NASCAR Heat Review

If you're, more or less, sick of the Grand Prix 3 story (Easy there, there's a lot of GP3 fans out there. -Ed.), and if you are impatiently awaiting something more interesting, with more adrenalin and a thinner line between life and death, then this is definitely the thing for you. Providing you don't mind driving like a maniac on tracks that all look alike...

Another boring lap...

Green flag, oh yeah!

Hasbro Interactive, a company that copes perfectly with all kinds of flight and race simulations, has graced us with their version of the famous NASCAR competition, entitled NASCAR Heat. Despite their solid sim record, Hasbro has almost timidly avoided for the longest time to try their hand in NASCAR. It is almost as if they where afraid of Sierra, a dangerous contender, who in cooperation with Papyrus - NASCAR fanatics, had great success with a bunch of games that cover this type of racing. Oh yeah, it'd be rude to skip Electronic Arts who recently released NASCAR 2000 and NASCAR Revolution... Anyway, I don't know what took them so long, but looks like they finally realized it was time to catch up, because this competition is being viewed by 100 mil people, up live and over the tube (NASCAR is number one on Alta Vista Top Sports Searches as I'm typing this).

The developer credits for Hasbro's genre first-born go to Monster Games Incorporated, a software company whose employees up until a year ago were all working for Papyrus. After they split from Papy, they developed Viper racing, later published by Sierra. They have been laying low since ...until now. By the way, did you know that Hasbro intends to release another game, NASCAR Racers, which will be an arcade-style racing game based on the Fox animated TV show of the same name? As is the case with the Fox's animated series, the game won't stick to the official competition. Instead, players will get to race in the "bogus" environments made popular by the TV show.

OK, the HEAT is on... One of the first things you'll see in the game are family dedications to drivers who got killed on the New Hampshire International Speedway track during this summer --- young Adam Petty, who met with his faith in May, and Kenny Irwin who died two months later. Sad... The scenes are followed by an upbeat intro movie, showing a few Winston Cup drivers goofing around, no doubt to highlight the lighter, more humorous side to the competition. (We don't want to scare the customers, right? -Ed.) A very functionally designed main menu comes next, featuring two very distinct modes of play --- Beat the Heat and Race the Pro.

Beat the Heat is an interesting combination of 36 challenges divided into six chapters, some of which are original, and downright fun --- four cars are on the track... ...you are on the fourth starting position, and you have to finish at least third. In another challenge, the player has the honor of driving as Bobby Labonte's teammate against three other drivers. Bobby's poorly placed, and there is only a few laps left in the race. Your job is to try hard, get in the way of other drivers, and help him win the race...

The player starts as a total rookie, with his sights set on achieving the status of the champion. Don't you for a moment think that's easy though! I had a lot of problems, and several of the challenges were harder than winning first place in various standard races. After each completed challenge, you get a gold, silver, or bronze medal, and continue your quest for the Champion title. Of course, if you are not satisfied with bronze, you can always go back and try again... A very interesting mode, but if you get stuck in one of the tougher challenges, you'll have the displeasure of meeting the frustrating side of Beat the Heat.

Race the Pro is some kind of Ghost Race, in which the ghost is actually one of the top drivers. Three tracks and two driving modes are offered (Expert and Normal). The opponent AI is adapting to your driving performances. Give it a shot if you feel like hacking it one-on-one against some of the main men of the sport! The developers decided NOT to feature drivers' real-life performances. They used their in-game performances instead. What they did was, they brought in ten drivers, placed them in front of PC, and "persuaded" them into playing NASCAR Heat. Then they recorded their best scores on some 2-3 tracks. And believe it or not, some of these guys were real good in this game!

Except the two aforementioned modes, the game features the standard Quick Race, Championship, and the support for multiplayer games. NASCAR Heat offers 28 real-life teams and 19 Winston Cup tracks. All you have to do is pick a driver and the track, see and hear Allan Bestwick's report - the man who actually does that on NBC (reports, that is), pick one of the many in-game views, (my two favorites are birds-eye and "under the hood" view) and off onto the tarmac action you go...

As far as the car physics goes, Monster Games applied "6 degrees of freedom" physics model. This model, in which the cars can move forward, backward, left, right, up and down is something already seen in Viper Racing, and is similar to Sierra/Papyrus' Grand Prix Legends. It's main purpose is not to give you takeoff (although you can try that too), but to provide more realistic handling of the car and its grip on the tarmac (and sometimes off the tarmac...). The great thing about it is that those Monster guys talked Bobby Labonte into being their consultant (they say Bobby spent several hundred hours playing NASCAR Heat!). You can really notice the car's good grip both in low and "killer" speeds.

If you play in expert mode, you have to know that the computer won't tolerate any of your mistakes. In normal mode, however, many of the mistakes are overlooked in favor of gameplay dynamics, even too much at times. For example: your car will survive a direct collision at 150MPH, with a car that is doing the same speed! A little unrealistic, but just goes to prove that this game will be, as they announced, appreciated by die-hard fans, as well as moderate players.