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NASCAR 3 by Papyrus/Sierra Review by Stu Brown
As the dust settles and the smoke clears now that Nascar 3 has been out a couple of days it is becoming clear that Papyrus had the resources and time to make this title what I expect they would have liked to do for Nascar99. The improvements run right across the board and although there are a few niggles the wholesale improvements shine through and tell you that this sim has been given the overhaul it was long overdue.
The first thing to hit me was the way that they havent messed with a good menu system and adding drop down boxes as in GPL is a welcome improvement. Everything is clear and exactly where you expect to find it if even if you haven't played any of the previous titles. If it aint broke, dont fix it!
You inevitably just want to head for a quick race, but before that of course you'll need to calibrate your controller and as always this has been done well. The options of using a generic driver and directX input is a plus and Force Feedback is also available and fully tuneable.
Next up you'll want to select your graphics card and with both Direct3d and Glide (3dfx) hardware acceleration supported that should cover just about every card on the market today. You'll need to do a quick restart of the game if you change it but once its done you're good to go. There are all the usual options from N2/99 in here so you can make texture selections manually or set them to auto on/off to keep framerate up if necessary. There are however new additions in the graphics options that would also help you do this and generally adjust your visual quality to your hardware and framerate requirements:
A framerate indicator has also been included in N3 and can be activated while on the track by selecting ALTand F and shows up in the top left corner as 2 numbers. The left number being like a recent average and in brackets on the right you have the current framerate. This can help you to see which sections of the track are causing slowdowns and adjust your graphics settings acccordingly. See note below on skid marks as they have quite an impact! Just as in all other Papy releases the maximum framerate has been capped, and N3 like its predecessors is capped at 30fps.
On top of this all the promised graphical effects are in there. Lighting, shadows, smoke etc. Papy has always managed to avoid that "cartooney" look that many 3d games seem to have and this is no different. So while these effects really are nothing less than we expect nowadays from a 3d title, the fact that you can almost overlook them tells you that they must be right because nothing stands out and makes you think "yuk, what were they on when they overkilled that"!
Anyway so now you're set to go and swap some paint and the minute you floor the gas something has changed in the way the car takes off from a standstill. While it is essentially no different to previous versions due the car physics being based on previous Nascar releases, the way the car sounds as it takes off and you hear the drivetrain and tires scrabbling to get the grip down makes this feel good before you even turn a lap. You'll need a steady hand on the wheel to keep this thing pointing in the right direction as the rubber gets laid down and smoke pours off the spinning rubber.
Next thing I noticed as I shifted up through the gears was that the torque/power curve of these cars has changed! Something that many have expressed concern over and was I ever glad to see this brought up to date. Both the feel of it and the feedback from the rev counter tell you that you now have a better spread of power over lower revs and the engine is not as "peaky" as it was before. It is especially noticeable at Talladega. No longer will you be gearing the car up to max out at around 9000rpm because it just wont get there in a high gear. In fact with the default ACE setup the tacho wont budge much past 8500rpm in 3rd no matter how long you try showing you without doubt that these engines have their power at lower revs than with N2. The power is now much more realistically where you would expect it to be on a big V8 and early indications seem to me to put the useful power down about 6000 to 8000rpm. Thundering around Talladega at 7-8000 rpm you feel like the car is geared too long, but try making 4th much shorter and you'll soon see your laptimes drop off!
Talking of thundering, the sound quality improvement is an area of the game that has really had a big facelift. N3 supports the Aureal vortex 2 chip with its 3d sound effects. The Diamond Monster Sound MX300 has this chip and I couldnt resist this opportunity to update my old AWE64 for the sake of a mere 50 quid!!. Apart from the sound quality imrpovements, this card also takes some of the overhead off the CPU in sound processing - more good news for your framerates. Even without this card though the addition of an 8bit or 16 bit sound quality to the usual sound options plus all new engine, skid and crash effects are a major step forward. Add in the 3d sound and a 4 way speaker system and the atmosphere this generates is simply awesome. To not just see the cars as they go by the side of you or close up behind you but to HEAR them doing it as well is something that just has to be experienced to be appreciated. When I first plugged this in I was practically looking over my shoulder as a train of drafting cars closed in behind me then growled their way by on the high side. While this is not essential in my view as the sound has been quite considerably reworked for the better, it really does add another dimension to the racing experience as a whole. Another point of note on the sound is that by the inclusion of a well documeted Sndtweak.txt file we are even able to play with these sounds to tune them to personal preference. A nice touch I thought.
Ok so you've run few laps and now you want to go faster. Of course you can just put your old N2 setups in the their respective track directories or just take the much improved ACE setups and start tweaking away. Really there is not much to say on setup that has not already been said because essentially the car physics are an enhanced N2 version with the sway bar and grille tape additions. Your N2 setups will likely feel a bit loose, but with a little playing around and regearing they should soon give you the feel you had before. I guess there will be those that are glad not to have to start from scratch again and those that were really hoping for a more major update on the car physics. Either way these cars now feel more like the 3500lb tanks they are when you drive them due to the roll effect when driving and you also see the AI cars doing the same thing. Although this is not strictly a physics enhancement I was quite surprised at how such a simple thing could improve the feel of the driving. Its the combination of a lot of little touches like this that make the whole experience that much more immersive in N3. Another improvement like this is in the way that the AI are not so ridiculously slow from a standing start and do not seem to run their initial few laps at such a relative snails pace. Its not completely fixed by any means, but from my limited play time it doesnt seem nearly as bad as it was. The PR says that the AI has in fact been given the once over too, but with such short testing time to date really its hard to say for sure exactly what has been done with any real certainty so the jury is still out on this one... only some more long term racing will tell just how much better it is.
A word from my sponsor, known to some of you guys as my girlfriend Donna.....
Waffle waffle, yak yak, waffle :-) What he really means to say is WOW! I know this 'cos he hasn't been off the damn game since he got it. In fact the only way I got to spend some time with him is to move a comfortable chair into his den and sit quietly in the corner. Well, if you cant beat them, join them and the only way I could get Stuart off his computer for 5 minutes was to have a go myself
OK Donna I'll get to wrapping up then :)
Before I conclude here there are a couple of areas that have also seen some noticeable first impression changes. So what about the cars themselves? The carshape has clearly been brought up to 99 WC spec and we can now run a proper 43 car field where pitstall availability allows. The carset lists have also been made easier to manipulate with a couple of new functions to aid moving and sorting the lists. The AI car settings are also more configuable with individual power settings for road/shorttrack/speedway allowing more accurate creation of carsets using the myriad of statistics that seems to be such an integral part of Nascar. Unfortunately the car palattes are not much different to before, but the cars still look plenty detailed enough for me at 150 odd mph.
The only niggle I have here is that the chassis 1,2,3 selection appears to have been given the wrong picture file allocated to it and the car handling does not match up to the carsets. A fix for this is already available at The Pits so you can get rid of that ridiculous chassis 1 etc stuff and put your Ford, Pontiac and Chevy logos back in. Also while on this subject I at first thought that the chassis could not be changed once they were set, but it turns out that you have to click to the right of the chassis selection logo to get them to change, then it will work.
On to the last thing I had a chance to try out before hitting the sack far too late last night ! The multiplayer stories that were flying around about it requiring huge amounts of bandwidth and giving warpy, lousy gameplay worried me greatly after having TEN. I need not have worried though because even hosting on my 64k ISDN line we had as warp free a 4 car race as you would ever be likely to get on the internet. Initially I caused some warping myself because I had all the graphics maxed out to see the sim in all its glory and this was causing framerate hits, but once that was sorted it was as good as I've ever seen it on TEN. To push it to the limit we tried Dega, Watkins Glen and Martinsville and with none of the expected problems. A sigh of relief all around I think. If the way that (the much less popular) GPL can quickly get an online community going thanks to the good folk involved in projects like VROC and GSB then I expect that it will take even less time for the same to emerge for N3. While it would clearly take some serious bandwidth and good routing to host a 32 car race over the internet the multiplay software in N3 has the benefit of a lot of testing now from previous Papy titles and they are undoubtledly the best in internet multiplayer racing. There is a lot more to the mulitplay than a first impressions review has scope for, but in initial trials with no special tweaking, for it to work first time and run without problems gave me great encouragement. The collision detection seems to work particlarly well compared to how it was on TEN.
Other intersting things that have been noticed are that YES, the converted ICR2 tracks we ran in N2/99 do work with N3..... and perhaps even better is the fact that we can now run them online because the restrictions that TEN placed on us have now been removed. Expect The Pits Touring Car Championship to go online..... at long last. And without giving too much away just imagine the possibilities of this when you add in a full I2-N2-GPL converter ! There will be nearly as many road courses as ovals
Also interesting to see was that the track.txt files include the truck settings lines..... anyone fancy an add-on sometime early next year......?
For those who cant race online for whatever reason or just like to run offline leagues as well you'll probably be pleased to know that the standings exports work with offline.cfg just as they did before. It doesnt mention this anywhere in the documentation, but I tried it and it definately works.
After such a long wait for a "proper" upgrade to N2 it has indeed finally been worth the wait ,where N99 really wasn't much more than an addon/update. Ok there are a few niggles and it would have been nice to see a little more improvement in the physics such as getting rid of the traction control and the antilock brakes, then complimenting it with brake balance and some less generic suspension setup, but overall it is a significant move forward. The graphics are better, the sound is better, the AI are better, the physics is better, the carsets are more tuneable, the multiplayer is better (certainly more flexible)....... Kinda hard not to like it really.
You'd have to be harshly critical not to see Nascar 3 as a big improvement. Ok its not ground breaking like GPL was, but for my money I'd rather have something that doestnt need a SUN computer just to run it with 20 cars at full detail, never mind the 40+ in a full Nascar field. If we had a V12 rating I'd give it one. This game will be played and loved for a long time to come..... count on it !
Stuart Brown
16 September 1999
