timwheatley.org

While NASCAR may appear to the casual outsider to be the evil half-sister of Formula One, it is one of the most competitive and hard to win championships in the world, one where the driver matters more than the car and winning is not dependant on your car being red and your team having a budget reaching into the hundreds of millions. Once you get used to the amusing American accents and the fact that most people involved with the sport carry a cloned moustache you really can start to enjoy it, even if you’re European like me.

In terms of modern racing, NASCAR uses very basic vehicles under very strict rules. These rules mean teams have to work a hundred times harder just to make a little difference in their performance; the driver and the car setup make a big difference in NASCAR.

I must admit before I started this software up I had already pretty much written it off. Like most simulations I’ve tried in the past, I expected I would end up running back screaming to Papyrus’ NASCAR 2003 in the long run, it still “feels right” to me and I didn’t see how any attempt by EA was going to beat it no matter how many real drivers names they could quote or how many times people said the demo felt good to them.

I got my copy of NASCAR SimRacing (NSR) via a friend in Florida, it arrived from FedEx on Monday 21st February 2005, the day after I’d watched and been extremely excited while watching the Daytona 500. The first major failure of this branded NASCAR simulation? They assumed only American’s will buy it, releasing it in North America only (at the moment). Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad…

You can read about it here.

Not wanting to turn a news post into an article, I’m probably going to…

While I find it very sad that people have died, I do not understand what basis there is for blaming the actions of this young man on GTA. You can guarantee that if GTA had never existed, someone who obviously suffers from some form of mental illness (please note - mental illness is not a derogatory term, go read about it) such as this would have found something else that would have had consequence to either himself or others. The fact that this particular youngster found himself doing these things is nothing to do with GTA, it is to do with his mind and it’s own problems.

Additionally while I’m on a roll, let’s bring up a discussion about the JFK Reloaded game and the ‘disaster game’ (which I cannot remember the name of) which simulated an escape from the Twin Towers…

I am a logically minded person on things like this, one which thinks that the death of one person (JFK) or the deaths (or in this case, survival) of a person, is no more ’sick’ than a 1st person shooter such as Medal of Honor, where you run around shooting hundreds or thousands of German soldiers in order to re-live an event of mission during a war in which not one, not a few thousand - but millions of soldiers and innocent people died in whatever circumstances.

I remember how I felt watching the news on 9/11, I consider myself fairly in-tune with the American psyche on that event, but I have a broad enough mind to accept that if I was to play a game where I shot JFK - it’s no worse than playing any other game where I shoot any other innocent, or indeed any ‘Nazi’ soldier. A life is a life.

Additionally, I’d be interested to hear debate on whether driving a Goodwrench #3 at Daytona with a 2001 carset (ie; simulating the 2001 season) is considered to be good taste? You are in effect re-enacting the event in which Dale Earnhardt died. How is this worse than playing the part of someone who escapes from the Twin Towers?

The gaming industry is a gaming industry. Time does not heal certain wounds. While it has been a long time since JFK was shot, why are people less inclined to accept a game where you shoot him, than accept a game based on events 300 years ago where you do much the same kind of thing with a primitive gun. Is it because the event was in our lifetime? Surely that can’t be right, how can we force views right now which our children will probably not care less about? Why are we blaming the gaming industry for things like this? Because it’s the easy answer? I think so…

Apparently, GT4 is going to flop! Because a writer for the Guardian says so! The comments from the public are pretty funny too…

If only the modern press would employ writers like me.

Read the ‘article’ right here.