NASCAR 09

When NASCAR 08 made the leap to the 360 generation last year, it proved something that real racing fans know — driving fast in a circle is genuinely hard. Unfortunately for the game, only a niche of hardcore players want a ball-busting simulation that pushes them to the limits. Most players prefer a more balanced approach that lets them start off gently and ramp up the realism to their tastes. With NASCAR 09, EA Sports says they’ve heard and addressed those complaints.

The game opens with Jeff Gordon as your mentor, and one of the first things you do is pick your driving style — Normal or Pro — which are pretty self-explanatory. In Normal, you don’t instantly lose control if you collide with someone, and you can also do quick pits and quick flags. Pro is all sim all the time.

As a new learning ground for beginners, the game is also adding Sprint Driver Challenges (as in, sponsored by the phone company — not driving sprint cars). Much like the honeycomb grid of challenges in Tiger 08, it serves up a selection of short, one-off race challenges that’ll help you learn the ins and outs of the game, or just get in a quick shot of racing.

On the career side, everything revolves around rep — the AI reaction to you on the track, sponsor contracts, even online matchmaking. You’ll begin your stock-car odyssey by building your own car and hitting the track to start racking up the strong performances (but probably not wins, at least at first) to build that rep. You also earn performance points, which you can spend to build out your engine, chassis, aero, and durability on each track type (speedway, road, etc.).

The other cool highlight of NASCAR 09 is the new Own the Track Mode, which presents you with a Risk-style map of the NASCAR tracks across the country. Your performances make the tracks “yours” in a leaderboard kind of way. If you’re on Live, you compete with anyone on your friends list; if you gotz no broadband, it’s you vs. the AI.

Speaking of online, look for 14-player action this year, which EA hopes will perform more smoothly by not sticking one of those 14 in the role of host for the session — theoretically, all players should therefore have equal access to packets. Aside from that, the graphics were naturally enhanced (anti aliasing!), and the AI now dynamically adjusts, taking it up a notch if you’re killing them and easing off if you’re getting killed. It all sounds like great stuff to us — watch for our final verdict in our August issue.