If you’ve ever wanted to drive a high-performance, state-of-the-art stock car, here’s your chance. For most of us, NASCAR Racing from Sierra On-Line will be as close as we’re going to get to professional racing. Like its sibling, IndyCar Racing II (reviewed in “MacAddict,” Nov/96 , p82), NASCAR Racing is much more than just a car racing game. It’s an extremely detailed simulation with lots (and we mean lots) of parameters to tweak.
If you’re one of those folks who likes to jump into gameplay without reading the manual, forget it. A stock car is a very complicated piece of machinery and NASCAR Racing simulates that complexity. It lets you make all of the adjustments you’d make to a real car, such as how much fuel is in the tank, weight balance, shift ratios, spoiler settings, and more. If you’re serious about winning, you’ll have to find the settings that let you get the optimum performance out of the car. The well-written, 200-page manual covers the options in detail. Notes from real NASCAR drivers give you tips on setting up and handling the car on each course on the NASCAR circuit. If you love to tinker, you’ll love the depth here.
Little things, such as tire wear and weight balance, make a big difference in the handling and your ability to control the car. On the subject of control: It can be hard to keep the car on the track using the keyboard or the mouse, and you may spend a lot of time bouncing the million-dollar racer from wall to wall. An analog joystick, or better, a driving wheel, is necessary to get the most out of the game.
As well as customizing how your car handles, you can customize its appearance with paint and decals, which can be imported as PICT or PCX (a PC graphics file format) files. You can also customize your pit crew’s uniforms. This is a grandly fun feature, especially if you’ve never had Barbie dolls.
Your pit crew members play an important part in NASCAR Racing. While driving, you can communicate with them to set up changes to the car. If you find that your settings aren’t quite right, you can radio ahead to have the pit crew ready to change the specs at your next stop. You can communicate via function keys, or you can actually talk to your crew using Apple’s PlainTalk speech recognition. This is not only a big help but also way cool, and a great use of Apple technology. To take advantage of it, you’ll need a PlainTalk microphone and the corresponding software. By the way, the PC game doesn’t have this feature.
Once you’ve painted your car, set the parameters, and learned how to drive, you’re ready to tackle the 15 different tracks. They’re no cakewalk, though: The artificial intelligence that controls the other racers is awesome. The computer-controlled cars drive like real (and vicious) competitors, and just making it around the track without getting jammed into a wall gives you a pretty good sense of accomplishment.
The 3D graphics are nicely rendered, but you’ll want to turn down the texture-mapped detail on slower machines. The frame rate was acceptable on the Power Mac 8500/150 with full detail. On a Power Mac 8100/110, the detail needed to be lowered to just above “none.”
There are plenty of options for race viewing, and even more camera angles available for the instant replay of your racing successes and failures. You have VCR-like control of replay, so you can watch it again and again. This is useful for trying to figure out how the wall suddenly leapt in front of you in Turn Three.
Overall, this is a truly enjoyable, though very complicated, game. If you’re a real racing fan, you’ll find more than enough here to keep you busy for a long time. However, if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like reading manuals and spending time with a game, then you might want to pass this one by.
Worthington, John. (March 1997). NASCAR Racing. MacAddict. (pg. 78).
Papyrus Design Group
Games
out of 10 (1 vote)
263 / 
2014-04-14 / 
2023-12-11 / 
d3aab1e9c4b2ebb9e7e2b8bc137734c5c3a92f02 / 
/ 
nascarracing_1_0_1.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
