I don't consider myself a fan of NASCAR. I don't currently own a car, as a matter of fact. My entire history of traffic tickets consists of one incident more than ten years ago in which I changed lanes without signaling while "speeding" in a "construction zone" where there was no construction. (But I'm totally over it.) I have never been at fault for an accident, except for one time when I hit one of my parents' cars with the other one in the driveway when I was in high school.

All of this does nothing to reduce my enjoyment of being a completely dangerous, bomb-throwing, car-crashing, joyfully destructive menace in the ad-soaked but still very enjoyable NASCAR Kart Racing, my latest Wii acquisition.

I had absolutely no confidence that I would even be able to figure out how not to immediately blow myself up every time I started driving, but I got the hang of it fairly quickly once I figured out where the accelerator was.

There were a few bumps along the way.

The bumps, after the jump...

 

My least favorite thing about the game is actually my least favorite thing about NASCAR itself, which is that it's a lot like diving into a six-foot-deep pit of distilled advertisement juice. (Or, if you are six feet tall, a seven-foot-deep pit.) Hilariously, one of the "road hazards" you can encounter is that one of your opponents throws a giant ad in your face, so you're trying to drive while having your view partially blocked by an ad for Best Buy or whatever. (Real ads; real advertisers. Just like NASCAR.)

You can't accuse them of subtle product placement, that's for sure.

But after a while, I stopped noticing the ads (mostly) and began concentrating on how often I accidentally took my own life. Some of the courses make it almost impossible to off yourself; you can smash into the wall as fast as you want, and all it will do is slow you down. (In this sense, you are everyone's nightmare of a 16-year-old's fantasy of invincibility. Yay!)

But in others, I did have a few problems with driving off the track and into space, which causes you to just...disappear. Fortunately, you do not see yourself as you are, say, dashed on the ground below, at which point your body would be removed from the car by the Cheetos Jaws Of Life, transported in the Monster.com Hearse, and incinerated in the Budweiser crematorium. Instead, you simply float back down onto the track and get another chance. My kind of terrifying crash!

It's hard to get the feel of the "slingshot" business, in which you drive with a partner and gain speed by drafting and then shooting ahead to be drafted off of in return. And since you constantly get a supply of weapons (throw a bomb! throw a rock!), I was perpetually afraid that I was going to accidentally injure my partner. Incidentally, you can choose lots of real NASCAR drivers as your stand-in and as your partner. I should probably branch out and stop making myself Jeff Gordon every time just because I know who Jeff Gordon is, right?

In the end, in spite of being an unlikely audience for a smash-em-up racing game, I found that a large part of me very much enjoys crashing a cartoon car and leaning hard to the side with my cheap plastic steering wheel (a worthwhile purchase if you like racing games) clutched in my fists. And if you hear a vicious rumor that I yelled "Vroom vroom" at any time during the first several days I owned this game, please remember that it is only a rumor.