NASCAR 08 Demo Impressions

After my Xbox 360's absence quite a few demo's have built up and I've been busy downloading and testing a few of them out. First up was NASCAR 08.

Firstly I'll have to admit that I don't know a great deal about NASCAR as it's not that popular over here in the UK. The demo provides you with one track to race on, which is the "Daytona International Speedway" and allows you to select from one of three available driving personalities (presumably real life drivers in NASCAR).

Before a race you can choose to qualify for track position and you're given two laps to post your best time. Once you've qualified (or skipped) you can enter the race and this commences with a rolling start and lasts for a eight laps with eleven competing drivers.

The graphics are OK but didn't overly impress me and although the sound FX were fine in general when changing camera views there seems to be a transitional sound effect as the engine noise is silenced for a split second until the new view takes over. I'm not sure why the developers thought this necessary, but I found it irritating as I do tend to switch views every now and again during a race. On a positive note there's a good selection of camera views including a cockpit view which serves its purpose well.

I found that driving at speed on an oval does take skill and finesse even though in principal it sounds fairly easy, and if you're not careful you will clip the barriers or spin out on numerous occasions. Although the speedometer reported that I was travelling at high speed (over 170 mph) I never really felt a great sensation of speed. This may be due to the nature of an oval track as there aren't many objects that whizz past or corners you have to brake hard for to enhance that impression.

The demo doesn't really give you a lot of options to play with but gives a flavour of the game none the less and there are various options that are greyed out that indicate there's more to the game than the demo suggests.

Although the racing genre is among one of my favourites I'm sorry to say that NASCAR isn't really my scene and the demo didn't impress me enough to tempt me into trying out the full retail version.