Need recommendation for NASCAR game for our PC

The Game Room
1

Our son is a NASCAR nut. He will soon be turning 8 years old, and I’d love to get him a NASCAR video game (for a PC) and a steering wheel that can plug into the computer.

What would you recommend? I know nothing about NASCAR games, nor steering wheels.

2

I know nothing about NASCAR games myself, but Logitech makes some steering wheels which might work well with them. http://www.logitech.com/en-us/gaming/wheels/devices/5184

What are the specs and OS of your PC? This information might come in handy for those wishing to recommend a game.

3

I’m a a racing fan myself, and unfortunately there’s not a lot out there. EA has had the license and they stopped making PC NASCAR games in 2005 (and even that game was suck). It looks like the only one I can find that’s currently maintained is Iracing.com, which is an online-play subscription service that runs around $7.50 a month plus additional fees for access to more cars and tracks. They supposedly started adding NASCAR-specific content in 2010.

If you can live with “Not NASCAR specifically” for a while, at least until someone else picks up the NASCAR license that EA lost in 2010, here’s a listing of reviews of PC racing games in general: simracingworld.com - simracingworld Resources and Information.

4

And according to this thread, it’s really hard, maybe not for an 8-year-old. Never played it, just passing the info along.

Joe

5

No way I would put a kid newbie into an iRacing ride. There’s plenty of mods/series for such modern sims like rFactor and GTR2, some of which do include stock cars (tho I stick with sports cars on non-ovals mostly).

6

The latest Nascar racing game is “Nascar 2011, The Game”, however, it is only available for Xbox and PS3.

Apparently, the current release is very buggy and the publisher is working on a patch.

7

If you look around, you can find a port of Daytona USA (the multi-player sitdown arcade game) which was a lot of fun. I think there is a patch you need to download for it IIRC. Here’s a link to a demo download:

Papyrus made some excellent NASCAR sims in the early years of the century.

There’s a Dirt Track Racing game for the PC that is barrels of big slidey fun and opposite lock.

iRacing would not be recommended as a game. Too many rules, man…