Still holding off on a Shadow Warrior replay/NG+ for a while, but I think I'll dive right back in when my rig is upgraded. I definitely think I'll hold off on going full-bore with the difficulty because hoo boy, yeah, that final room soundly whupped me before. I've found that when getting a bit stressed out and wanting something to just unwind with, the pack-in bonus Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior has been surprisingly soothing. It's nice to just... not have to think too much. It's a tad gruesome, but amusing moreso. There's no real high-stakes chaos (unless you purposefully add a timer) and it's just you and the mess you left in the opening level of Shadow Warrior 2013 proper. It's kinda nifty, having the repercussions and aftermath of something else you took part in. It might just be a matter of mopping and picking things up and tossing them in the incinerator and mopping more and then bloodying the mop too much and smearing the blood everywhere and hastily washing it off in a small stream and running back, but... it's just nice. Which "clean up the scene of a bloody gunfight" doesn't usually sound like.
Tried Forza Horizon 4's demo! It... didn't click for me. Like, it looks fantastic, but "you're a rookie and you're establishing your racing life at the Festival!" is not something I actually personally want right now. Not after I was just the boss of the Festival in the previous installment and was orchestrating cross-country rally races through the rainforest before connecting an entire archipelago with frickin' gigantic Hot Wheels track and launching supercars off into the ocean. The bar is too absurdly massively high and I already got *exactly* what I wanted more than I could ever want again. So... probably count me in when they announce some crazy expansion, but I can hold off for now. (The Bond cars look
amazing, and I have a soft spot for the DB5 and the submarine Esprit, but I want crazy high-octane chases to use 'em in! I thought it'd be something more like FH2:F&F.)
So, trying to break free from Forza for a bit, I went back to Need for Speed: ProStreet, a game I got and then just... didn't play much at all, since I wasn't impressed by the kinda weird event format (you don't choose individual races; you go to Race Days that include several of them grouped, and progression is made by a different score that's calculated from your finishing position, time, and damage taken) and the random drops (yep, those weren't introduced in Payback, the best parts being absolute luck to obtain has been a problem since even the beloved 2005 Most Wanted). But, figuring that the alternative was that the disc just sat there, I figured I'd just play whatever seemed interesting, and it's growing on me. It absolutely feels like they just weren't quite done within the timeline, and it suffers from not being what people really wanted then. I skipped it when it came out because, to me, the NFS series was about street racing, and "take it off the streets to the track!" was "Oh. No thanks."
The music is pretty excellently done. What brought me back was actually hearing some of
Junkie XL's original songs for it and going "oh, man, out of the whole series, that only got used in
ProStreet?" (Mercifully, some got patched in to NFS2015, but that ended up equally infamous as "the one with no pause button".) Every style of gameplay is pretty heavily separated, and they're all an existing kind of gameplay from the series repurposed. Grip races are sorta like the URL races from NFSU2 but with nitrous, Speed races (the best part) are very old-school NFS1 style point-to-point events at ludicrous miles per hour, and Drift and Drag are about how they were in the Underground era. The thing is, all of these but Drift get gimmicky variants to break things up without actually adding more tracks (Speed has not just races but Top Speed Runs where your speed through various checkpoints is totaled up, Grip has Sector Shootout where you have to post the best time on each portion of the course, and Drag has Wheelie Contests that are functionally just drag races with the focus being style over speed). So a massive bulk of the game is hardly racing so much as some weird ruleset that shows up here and never gets used again.
Most of all, I feel like this game suffered from being something the fans didn't want and forcing an extreme sudden U-turn; if it had more improvement and support and if there was continuity from here, more of it would matter. The protagonist, Ryan Cooper, is repeatedly referred to by name specifically as Ryan Cooper and you are listed on leaderboards as Ryan Cooper and announced by the DJs as Ryan Cooper. Despite all this, Ryan Cooper doesn't even get a face or any lines; he just wears a helmet and gestures occasionally. The rest of the cast is similarly decorative. The DJs repeat their lines constantly. None of the cast from this game ever returned (except in the PSP version of Need for Speed: Shift, surprisingly), until out of nowhere, ten years after, NFS: Payback decided to bring back the Noise Bomb crew in a far larger role than they actually had in ProStreet (and actually have Ryan Cooper's ability to magically win absolutely everything ever and become Street King
actually finally referenced by anyone!).
The other major failing is the arcade street-racing physics being directly plunked onto circuit racing, which... doesn't entirely work. NFS: Shift had more success with purpose-built physics for it, in my opinion, and Shift 2: Unleashed brought the concept of "Need for Speed with professional racing" to its apex. (The Tokyo course in those games is actually a direct recreation of the Tokyo Dockyard course from ProStreet, but the rest is original.)
All in all, it's mostly been a very intriguing time capsule, seeing the cars of 2007 (mostly; there are some concept cars included that bring the model years up to 2010!), a unique musical and visual style, and most importantly to me, some fantastic courses and locales across the world. There's definitely some value now, to going back and tearing around the highways of Tokyo (with the tallest thing in the landscape being Tokyo Tower, no Skytree yet!), the oval at Texas World Speedway (sadly, despite its history, a long-defunct course now that's just a massive asphalt grave for flooded cars), the Porsche test track at Leipzig (gotta force in that reminder that EA had the exclusive license to Porsche in there somewhere!), and various wonderfully chosen locales that very scarcely showed up again. A personal favorite is the Autobahnring; instead of the usual Nurburgring for Germany, they just close off the Autobahn and leave it similarly twisty and perilous, with ridiculous Talladega-esque banking that you're probably going to fall off of if you can't make 225mph.
It had a lot of great ideas that they just didn't quite flesh out yet. It's a shame that it's more a curiosity than anything in hindsight (it's honestly consistently pretty frustrating to play!), but it's an intriguing one, as they took a very big gamble and a lot of these decisions ended up lasting to later in one form or another. There's a lot of return to form - having set courses, the antagonist being just some guy who thinks you can't drive better than him rather than having a nefarious plan, a worldwide setting instead of just fictional Americana, a focus on just improving a small stable of cars rather than collecting them all - and a whole lot of newer stuff, like keeping the focus firmly in affordable cars, occasionally remixing the same few songs to fit different situations (which would become much more prominently the style of Shift 2: Unleashed), and naming the protagonist (which has yet to go over well even once).
Essentially, this would be the start of the end for the development team at EA Black Box, as they hastily turned back to street racing with the mediocre NFS: Undercover, and then made an attempt at a saving throw with the cinematic NFS: The Run. It wasn't bad, but, again, it wasn't what people wanted and it didn't really feel finished, so they rolled a 1 on that and went under, taking their Skate series with them (the greater loss between the two series, IMO, even if NFS has been completely rudderless in terms of figuring out what it wants to be since... but, granted, it was kinda like that before.)
If nothing else, I can be amused by now having two games that name Sears Point / Sonoma Raceway as Infineon Raceway, when it had that title for about a decade and nobody really called it that.