NASCAR 08 PSN Demo

EA sports games are generally not in my pantheon of good games, I don't think I've ever bought one. However, when presented with a NASCAR 08 demo, I couldn't resist the comedy of turning left. I'll be honest, I know nothing about NASCAR (National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, according to Wikipedia) except that it's really boring to watch.



Now, it may be due to lack of competition on the stock car genre or just the fact that this game will sell about 10 copies, but the game has a lot of problems:

1. I was playing the PlayStation 3 demo and was shocked at how bad it looked. I mean, compared to Gran Turismo HD and DiRT, NASCAR has serious graphical problems. This game is coming for 360, PS3 and PS2 and I bet it will look the same on all three platforms. I'm probably spoiled by how good Gran Turismo looks, but that's no excuse for this.

2. Trying to drive the cars is needlessly difficult, the cars seem to be driving on ice. I can understand that they wanted to make the difficulty factor higher for circular tracks with few turns, but, after playing games with more realistic response, it's frustrating... so frustrating, I didn't even complete a single race.

3. NASCAR 08 is a terrible waste of time, anyone who likes racing games will navigate towards GT and PGR and DiRT, only rednecks who write poems about Dale Earnhardt and maybe actually watch NASCAR will buy this game... and because they're rednecks and they hate "them thar gotdamn Japs", they'll have to buy a 360 from the pawn shop down the street from the trailer park because it's not being released for XBox.

Anyway, this game sucks, NASCAR sucks, the cars suck and Gran Turismo 5 Prologue is coming soon, making every other racing game pointless.