Old School - NASCAR Racing and Indy Car Racing 2

[JohnBM01]

On the PC, one of the cooler titles was the Test Drive series. There was another racing game called "Stunts" (it has another name for another country, but I forgot the whole name) in which if you could make 500 race tracks for the game, you can probably race any one of those 500 since there was a track editor for the game. If two racing games were pretty cool for PC racing in their day, let it be two games I've played before, NASCAR Racing and Indy Car Racing 2 (demo I played). Developer Papyrus was at the helm of NASCAR Racing and the Indy Car Racing series. Now that both games are basically old news (well, ICR2 at least), here's another contribution to some old-school racing. NASCAR Racing is first with ICR2 to follow.

PROS of "NASCAR Racing": chance to create paint schemes and customise your team colors; great graphics, even if not like Daytona USA; stock car handling for authenticity; can race against 38 others solo, and 15 others online for network play; all the NASCAR tracks raced in 1994 including now-defunct track North Wilkesbarrow; all the drivers at the time including their cars and paintschemes

CONS of "NASCAR Racing": (for NASCAR purists) no Dale Earnhardt, Daytona, or Indianapolis; can't choose which cars you want to race against or race with (NR2 and its 1999 Edition changes that); hard-coded tracks make it difficult to add new tracks.

VERDICT: Even if you don't like NASCAR, this game was pretty realistic for its time on the PC.

OTHER INFO: Later NASCAR Racing titles enhanced the graphics, physics, and customization options. You could even change car bodies as well. By looking in the right places online, you can find new car bodies to change from a dull stock car to a lovely Late Model stock car, a pickup truck, a McLaren F1, a Ford GT40, a touring car, and even (dare I say), an Australian V8 Supercar.

 

[JohnBM01]

Dislike NASCAR? You might like this. Back around 1995 or 1996, CART was REALLY in its prime. Chip Ganassi was starting a CART legacy, the IRL lacked popularity, and CART was neck-to-neck with NASCAR for the battle of America's best motorsport. Care to take the fight to NASCAR? You can. I have never played the first ICR, so I'm doing ICR2. I've played the demo to ICR2, so my review will simply be based on this game.

PROS of "Indy Car Racing 2": ovals and road courses, including street circuits of the better days of CART; a lot of the Champ Car stars including Jimmy Vasser and Alessandro Zanardi (or simply "Alex Zanardi," of course); customization of car colors and team colors; being reminded of the good days of CART when bankruptcy wasn't an issue; nice physics, plus you can spin your car out if not careful. Remember, these are mid-engined machines, so handling is much different than a stocker.

CONS of Indy Car Racing 2": still cannot choose cars from a list to race against; the demo makes it highly impossible to complete a race. About half-way, you won't be able to complete the event; never had a sequel afterwards, perhaps since NASCAR is simply more popular than these machines

VERDICT: A nice alternative to NASCAR Racing

OTHER INFO: Some PC modders wanted a hand full of road courses for their NASCAR Racing game. There was a program designed to convert ICR2 tracks to NASCAR Racing. So you could race Laguna Seca or Long Beach from ICR2 to NASCAR Racing 1 or 2 (I believe you could with NR2/NR1999). Keep in mind, there's more freedom with a PC game, so customization was pretty big.

 

[DQuaN]

Two of my favourite things about NASCAR were:

1, The sound. The cars engine sound was the most realistic of its time and I think it still beats most of todays games.

2. The crashes. Bwhahahahahaha. The crashes were great. I spent most of my time driving the wrong way down the track to see how many cars I could get in a pile up. There were wheels and body parts flying everywhere!

 

[RandomHero]

OTHER INFO: Some PC modders wanted a hand full of road courses for their NASCAR Racing game. There was a program designed to convert ICR2 tracks to NASCAR Racing. So you could race Laguna Seca or Long Beach from ICR2 to NASCAR Racing 1 or 2 (I believe you could with NR2/NR1999). Keep in mind, there's more freedom with a PC game, so customization was pretty big.

Apparently there are many replications of the local shorttracks around the country for NR4 too.

 

[ianmunroe]

Nascar Racing 2003 has a lot of mods out, and is by far the most modded nascar based game. One of the newest mods out is a GTP mod, which uses the old IMSA GTP and FIA Group C cars. Very fun games, and you can create your own hi-res paint scheme using one of the many 1024x1024 texture sheets.