Prove you can handle the thunder! Featuring more drivers - Dale Earnhardt Jr., Tony Stewart and Adam Petty join the field of 33 NASCAR drivers and 7 legends. 18 licensed NASCAR tracks, now including Homestead-Miami Speedway. New TV and Crew Chief audio - Bob Jenkins and Benny Parsons in the booth plus Crew Chief and Spotter assistance. Wheel-to-wheel NASCAR competition - go head-to-head on the split-screen! Six driving views, including behind the wheel. Multiple modes - Quick Race, Single Race, or Championship Season.
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I don't know what it is about NASCAR 2000 the game but it just wasn't as fun as the previous years game.
NASCAR 2000 was a solid racing game for its time. It has all the classic NASCAR tracks, basic car customization, and decent graphics for the N64. The sound effects are cheesy, collisions don't feel realistic, and it's basically just driving in circles, but hey, if you're a die-hard NASCAR fan who wants some nostalgia, it's alright. Just keep your expectations in check.
I used to play this with my dad and just drive the wrong way on the track and crash head-on into oncoming cars. He would get annoyed at this but it was a lot of fun for me as a kid.
This game is not great but turning around and driving in the opposite direction, ploughing into rival drivers in head-on collisions at speeds approaching 180 mph, blowing out all four of my tires and sustaining major damage to the body of my car, only to hear the announcers say "Nothin' a little duct tape can't fix!" is an all time gamer moment.
NASCAR 2000 is a reasonably fun game that there is absolutely no reason to go back to past the date it was released. The biggest reason for this is simple: Lack of features. NASCAR 2000 has single race and season mode aaaand that's it. There's no Career or Franchise-style mode, which is the lifeblood of basically every sports game in my opinion, nor anything like race specific challenges, big time race recreations to play or what have you. All you can do is the bare minimum of racing around. Fun to waste some time with, but there is no depth or replayability which means there isn't a ton of a reason to come back to it. This is furthered by the fact that the game doesn't have a full selection of NASCAR tracks,
The gameplay feels very "arcade-y", looser than games like NASCAR Thunder 2003 or to use a contemporary racer F-1 World Grand Prix and more easily exploitable. Really, that's another major issue that NASCAR 2000 ends up having: The AI isn't very strong and therefor resorts a bit more to rubber banding than great racers, but with the arcade-y fun can still be nice to beat, with the end result being that popping it in for like two races can be fun but it isn't a long term experience and it isn't as fun as more modern games. The graphics are good for the time, making the cars fairly crisp and distinct and the courses feel fairly realistic for a Nintendo 64 experience, although I wouldn't say they look as good as F-1 World Grand Prix. Better draw distances on the cars, but that game had superior course detail and so on.
Overall, NASCAR 2000 was okay at the time and I have some fondness for it from my childhood, but even back then there were a ton of racers both simulation (F-1 World Grand Prix, Indy Racing 2000) and more "party" (LEGO Racers, Mario Kart 64) that stood out as superior to me. And as soon as NASCAR games evolved at all, this game became pretty outdated and meaningless. Not the worst experience but simply not worth checking out again.
The gameplay feels very "arcade-y", looser than games like NASCAR Thunder 2003 or to use a contemporary racer F-1 World Grand Prix and more easily exploitable. Really, that's another major issue that NASCAR 2000 ends up having: The AI isn't very strong and therefor resorts a bit more to rubber banding than great racers, but with the arcade-y fun can still be nice to beat, with the end result being that popping it in for like two races can be fun but it isn't a long term experience and it isn't as fun as more modern games. The graphics are good for the time, making the cars fairly crisp and distinct and the courses feel fairly realistic for a Nintendo 64 experience, although I wouldn't say they look as good as F-1 World Grand Prix. Better draw distances on the cars, but that game had superior course detail and so on.
Overall, NASCAR 2000 was okay at the time and I have some fondness for it from my childhood, but even back then there were a ton of racers both simulation (F-1 World Grand Prix, Indy Racing 2000) and more "party" (LEGO Racers, Mario Kart 64) that stood out as superior to me. And as soon as NASCAR games evolved at all, this game became pretty outdated and meaningless. Not the worst experience but simply not worth checking out again.