At the time, Sierra owned Papyrus Design Group, responsible for some of PC gaming’s finest simulation racing games, like Indycar Racing, Grand Prix Legends, and the NASCAR Racing series. So in perhaps the oddest mash of gaming licenses since Battletoads and Double Dragon, Sierra created the fifth and final 3-D Ultra Pinball game, centering around the NASCAR license.
At the start of the game, you’re able to pick which driver to play as. There are four: Dale Earnhardt, Sr. (as this game was published a few years before his unfortunate death), Bobby Labonte, Terry Labonte, and Bill Elliott. This really only affects some of the graphics around each table and what the in-game commentators will say.
Amazingly enough, NASCAR lends itself quite well to the world of pinball, with the various drop targets and bumpers being replaced with piles of tires, tool boxes, garage jacks, and track walls. Your pit crew will talk to you on the radio as you play, telling you about where your ball should go next, as well as teasing the player if they bump the table too much (“Take it easy, it’s only pinball!”). Since the tables are actual locations at a NASCAR track (the garage and the track itself), table bumping becomes a bit absurd, since you’re essentially bumping an entire mass of land instead of a mere table.
NASCAR‘s metagame isn’t as involved as previous games, but should at least be interesting enough to fans of automobile racing. The usual three-balls-per-game formula actually does not start immediately. When you first start the game, you’re in the garage, attempting to fix up your car in time for the race. You only get one ball on this table, and your task is to hit all eight of the spot targets as many times as you can. If you lose your ball here, you’re sent to the track to take your qualifying lap. Here, you get 60 seconds to hit targets as they’re lit up, and losing the ball merely sends it back to you. Once the 60 seconds are up, the table restarts and normal gameplay is started. Doing well on the qualifying lap gives you a better starting position for the race, which affects bonuses at the end of the ball as well as other factors. While the majority of the action on the track takes place just off the road as you watch the cars race past nearby, it’s possible to knock the track walls down and launch the ball into traffic, destroying some of the cars in the process and earning bonuses if you can hit the “HIT HERE” section of the opposite wall. Pit stops are also handled on a separate table, where losing your ball merely sends you back to the track.
NASCAR Pinball borrows the engine from Thrill Ride, so the game now runs at a higher color depth and a resolution of 800×600. It looks much cleaner than the previous few games, and the depth of color helps make the tables look more like the real locations they’re supposed to represent.
Sierra also released this game in Europe, but as NASCAR is neither as widespread nor as popular outside of the United States, the game was renamed to 3-D Ultra Pinball: Turbo Racing.
Other 3-D Ultra Games
Outside of pinball, Sierra used the “3-D Ultra” brand for various other games, including 3-D Ultra Minigolf, 3-D Ultra Radio Control Racers, 3-D Ultra Cool Pool, and most bizarrely, 3-D Ultra Lionel Train Town, a virtual train set based on the Lionel line of model locomotives. The 3-D Ultra brand name was retired in 2001, following Sierra’s acquisition by Vivendi Universal.
