SimHQ.com - Motorsports Zone - Review: NASCAR SimRacing

The installation guide recommends turning off all Anti-Virus software before installing. Just for the sake of argument, Chunx tried it with Norton AV Auto Protect running and had no problems with installation of the game. YMMV.

Surprisingly, the install process is a bit out-of-sequence from other titles we've tried over the years. Right off the bat, NSR insists you register the game with EA via the internet. In fact, you MUST register the game in order to play online. The registration process is very elaborate, with fancy GUI's, lots of glitzy animations and graphics and in our opinion a lot of intrusive questions that must be answered to complete the process. Included in the registration process was a 'hard sell' request to complete a survey, in order to have access to some 'free' EA goodies. For those at EA, we'll say this: We understand about the problems of software piracy in today's broadband, online world, but this registration process was excessive and intrusive and registering the game in this way actually diminished the enthusiasm for playing the game later on. To round off the picture, Jens got about halfway in this survey and was then informed that there was a problem with the server. Try again later... guod tells us he didn't get that far in registering the first three times he tried. He saw "server problems, try again later" for over two hours until finally connecting through. Hopefully EA has those issues resolved now.

The rest of the install was quite normal and the process finishes with an offer to start the game. When clicking on 'yes' the user is prompted to re-insert disk #1. Oddly, you need disk #1 in your optical drive in order to play the game. Chunx dutifully inserted Disk #1, let it spin up and clicked "OK." And then... nothing happened. The game didn't start. No big deal, as his Momo settings needed configuration, anyway. However, this poor performance of such a minor and simple feature of the installation process was surprising, coming from a company like EA. It looked a bit unprofessional.

When you pop the NSR CD #1 into your optical drive, you get a handy game start GUI, that offers options to automatically check for updates (nope, there weren't any updates), uninstall the game, visit the EA Sports main web site, check the Readme.txt file, or do some Troubleshooting on your computer.

We checked out the Troubleshooting feature and discovered that it's actually a neat little tool to assess your computer.

The "automatic update" button was certainly a nice touch and hopefully, someday soon it will take you to EA's web site for the latest patch. However, since there are no patches for this game currently available, we're unable to test the functionality of this feature.

Starting Up

After setting up your controller's profile for NSR (assuming you use profiling software), it's best to run the game's 3D Setup utility. Looking almost identical to F1C's utility, it also contains a handy benchmarking tool to evaluate your PC and its current settings for their ability to draw texture triangles as it calibrates the game. Performing the NSR benchmarking test at the above listed settings, Chunx' Dell / Radeon was able to deliver 51.0 million triangles per second. His homebuilt / GeForce was able to deliver 64.5 million triangles per second.

Jens did some additional tinkering with the 3D setup utility and found that the amount of triangles drawn varied by 1.5 Mtri/sec when trying all screen resolutions between 1024x768x16 and 1280x1024x32. For his system, the lowest score was 27.3 and highest was 28.8. This no doubt indicates that a new graphics card will be in Jens' future! For now, Jens found a fairly happy compromise between performance and graphical quality at 1152x84x32 @ 85MHz, no AA.

This tweaking disclosed a surprising fact: Jens found that starting out at 1280x1024x32 resulted in the in-game options for graphical detail was grayed out and inaccessible. Going down to 1152x86x32 meant that these settings were now accessible and suddenly the rather dull 2D wheel-rims became nice-looking 3D and car texture detail could be bumped up.

Starting up the game, you are presented with the standard "EA Sports - It's In The Game" video clip, followed by a random selection of a host of brief videos featuring various Nextel Cup drivers endorsing the game while standing in front of their cars, a trio of young ladies and another character or two.

While glitzy, we'd have traded the budget money for these time-wasting video bites for a better manual. While we can't do that, it's easy to remove these files from the game's "movie" folder, thereby speeding up the game start process and slimming the install by almost 70MB.

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