Bad news for fans of making left turns at 200 mph: several customers are reporting a game-breaking bug in their Xbox 360 copy of NASCAR ’09 that is forcing them to completely delete their game saves and start over from scratch, effectively removing all unlocked content and career progression.

According to reports, the bug hits after you have driven so many cumulative laps. The game then freezes on the load screen and refuses to budge, and the only known fix so far is a complete deletion of all game info from your hard drive. The only known workaround is saving the game to a memory stick and turning off the auto-save, but that’s hardly a fix for a situation that never should have arisen from one of gaming’s biggest publishers.

Thus far, EA has chosen to bury their collective heads in the sand and disregard the vitriol of a NASCAR legion scorned, but they’re going to have to come out some time, as these folks can be quite tenacious. The fact that such a major bug made it through QA leads me to believe that this game was not tested anywhere near as thoroughly as it should have been, and every day that passes without some sort of patch only sinks the company lower and lower in the court of public opinion. For shame EA, for shame.

- Via Kotaku