Graphics: The shiny, stylish, colorful visuals are a real feast for the eyes. I simply love the car and track design here. The appearance of the cars reminds me a bit of Acclaim’s Extreme-G 2 and the look of the tracks reminds me most of Ubi Soft’s POD. The heavy emphasis here is on a sleek futuristic motif, and the lighting and reflections are both exotic and fantastic. When cars are racing in a bright multicolored tunnel, the dynamic reflections on the top of the vehicles is simply dazzling. The smoke and spark effects are also excellent and the visual display of damage is quite realistic. Unlike many racing titles, the frame rate is quite high with all detail settings at the highest levels and you never see any stuttering in the animation. The biggest disappointment is that the highest resolution is 640×480 pixels (indeed, the only other resolution available is 320×240), which is downright puny by today’s standards. You may, however, run the game in a window, so if you have your desktop set at high resolution, you can have other stuff visually running as you play.

Interface: There is full support for keyboard, joystick and steering wheel, and all three collections of default settings are fully and easily re-configurable. I find that my Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback Steering Wheel works wonderfully with this offering, which contains exceptional force feedback support in permitting you to set separately the engine, tire adhesion, steering, collision, G-force and overall feedback levels. The play screen is clearly laid out, showing your track position, your speed and revolutions-per-minute, a damage diagram of your car, the pressure placed on your tires, the track and the position of all the cars. What is missing and would be nice is a rear view mirror option. The menus are quite straightforward and not particularly stylish, with actual racing taking place in the background as you click your choices. Perhaps the biggest annoyance here is that many of your preferences are not kept from session to session, forcing you to reset them each time you run the game and, in some cases, each time you repeat a particular race.

Gameplay: The racing is sheer frenzied excitement, perhaps best exemplified by the title having you already going full speed when the races begin (control is turned over to you after a few seconds) rather than the usual pattern of races starting from a completely stopped position. Although Jeff Gordon is a three-time NASCAR Winston Cup Champion, this offering does not remind me in any way of NASCAR racing. Instead, it is the fastest racing game of any type that I have ever seen, including Redline Racer, the previous speed king. Gone forever are those days when, due to slow CPU speeds and weak acceleration cards, I had to creep along on a track pretending to myself everything was a lot faster. You are supposed to be going 300 miles per hour, and at the rate you whip around the track, it really feels like it. When you combine the speed with the sharp banks, corkscrew loops and huge jumps, you can see why racing here is a real blast. What I really love is that the speedways are genuinely multi-path; they don’t just have little shortcuts available but rather huge alternative routes, almost the equivalent of two racecourses in one. The on-the-fly morphing to repair visible damage, in place of pit stops, is a wonderful innovation. Unlike many computer races I have driven recently, there is not an instant of boredom on any one of the tracks.

Sound FX: The sound effects in this game are outstanding, and what is surprising is that they are more realistic than in most racing simulations. The engine sounds were all recorded at Charlotte Motor Speedway from inside and outside the car to ensure authenticity, and it really shows. The background track noise, tires squealing and engines revving all are great. A nice feature is that you can separately control the volume of ambient environmental effects, your engine, the other cars’ engines, tires, collisions and speech. This last adjustment is especially useful, as there is an awful lot of Jeff Gordon here, introducing tracks and making comments as you race, and on occasion it is nice to be able to muzzle him. The game does indeed have 3D sound, but it is provided through software Q-Sound technology rather than through specific support for 3D hardware standards like Aureal’s A3D or Creative Labs’ EAX systems.

Musical Score: The music is clearly not an emphasis in this offering. The background tracks just have a beat and little else. I can understand that, for many racing fans, background music is unimportant (several have vehemently said so to me directly), but it would have been nice to have some real tunes to augment the great sound effects.

Intelligence & Difficulty: In addition to the standard easy-medium-hard difficulty options, at the last minute, “very easy” and “very hard” levels were added for real novices and experts. I think this was a great move, as surely all ability levels are covered here. As to artificial intelligence, each computer-controlled opponent has an aggressive yet distinctive personality. I am extremely impressed with the driving skills of these drivers, as they constantly find ways to block my path, slingshot past me after I have I have passed them, and otherwise make winning races a constant battle. In so many other racing efforts, I can just zoom past the opposition, get in the lead and never look back; here, that never happens, no matter what the level of difficulty is.

Overall: Jeff Gordon XS Racing is the purest arcade racer I have ever tested, and a fine one at that. It certainly could have done more with play options and music, but these are peripheral to its central successful thrust. It is not surprising that ASC Games intends to port this to the PlayStation and other console platforms in the near future. If you only like racing simulations, or get dizzy going at super-high speeds or flying blindly through the air, then don’t come near this one. If you are the type of gamer who liked Motocross Madness a lot more than Redline Racer, or Grand Prix Legends a lot more than Motorhead, then don’t give this one a look. But if you can find it within yourself to appreciate a quintessential adrenaline-pumping reflex-twitching experience, then grab this one without a moment’s hesitation.