Xbox 360 Roundup

NASCAR 09

• Publisher: EA
• Developer: EA Tiburon

Aah, the noble art of driving really fast in a circle in order to appease sponsors like Billy Joe Bob Buckwheat's Discount Ammunition Store. I always forget that EA sometimes releases NASCAR games in Europe, presumably in order to make their NHL games look more popular. Unlike other EA Sports updates, I suspect the 09 isn't the year but the number of European NASCAR fans eagerly awaiting this release.

As with every other EA Sports franchise, the presentation is buffed to a luminous shine with options galore and extra fancy interactive doodads out the wazoo. Jeff Gordon is the obligatory named star, gently introducing you to the world of professional stock car racing via filmed segments integrated into the game using green screen. It's a neat concept, and his agreeable chatty style certainly helps to ease you into the game. Once he buggers off and lets you find your own way, however, the opaque menu system becomes a problem. After choosing the wrong sponsor, for example, I found myself taking part in truck races with no obvious means of switching back to the car I'd just painstakingly designed.

Yes, you can design your own car, using a Paint Booth feature clearly inspired by Forza's suite of decoration tools. You can download a template to your PC, do whatever you like to it in Photoshop or whatever paint package you prefer, and then port it back to the game. Other familiar features include a web of linked challenges, much like that found in the Tiger Woods games, to earn additional respect and points with which to upgrade your car. The upgrades themselves are a fairly broad series of sliding scales, so anyone who enjoys really tinkering under the hood would best look elsewhere. There are no licensed car manufacturers either, which seems extremely odd considering EA is usually so hot for licensing everything right down to the gloves their virtual sportspeople wear.

Despite my immature jibes at the "going round in circles" nature of NASCAR races, it's not quite the problem you'd think once you're actually on the track. It's a different style of racing, putting the emphasis almost entirely on overtaking and blocking rather than cornering, but that's no bad thing. Holding a thumbstick never quite conveys the enormous concentration and stamina needed to hold a speeding vehicle steady against the camber of the track for the long haul, but the game wisely defaults to the steering wheel viewpoint which is exciting and atmospheric.

Where the nature of NASCAR does let the game down is in the stop-start pace of the action and the annoyingly fussy rules. Forget what you've seen in such famous documentaries as Days of Thunder and Talladega Nights - spectacular crashes are all but absent from this game, replaced by tame spin-outs, and every time this happens the race is halted and then resumes from a slow rolling start. Even though stock car racing is best known for its rough and tumble, aggressive driving is severely punished and you're forced to drive sensibly, which rather goes against the natural instinct to shunt and grind your way to the front. A position, incidentally, that pretty much guarantees victory provided you use your mirrors to prevent overtakers sneaking up the inside.

There are moments as you roar around the tracks when NASCAR 09 is vastly more entertaining than you'd expect. Sadly these brief thrills are almost always muted by the typically sensible EA Sports corporate sheen, which ultimately reduces the game to another technically minded racer of limited scope rather than the over-the-top metal-shredding redneck rumble of the real thing.

6/10