It was originally an intentional joke on the part of the developers, but as time passed, the NFL was decreasingly okay with it and eventually asked for it to be removed in later installments, hence the lack of an injury animation in some titles and it being a brief cutaway in modern ones.

All I could think when I saw it is it was the motorsports equivalent of this.

I’m so sick of ads for dick pills that I genuinely just want this to happen out of spite. (And for Landauer to have sponsorship money because she’s pretty damn good.) I wonder how it’d go for diecast and merchandise licensing, though; would it count as a pharmaceutical product and have to be replaced with her name or…

Delayed perpetually into non-existence. At best, development hell, at worst, quietly shelved.

They did also include a lot of modern pop bands of the era, but half of the tracklist is stuff the parents would recognize for the sake of multiplayer. And for the sake of awesome, really, since it’s a very cohesive playlist.

Stage racing at least had any kind of effect besides controversy and random unwarranted crashes.

Yeah, I don’t see an issue there. If people are gonna jump to weird conclusions, that’s their problem. I’ve played Shinovi Versus plenty in public and in the living room and it’s pretty clearly more humorous than anything else.

I’m glad to hear it’s genuinely a good game. The bait-and-switch that comes with a seemingly shameworthy title being legitimately fantastic to play or well-written - much of why I stick to the Senran Kagura series despite being initially skeeved out by it - tends to make it all the funnier.

Yeah, the story and the character interactions are really where the Senran Kagura series shines. The fanservice and comedy play well as a hook, but it’s the unexpectedly impressively deep and dark storylines as well as the hilariously dorky mundane stuff in the side missions that I absolutely love.

Hoping the course design doesn’t suffer from the procedural generation. It’s all well and good as a theoretical “new courses forever” thing, but doesn’t tend to hold up great without being supplemented by purposefully designed locations.

That sums it up exactly. The exaggerated designs are made to fit the medium, and when you just up the resolution, it tends to look busy and non-cohesive.

I’d say it can be summarized as “making everything really sharp makes it look extremely busy now”.

Been busy with a move, so this is my chance to dive back into my racing games. Been really hooked on Need for Speed: SHIFT lately. I’m surprised I let that one slip through the cracks for so long. It’s the ridiculous presentation, supercars and course design of an NFS game with some mild semblance of realism and…

I do recommend slipping Arkham Origins in there somewhere if you can, but definitely after a break from City. Otherwise it does feel a bit too same-y and muscle memory gets messed up; same with Knight.

As someone from a NASCAR household, I can tell you that once we started getting WRC coverage here, pretty much everyone here adapted pretty smoothly to loving rally as well. “Drive fast in ridiculously beautiful places” was not a tough sell in the least. FIA World Rallycross and Red Bull GRC followed suit, too, so…

Essentially, it was the violence and focus on being a spy flick that undid it for me. Mater’s characterization/expertise/development and the whole idea of a global Grand Prix that took all kinds of vehicles and pit them against each other were pretty excellent, in my book, and... I dunno. It was too busy and it was…

Well, Formula E has all zero of the roaring engines that it did when it started, so no change was made to be disappointed by!

Usually, they put the races up on the official NASCAR channel after a long while. Not that they don’t usually float around on Youtube unofficially before then...

“I think it’s dumb and I refuse to watch it” is generally a much worse way to have fun with motorsports than “wow, this looks so ridiculous I oughta see it”.

Essentially, it got batted around due to scheduling conflicts (I think a soccer game got rescheduled onto FS1?) and shoved over to Fox Business since every cable package that includes FS1 also includes that.