Well, we've played it and played it some more and still are trying to find something to like about it. Honestly, we are trying to be fair because we do like EA and are very excited about the upcoming release of SCGT. We simply think they blew it with this one and our reputation for honesty won't be swayed despite the amount of email we are getting from Nascar Revolution fans. Everyone is entitled to their opinions.

And as we promised, your comments on Nascar Revolution are below. It is our hope that Electronic Arts takes these comments as the constructive criticism they are intended to be. Some comments are very good and very detailed. Others are (for lack of a more constructive term) boorish. But they do represent the thoughts of many sim racers out there and in our opinion are worth sharing.

Send us your EMAIL and tell us why you like or dislike Nascar Revolution. Also send us any cars or utilities you make for it. We'll gladly post all items here. The only rule on the comments is that you must include your name as it will be posted along with your comments (names add credibility).

The first ever Nascar Revolution League is being formed! NR Challange

Well, you asked for it.....

Things I like:

Things I don't like:

I could go on, but I think that's plenty...

Scott Moore

What I figure is, might as well have fun with what we can until Nascar3 comes out. the game isnt all bad, it has some good points and if you race with the settings we give it can be enjoyable..but not really that fun. The patch will help, but this will do until n3!!!

"Jeff" (bevono10@intergrafix.net)

I'm not sure where to begin here, there is so much to say. I've been a regular at EA's Nascar Revolution since the board came up, which was right on the heels of the game release. As I'm sure your aware of by now, there are numerous problems with the game, as well as some very interesting tactics by the company itself. These tactics include VERY misleading advertising, which many think are outright lies (fraud). The legal world can be very gray, so I'll just stick to VERY misleading.

Recently a thread has been started on the board that leads us to this letter to you. It has been said that you are in the process of constructing a review for NR, and had written back some of your concerns to a fellow poster that had e-mailed you about the game. He suggested that all of us try to let you know about legitimate complaints with NR. So that is why your mailbox runneth over (I hope).

Let me state that I am the consummate early adapter, with hardware as well as software. I have owned consoles going back to the Oddessy (sp), Atari-2600, Intellevision, Colecovision, Nintendo, Sega, SNES, 3D0, N64, as well as many lines of home computers. For the games, that's why, I must have the games. As you can well imagine, I have literally wasted thousands, even tens of thousands of dollars just on games, and I have purchased some pretty horrid ones in my day. That is why I have come to rely on publications such as PC Gamer to help me filter some of my bad buys. I respect PC game the most of all those publications because "you tell it like it is", and if the game company happens to be running an ad in you magazine, well, that's just too bad because the game sucks. I used to look at computer gaming world as well, but the rating system has gone to the 5 star system, and there is just not enough leeway in the scoring system to lock in a game. Also, lately I think that they have been giving unjustly high marks to bigger advertisers, and then finding obscure games to lambaste just so that they can say "hey, we lambasted some games here". But I digress. My main point is PC Gamer gives fair gaming reviews. Not that I think you will need any additional information on this game to rate it what it deserves, but we want you to know that goes well beyond just a bad game, and more than that, we want the gaming world to know as well. Quite frankly, we're mad as hell, and we're not going to take it anymore.

The problems here can be categorized as follows :

I. False or Misleading advertising I know that Moezilla and Pokechop have sent you quotes from EA which basically says that this game is a simulation. I read everything I could get my hands on from EA about this game prior to release, and was convinced that this was a simulation. A quote from the NR team, answering the question "Is this a simulation or an arcade?" went something like "Nascar Revolution is a simulation, the demo could only be played in arcade mode, buts that's just so everyone could play it". I don't have the exact quote, it was on the bulletin board at EA, but that post, like many others pointing out flaws in the game, have been assimilated by EA. EA's response (taken directly from the board) was :

"We truly feel sorry that people are disappointed with the game as it is. We know that the most vocal people on any bulletin board are the hard core simulation fans and unfortunately we did not design the game to be a hard core simulation. While physics are modeled correctly, the gameplay was tuned to be more arcady so the user does not spend time trying to correct the car from wheelspin at 150 mph."

and

"And once again, the game was designed to be more arcady than simulation."

At this point, in our eyes, they have definitely acknowledged that the game is not a simulation. Yet, to my knowledge, it is still being touted by EA as a simulation, and I think that is very, very wrong.

2. Bugs, bugs, bugs

There are many bugs with the game. It was not ready to be released and that is quite obvious. I will probably not cover all of them, but in my defense, I only had the game for two days before I had to take it back, it was that bad. At this point, I'd like to enter my PC as exhibit A, so that we may show the court that it's a pretty nice machine.

Minmaw case, 300W power supply, with 5 fans (heat kills). PII-400 processor, Asus P2B motherboard with 128MB 100mhz memory. Velocity 4400 AGP w/16MB, Creative Labs SB Live (with the wonderful Cambridge Soundworks, man that sound rocks). That's the core, and I'll put that horsepower up against allot of PC's out there. Now, on to the bugs.

Constant game hangs, hard lock ups indeed, required power reset to get the system back. From driving "in car", the only way to drive, you could not see the flagman, and you were not given pit options under caution. Cautions, and lots of them. It was very hard to race for more that 5 laps without someone in the field wrecking. My car appeared to be the only one on the track making sound. The "play by play" is terrible, while I realize that this is a tough thing to get right, you get comments like "he's been racing hard all day" on lap one. The spotter. Not only was he wrong on most occasions, on obvious things such as where cars were (he apparently has a problem discerning between high and low), but he was never timely, his clears were delayed. Comparing this to the Papyrus line of sims, if I get a clear, and I have not let off the accelerator or hit the brakes, I feel that I can move in front of the car safely. If I try the same thing here, I will crash. Speaking of brakes, there aren't any (well, they are there, but barely). While EA supports other annoying things as 'desing issues', such as no car control under caution, there are bugs with the design issues as well. Under caution, you cannot control the car, you can pit, just can't drive. Your car will, however crash into cars under caution, and the resulting damage will drop you out of the race. This is just not happening when the caution comes out, and there is a wreck to avoid. This happens when you've been following the pace car around. Here is one sequence of events that happened to me. Caution comes out, I cannot drive now, but I do pit. When I leave the pits, I am black flagged for something, I do not know what. The computer controlling my car takes be back into the pits for a stop and go penalty, and then drives me out again. I pass the field once, and continue around the track. I start to pass the field a second time, and finally settle into 3'rd place. I should have been in about 40'th. This brings me to another point, there is no warning of the impending green flag when you are under caution, if you are inside the car, you cannot see the flagman, and you first indication of green is cars accelerating past you. Go back to my previous scenario, I am in third place. At this point I figured I would at least be able to tell if we were going green, I was after all behind the pace car, and the lights were on. I would expect that the lights would go off a lap prior to green, and I would see the pace car head into the pits. Well, the lights stayed on, and the pace car just vanished, and we were back to green flag racing. Another design issue is the way they handle the frame rate. What is very hard to get across is that I don't have an issue with frame rate. Because EA will not let me. They have designed the game to 'slow' down when the going gets rough, rather than to drop the frames. They purposely slow the game down. A lap in 'EA' time may take only 40 seconds (game clock), but your stopwatch will show that 70 or 80 seconds have gone by. You can imagine that this will completely eliminate any sense of speed from the cockpit. It truly feels that your out on a Sunday drive at Talledega when your supposed to be doing 0 MPH. I realize that this is a design decision, but if there is one thing that you would think 'arcady' games would have, it would be blow your hair back speed. That's my bug list, I'm sure there are some of my own that I have left off, but just head over to EA's bulletin board, and you will find these, and many more, until they are erased.

3. EA's attitude and cover-up

It's very hard to describe this to you, I'm not sure that it really has anything to do with a game review, and that my frustration with the company has not clouded my judgment. Suffice to say that I get the general feeling that EA is just blowing everyone who complains off. They do not answer legitimate questions, and it is quite obvious that they are reading all the posts. What bothers me is that they are censoring the board. There is not a post dated before 3/4, and this board was up and running on about 2/17. They say that post's have been deleted because they were not appropriate. But the posts that were deleted were not. Mostly they were posts such as the one that led me to you, or that would lists numerous bugs, granted there were some of the usual trash posts, but a majority of the ones that were deleted did not deserve to be. Finally, EA is stating that they cannot recreate many of the problems listed, which I believe to be an outright lie. People on the board are actually appalled that they cannot recreate the 'car crashing under yellow', when they have it happen EVERY SINGLE RACE. I myself was unable to recreate the problem, but that was because my game hung every time I raced.

4. This game should not have been released It is quite obvious that the game release was a marketing decision. EA had a huge presence at Daytona, and the game was destined to hit the shelves with the Daytona 500. The attitude was "ship it, we'll fix it later", and that's exactly what they did. They are not the only company to have the ship now/patch later attitude, but that still does not make it right. And this game is far from a patch away from getting it right. I really don't think that they can. EA has lost a number of customers over this, for every negative post on the board, there are many more people who do not post, but agree with what is being said. The only way they will get customer's and respect back is to recall the game, but they will not do that, they think that "it's a great game" (just ask em).

Well Rob, I'll take that long leap off my soapbox now. I truly hope that this information is useful for you in your review. I do have to stick up for my fellow gamer, and if I can do something to prevent him from throwing his money away, then I will do it.

Once again, Thank you for your time,

James P. Solie ---Trashman

I like Nascar Revolution because its just awsome. You gotta give EA credit cause they even put the Officials in the pits. Only EA has done it so far as i know of.

BsPnthr12@aol.com

I purchased this game in February. I based my decision (I'm one of those early adopters, and frequently get burned) on information at the NASCAR Online site, and interview with Dave Ross, the producer of the game, and after taking a look at the game's packaging. I should have waited.

The game was touted by Electronic Arts as a simulation appealing to both arcade game lovers and hardcore simulation fans. To my dismay, after purchasing the game at a retailer with a questionable return policy, I "opened the box, put in the disk, and went" (play on extremely hokey introto the game) to install.

To my surprise, after having read the misleading requirements on the box, the game had one option for the install -- 370 megs to my hard drive (glad I have a big one). I still haven't figured out why the recommended specs suggest a 24x CD-Rom, since the game fully installs and doesn't required the CD to play.

Well it was installed and I went racin'. Wow! I temporarily blown away by the graphics and the sound. Pretty good stuff. I check out the options. Yep, this is a simulation, all right! There are all kinds of options, arcade, custom, simulation. Graphic options were very impressive. So, I set it to the highest graphic settings, like I always do. I have a PII 400 w/96 megs, a Voodoo2 12MB card, and a good steering wheel. Since this is much higher than the recommended system, I knew I was in for a real thrill. Beautiful graphics in hi-res, the fantastic Staccato sound with Benny and Bob and a crew chief/spotter and it was going be fast!

Wrong! Was I ever disappointed, as I attempted for several days to like this game. Graphics and sound a game does not make! There, quite simply, the only good things about this game. The game is so flawed in design it is virtually unplayable, totally unenjoyable, and a disgrace for Electronic Arts and NASCAR. On a scale of 1 to 10, it rates a 3, at best! And that's only because of the graphics and sound. Even these features have their bad points. The tracks and cars look good, but many of the background graphics are two- dimensional and look paper thin. The sound impresses at first, but when you notice, after a few laps, that the other cars are running in a sound vacuum, and that Benny and Bob drive you crazy and never get anything that relates to race right, and the spotter seems to be drinking and has difficulty with understanding the difference between high and low, you start looking for a way to turn them off. I'll only briefly mention music. Music in a simulation? Who came up with that one?

Okay, I'm still trying to like this game at this point. I go back to the options and turn off Benny and Bob. I'll keep the spotter. The games been running so slowly, in a sort of strange way (it speeds up and then slows down, doesn't seem to actually be frame rate), that I reduce the game to 640x480 and turn some of the graphic options off. I don't understand why I am having to do this, with my system and all, but I do it anyway. Back to racin'!

The sense of speed, etc., seems a little better (I'm at Talladega, by the way). But I chose to use the default setup for my car and qualified 43rd and now I can't catch up with the fantasy driver in 42nd, much less any of the 31 "selected" Winston Cup drivers, driving their cars from last year, that are ahead of him. Not to worry, however, there's a big wreck on lap two, and since, being a good bit behind, I have time to avoid the problems and gain some positions. Things will be okay, after all, after the caution and I get to start between some cars and can use the draft.

My, oh, my. I lose control of the car. No, I didn't actually lose control,the computer just took over. Okay, maybe everything will be alright, I hope, after all I have to accept whatever happens since I'm just sitting here watching. What a show! The computer slams me into the back of that fantasy driver! He must have made someone mad! We go two or three cautions laps, very boring, but we will go green soon. Yep, we did! With absolutely no warning, whatsoever, so I get a really bad start and am lagging back again. Well, at least, I didn't have to listen to Benny and Bob. Some things are good in the world. But then, I start thinking, and I'm sure EA doesn't like that very much. My spotter suddently went to sleep or something. I haven't heard a peep out of him. He didn't tell about the wreck and that we were going green or anything at all.

I'm pretty frustrated at this point, and I've got to get ready for work soon, so I hit the escape key, and retire from the race. After watching my car travel around the track, in all it's graphic splendor for about 10 seconds or more, I finally get back to the options screens. I figure out that if you turn off Benny and Bob, the spotter gets upset and takes a hike.

I'm not going to talk much about how the game seems like it was rushed to market in order to coincide with the Daytona 500, or the incredibly unrealistic crashes with cars sometimes engaged in synchronized-flipping,or the ridiculous damage model, or the frustratingly inept AI that has drivers intentionally trying to take you out during the early laps of a race (even Mark Martin does it), or the fact that you can crash into Earnhart, hit the wall, spin out, take out Benson and just keep on racing without damage or performance hits and continue on to win the race (I did this later with just one adjustment in the car setup) and then find out that you actually lapped every car in the field without even passing them.

These problems persist, especially in simulation mode, and infect every aspects of NASCAR revolution. I've got to go to work. If you want more information about this game, please check the bulletin boards at:

Nascar Rev

and

Thanks for wading through this, I know it was long, but EA should be run out of the country for this one.

Jim Chapman

Despite all the flaming this game is getting, it's not that bad of a racer. The message board for Nas Rev by EA is full of people who really are missing something. The game is buggy, but even with all it's faults, it is still the only game to date to deliver the true look and feel of nascar racing. They (EA) are surely headed in the right direction.

I own Nascar 1 & 2 and these are great titles. I love them. But I can't play them anymore. The environment and sound leaves me flat in comparison to Nas Rev. I've been waiting for a long time for someone to REALLY capture nascar racing in all it's glory.

To give me side by side racing. To give me AI drivers that take different lines around the track and who behave as if a REAL nascar driver would. The game was released too soon. We all know the reasons why. Although they didn't hit a home run with this one, I know that soon they will. It's just their nature.

They are headed in the right direction and I like it. It's not the piece of garbage some are claiming. I'm waiting for the definitive nascar title to come. Nas Rev in my opinion has come the closest so far. I look forward to Nascar 3. I hope they (Sierra) up they ante. I don't care WHO brings the best nascar game to me... I just want it. Because I want to

KEEP RACING! All simracers will benefit. Thanks for listening.

Bubba4

Just wanted to add my .02 to this whole debacle. Besides the myriad of bugs I'm sure you yourselves have seen and what everyone else has posted to you, this game was marketed as a SIMULATION and is STILL being pushedas a SIMULATION. As we all know this is anything BUT a SIMULATION. I wouldn't have cared as much if it were an arcade game