From start to finish, installation of Viper Racing took about 2 minutes! -I love my machine! Please note that Viper Racing has a couple of patches to install and will be installed before continuing the review. I chose to go this route because of the age of this game. If it were a new release, I would NOT use any patches available. Why you ask? Because if a game manufacturer releases a game then I believe it should be ready to go right out of the box.

After installing the patchwork, I used the joystick configuration utility from the game start up screen to configure my wheel (Thrustmaster Nascar Pro Racing Wheel) which is just a shortcut to the standard Windows joystick configuration application. Next try was to configure the wheel in the game itself.

The options menu sports a FPS (Frames Per Second) Benchmark tool which allows you to see how fast \ slow the game will run. Therefore if you set the level of graphics too high then your benchmark tool will show you low frame rates thus enabling you to change the graphic settings before you start a race. Tuning your car is fairly straight forward and the manual covers every option in the tuning section...but the Kap'n aint fer readin all that mumbo-jumbo so I headed on over to Sierra Sports web site looking for a link for car setups! -DSL ROCKS!

After a bit of searching, I was pleasantly surprised to find a link to Troy's Set-up and Advice Page which is packed full of setups. The draw back is that there is no utility to install the setups. You must print them out and input them in manually.-arrgh! After installing a few of these car sets, I was able to lower my lap times considerably.

The scenery is nicely done, but unless your a loser who constantly crashes - who has time to look at the scenery at 185 mph?! Bridges, mountains, changes in elevation, all this adds up to a bunch of fun while circling the tracks. I did notice a huge difference while toggling off and on the FSAA on my 3dfx Voodoo 5 5500 video card. With it on, the cars \ scenery looked pretty smooth but with it off the lines on the cars (and everything else) became very jaggy.

One of the most noticeable features of realism for me was when I used the cockpit view. As you shift through the gears the nose of the car actually lowers and raises with each shift. Turning corners also shows an actual swaying motion, again adding to the realism.

Viper Racing supports TCP\IP, IPX, direct connect, and modem to modem connections. Connection is relatively straightforward and adds a ping of the game your looking for. -Very nice-

The user interface once you get there takes a bit to get used to, if you hit the back button one too many times you'll find yourself back on the outside and will have to re-connect to the game. (DOH!) Also, if you want to use the Viper GT you'll have to remember to select it each time before the race starts or you'll be stuck in the slow lane with the regular (default) Viper.

Lag is a big problem while racing on the net. Every time I have connected to a game, even if there is just one other guy there, lag seems to ruin the day. Cars seem to warp back and forth, lift towards the sky then slam back down or just stay up there disconnecting the player. I believe the patch helped with this multi-player problem but obviously did not fix the problem.