SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - NASCAR Racing 2003 Season

It’s been a while since SimHQ covered the Sierra-Papyrus NASCAR racing series. The series has been continually refined and tuned with each new release version.

If you like (love) racing, you probably already purchased NASCAR Racing 2002 Season. That is, unless you don’t like “real” NASCAR stock car racing. For most people, the racing sim you play is usually a real racing series you have interest in following. So part of what you’re buying when you grab NASCAR Racing 2003 Season is a slice of the culture. If you think F1 races are exciting regardless how far in front the Schumacher brothers are and if you can’t turn right in a race…it’s not a real race, then you’ll probably have a difficult time accepting NASCAR — either real or simulation. That would be a shame because you’d be missing the most well done racing sim on the market. Arguably it may be the best ever with only Papyrus’ Grand Prix Legends in the same class. This is as serious as racing sims get. We’re talking the “Falcon 4” of racing sims here.

Packaging and Installation

NASCAR Racing 2003 Season is available in the downsized box that retailers love. As you would expect, the package is adorned with flashy graphics, several screenshots and more text than you usually get in the instruction manual for some FPS games. The colorful packaging. I wonder, does anyone actually read each bullet point and paragraph on these boxes before or after buying it? Is it tradition or actual marketing benefit that generates this much energy in the packaging?

Once inside, you’ll find a 72-page printed manual along with a single installation CD-ROM. The manual is the same excellence Papyrus has maintained in their documentation for years and includes Appendices on the NASCAR points system, Sierra‘s multiplayer rating system, and the list of keyboard shortcuts. There is no separate “Quick Reference Card” included with NASCAR Racing 2003 Season. All the keyboard shortcut info is in the manual. It’s getting more and more difficult to find printed manuals like this in sims due to the cost of production.

Installation requires the looooong identification number that’s unique to each NASCAR Racing 2003 Season CD-ROM. This not only serves to avoid nasty people pirating the software, but also provides a unique I.D. once you arrive online in multiplayer. You get the usual wav file audio check to make sure your sound card is worthy. Once installed, you get the usual drill. Do you want to look at the “readme” file, do you want to add a shortcut to your desktop, and do you want to start NASCAR Racing 2003 Season? No, no and no, thank you. I want to reboot before even thinking about running this or any other new sim. Okay, I know you’re not supposed to need to reboot before running the sim, but the fact is, some sims have problems if you don’t. Keep this old habit. It’s harmless except for the two minutes of your life it takes to reboot and can save headaches later.

Digging In

When you do start-up the sim you immediately notice the increased pizzazz of the trendy splash screen and menu graphics than the 2002 version‘s predominant “blue“ menus. The layout of the menus are very similar to 2002’s with a few differences.

The main menu. Same as its predecessor, the group of “Action Modes” includes the Testing Session, Single Race, Championship Season and Multiplayer.

The “User Modes” include Driving Lessons, Player Info, Opponent Manager (with the updated Paint Shop as a submenu again), Options and Replay Studio. Each of the Action and User Modes has submenu areas that are arranged similar to 2002‘s menus.

From submenus you select which track, either the arcade or simulation mode, length of the race sessions, computer opponents and their strengths which can be either manually set or auto set based on your performance, "catch up" mode to keep you competitive and not see the competition head off into the distance, damage control (none, moderate, realistic), rules and weather. A significant new capability is the updated Opponent Manager. If set to auto, it uses data based on your performance at each track. As you get better, they get better.

Sadly, the Driving Lessons area has diminished. The ten in-game narrated video’s are still there…unchanged as far as I can tell, but ’ol Darrell has headed back to the house. Not that having a clone of 2002’s Driving Lessons would be acceptable, but I really wanted to see more new items in this area of the sim. Please show me more on race tactics, pitting early, suggested setup changes and their implications. Why not latch onto one of the real world Crew Chiefs to give us a garage version of what Darrell provided for us in the 2002 version? I suppose the cost of production argument comes into play here, but it‘s one of the few letdowns to an otherwise excellent sim. Maybe some enterprising add-on group can provide us with more in this area.

NASCAR Racing 2003 Season has the distinction of having the best replay capability in sim racing, and maybe the best of any sim in any genre. The more you work with it the more you'll find can be accomplished with it. It would be nice to have output built into the sim providing a standard video format such as mpeg or avi, but other than that one capability, the Replay Studio has it all.

Multiplayer mode is where NASCAR Racing 2003 Season really shows its strength. That is, providing you’re equipped with a broadband connection. Sierra has done an admirable job in providing excellent online connection stability in this sim. Close racing — like “scrape the bumper ahead with your front bumper” racing is only going to happen with good broadband connections and very close racing is the nature of real and simulated NASCAR. If you get a laggy host server, you’ll receive a demonstration of what lag in a racing sim does to close racing. A now-you-see-them, now-you-don’t effect ensues. You may end up sharing the same space with a car that’s already in that spot and predictably your race is over very quickly.

The other thing you'll need for multiplayer mode is patience. While I would love to see more Driving Lessons added, there are some online racers who have no interest in even learning or watching what training is already available in the sim. At least that’s what their driving and attitude indicates. It’s difficult for me to understand why anyone would expend the time, energy and money to become a certifiable “wreaker” for their own amusement. I’m not talking about somebody screwing-up and tagging another car accidentally in the heat of racing. We’ve all been on both sides of that situation before. A courteous “sorry” will almost always suffice and usually results in a “no big deal” reply. The determined “wreaker” is discarded as quickly as the host can press the eject button once he‘s identified. There are new controls built into NASCAR Racing 2003 Season that allow the host to control a "wreaker" from penalty laps to outright ejection.

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