not quite up to par yet. The flips in this year's game are very excessive and unrealistic. You can pretty much flip your car on every track, which on the smallest ones are next to impossible in real life. I think EA Sports was more concerned about the spectacular level of wrecks instead of realism. There are really weird glitches like if you flip your car by a really steep bank, the car will sink into it or if you flip into a fence, it just morphs into it and reset on the track. Its just more things EA needs to work on for next year. AI cars feel like they are glued to the track and not to mention they are over aggressive, which makes it fun but pretty unrealistic in most cases.

The damage this year is well done yet unrealistic at the same time still. In most cases if you hit wall, you will get a good deal of damage to your car. When you rear end someone, you don't get a whole lot of damage but you just clip their rear or front end, your car is massively damaged. This can be easily fixable but I just think EA should hire regular people to test these games to really see the realism before it gets released so they can fix things like this. The damage detail is very well done with details like smoking tires if you blow out one of them and sparks are very well done as well.

In terms of features, NASCAR 08 lacks big time. A lot of well liked features from past games such as allies and rivals, victory lane celebrations, career mode, owner mode, and all that jazz is mysteriously missing this year. It seems to be standard from EA Sports since Madden the first year on next generation systems was pretty much bare bones as well. I expect next year we will see most if not all of these come back as long as people complain enough about it.

Some features you do get include, test and tune mode, some pretty fun challenges, race now mode of course, and season mode. You get online play of course which features up to 11 other people and yourself but online features are pretty basic. Actually I don't think there are many features at all but it's the first year on next generation systems so next year should probably get a big over haul. The online play is solid for most cases but lags like most EA Sports titles.

The biggest issue with the game is the glitches and bugs. I can't even name them all since they are so many. It was like EA Sports never even bothered to play test the game at all. The game seems to be rushed as it is but the glitches in this game are just pathetic. They will occur online and offline and most will happen under caution. There are instance where I want to pit and tell it to but it won't, or on restarts you will just start accelerating off the track for no reason and bring out another caution and then you get to start at the back. Its really annoying things like this that hold the game back even more.

Bottom line, if you enjoy NASCAR games, then NASCAR 08 is still a good game but if your really into career mode like I am and all the extras they had in past years, you might want to just rent this one or wait until next year to see if they bring it all back. The game is very good physics wise and if you love to tune on stock cars and race them, this game is pretty good in that instance. NASCAR 08 is on the XBOX360, PS3 and PS2 this year.