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INTRODUCTION: It has been over a month since I did an extensive preview of NASCAR Heat. Now that the game has been out for several weeks, I can surely say that Hasbro will be one of the main forces in the stockcar racing simulation community (even though they also have a stronghold with the F1 community) that will be compete with Papyrus bread and butter. NH has so much going for it and that it could be in fact scary to any Papyrus zealot. Hey I, like most of you, am game for competition as competition usually makes better innovative products that are not of the typical winded, overdone or played out. One problem of having such innovative technology or something new in any product could be the amount of difficulty involved for one to master any game thus leading to a failure in sales due to the reports of previews and reviews. Think GPL! But is NH so innovative that it is too intimidating to get accustomed to? No, I think not. Will NH succeed in sales? Probably, they are a big company like EA and you can surely see in all seriousness that these gents are not playing around as the TV commercials are being aired during the NASCAR races. You know that they are in there for the long run. Has the legendary Papyrus ever aired a commercial for their PC NASCAR games? I dont think so. Papyrus seems to use their early racing title fame reputation to make up for the lack of funds to air a TV commercial. Again, this is my opinion. Is this a comparison of the two companies Sierra/Papyrus and Hasbro/MGI? Well, sort of, since you really look at their common factor, it seems to you have a publisher and a developer. Hasbro is definitely bigger than Sierra. MGI and Papyrus both have the experience in the creating auto racing simulations since the main core of the original Papyrus are at MGI. I wonder who will last in the years to come? My take is probably the Hasbro/MGI combo since Hasbro definitely has the funds and is definitely bigger than the Sierra, financially. Enough of this hubbub and on with the review!
When I first saw the screenshots of NH, Ill admit that I had my doubts with the game graphically. Yes, eye candy does sell America and please dont tell me that it doesnt! As time went on, those NH screenshots seemed to be changing quite a bit from those cartoon looking cars ala Papyrus to actually some very realistic shapes in which each auto manufacturer could distinguished easily. I have never seen this before in a stockcar racing simulation! Heck, for those rehash NASCAR Racing games from Papyrus they could at least change the body shapes and no, trucks dont count!
As the beta builds were sent to me I noticed the progression of this title changing with every build. In fact, the most obvious difference from NH from the entire stockcar racing titles before it was the realistic 3D or 6DOF driving physics. But not only was the driving model adapted for the human driver but also the artificial intelligence a.k.a. AI. So the AI in NH can have the same conditions and misfortunes just like the human driver. As I mentioned in the preview, the physics are more refined in the retail version. TEST SYSTEM:
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Platform: PC
