NASCAR Winston (or Nextel, if you want to be official) Cup racing is a sport on the rise; attendance records have never been higher and the racing has not been so fierce since the days of Richard Petty and Cale Yarborough.

Racing games based on NASCAR have generally flopped prior to the Thunder series.

 

NASCAR Thunder, is different. Since its debut a few years ago it has made fans out of nearly everyone. Last year, the game was so great that it didn’t matter to some people that it was indeed NASCAR,

a sport relatively popular in the South and dreaded up North.

 

EA Sports and developer Tiburon, are hoping to capture the entire spectacle of NASCAR racing, with some incredibly realistic visuals, enhanced sounds, new gameplay additions, and much more.

 

Winning lots of races, or at least modeling the racer after Terry Labonte (Mr. Consistency) would be an excellent start. In racing, winning is the ultimate goal. Nevertheless, as Terry Labonte showed several years ago, there are other methods to winning the championship.

 

Top 5 finishes are a must, but Top 10’s aren’t that bad either. Throw in a few wins here and there to maintain a high position in the points and the championship is nearly won.

 

The biggest addition is, of course, the online mode. 

 

 We aren’t expecting a full 43-car field, but10-20player-controlled cars would be ideal. Any more would be insane.

 

Also new this year is Happy Hour, a form of practice in real life drivers use to test their car and see if they need to make any adjustments prior to the race on Sunday. It may sound miniscule, but for the players who can’t get enough of tuning their car, it’s a profound addition.

 

Thunder’s car physics have been under fire from angered players. Evidently the cars did not react as they should in the previous editions, creating rather predictable and unentertaining wrecks. Surely no one wants to see a driver die, or anything of that sort, but it is still exciting when a spectacular wreck occurs, whether in real life or in virtual reality.

 

Spectacular pileups with smoke, fire trails, and sparks, with even more flipping of the cars. Yee-Ha!