Nascar, by EA Sports, marks the first time that Nascar has been on the PSP in any form. Nascar for the PSP coincides with the Nascar 07 games, that were released at the same time for the Xbox and PlayStation 2. The EA Sports Nascar series dates way back, even into the late 90’s, but how does it fare for the first time on the PSP handheld? Is racing around dull oval tracks something you really want to play on a tiny little screen?
Surprisingly, Nascar for PSP is overall, a decent game. Circling around a doughnut 500 times doesn’t sound fun, but EA does two things really well to make sure it doesn’t get boring quickly. First of all, there is a boat load of gameplay types. And second of all, the interaction between other cars and drivers liven up the action on the track. If it weren’t for these two great features, Nascar would easily be the most boring game ever created on the PSP.
The amount of gameplay types and options to tinker around with, in this game, is just staggering. Luckily the “Race Now” mode is right at the top so you can just jump right in and get started if you don’t want to start up a huge career mode and everything. Even if you just decide to do this though, you still have a good amount of options for things like the series, AI difficulty, race length, damage, and a few others. After that you will pick your driver. The list of drivers includes all of the actual drivers and vehicles for whichever series you chose. Then you get to choose which track you want to race around, which includes just about every major raceway. Finally you get the chance to race, but before actually starting the race you can do the usually things such as practice, qualify and tweak your car. If you just want to jump right into the race, there is nothing stopping you and there is no need to practice or qualify for the race.
All of these options and settings fall just under the “Race Now” gameplay type, which is designed to get you out on the track and racing as quickly as possible. There are a handful of race modes which is where the variety in the gameplay really is. These modes include: Fight to the Top, Speedzone, Dodge Challenges, and a normal race Season. This is where the meat of the single player game is at and you can easily spend many hours upon hours playing each one. They all offer different ways to play, but ultimately they are all still racing. If you get tired of racing against the AI, you can also take Nascar online and play against the world! The amount of gameplay options and replay value in this game is really amazing.
Besides the massive amount of ways to play this game, EA does a good job of keeping the actual racing interesting. They do this by having realistic physics and realistic interacting between the other drivers on the track.
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