PS1 Game Review: Jarrett and Labonte Stock Car Racing

 Jarrett, Labonte, two names embedded in the racing legacy's of four champion race car drivers.  Ned and Dale Jarrett as well as Terry and Bobby Labonte.  Meaning, they would have a great insight into NASCAR racing and a NASCAR game right? Yeah not so much.. as this is about Dale's son Jason Jarrett (essentially a Busch Series driver who didn't honestly drive after 2000) and Terry's son Justin Labonte (a race winner in the Busch Series in 2004) and their racing game, Jarrett and Labonte Stock Car Racing.  The game company that made this game? Codemasters.  Yep that same company who either produces a great or a garbage F1 game every year made this game way back near the turn of the millennium.  This game, well, is good in some ways and bad in others.

Positives:

1. Mainly correct courses for the time of this game being made.  They did make one note and that was a short version of Brands Hatch.  Otherwise the courses are more or less pretty accurate for when they were made.  

2. Realism in car damage, to an extent.  If you smash the wall hard, you are liable to cause a lot of damage and ruin your race.  It makes that seem pretty realistic to a real racing car.

3. Realism in competition, also to an extent.  As you progress your competition gets harder and that is a good thing as well.

Negatives:

1. Honestly, the realism in car damage is not impacted in aerodynamics or anything remotely close to impact of racing plus it is fixable right away with a pit stop.  Therefore.. it doesn't do much for me on that.

2. The competition does get tougher but the bar is literally moderate at best for advancing to the next championships.  As long as you do well in a certain group of races, you are gonna finish top 2 or 3 and get the points needed.

3. This games music is fine but the driving is so all over the place and jittery it makes it hard to enjoy.  I play racing games for the sake of racing.  This game if you twitch at all you are going to wreck.  You don't have the chance to save your racecar from a wreck.

In all honesty, that's what I gathered from my last playthrough of this game.  It is mainly just a standard game for racing on the PS1.  Codemasters obviously has done far better but they honestly struggled with this one and really it doesn't excite me when I play this game as it did as a kid.