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[GC] [PS2] NASCAR: Dirt to Daytona

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[GC] [PS2] NASCAR: Dirt to Daytona

Unread postby Amor fati » 13 Aug 2015 23:48

http://pretendracecars.net/2015/08/09/t ... hin-4-0-2/
James wrote:Despite the sheer abundance of modern racing sims available for the PC, games which are meant to capitalize on every last technological advancement in an effort to bring the most realistic auto racing experience to your home computer, the best racing sim currently available is still 2002’s NASCAR: Dirt to Daytona for Version 4.0.2 of Dolphin, a highly reputable Nintendo GameCube & Nintendo Wii emulator that you can download for free.

I shouldn’t have had to write this review. Though in reading it, I’m sure the readers of PRC.net will understand why I lack sympathy for developers who push out broken and/or unfinished games onto the masses, using rabid fanboys and easily influenced Gaming Journalists as a shield from the average customer pissed off at spending $60 for something that shouldn’t have seen the light of day. NASCAR: Dirt to Daytona was a racing sim developed by a team with no budget, next to no official licenses, no following, and previous entries in the series stood firmly behind both the Papyrus and EA NASCAR titles that were flying off store shelves. Despite this, Dirt to Daytona dropped an atomic bomb on NASCAR fans, and is not only the best NASCAR game of all time – it’s the best racing sim of all time, and now that it’s fully compatible with Dolphin – looking better than ever in High Definition – there’s no reason you shouldn’t be playing it.

The current crop of racing sims on the market are incredibly stale and dodgy; most of them unfinished to some extent, copying a large amount of content from other games already on the market, and relying on community participation to iron out bugs and downplay ominous issues. Project CARS will randomly send your car into the stratosphere, Assetto Corsa‘s AI will knock you around, iRacing will steal your lunch money and frustrate you with a tire model evolving as often as a Pokemon, R3E‘s pricing will confuse you, NASCAR 15 is shovelware in disguise, and Stock Car Extreme will force you to become a connoisseur of Brazilian culture. If you wish for competent AI, driving physics that can’t be exploited, setups that make sense, and a meaningful sense of progression through a huge Single Player campaign mode, the community will bully you into submission and label you a crazed hater for daring to speak out against the modern crop of driving games.

Dirt to Daytona is the antithesis of the above; it’s the game everyone desperately wants, yet are too polite to ask for. And the game was on store shelves years before Gran Turismo diehards would be introduced to the Nurburgring Nordschleife.


I have not played this game, but have played the excellent Excite Truck (the best original Wii racing game) by the same developer (Monster Games) so there may be truth to his claim of this being the best racing simulation game to date.
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Amor fati
 
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Unread postby Amor fati » 14 Aug 2015 10:31

Having watched a few videos on YouTube it appears that virtually all the tracks are variations of ovals as is typical in NASCAR. So while it may well be the best NASCAR racing simulation, due to the particular type of racing being simulated it is unlikely to be the best overall as the author claims and probably merits a three star rating.
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