Forgive me for bringing this up, I’m super deep into the offseason lol, but I’ve always wondered what a Pats Packers Super Bowl 42 would have looked like, and how much more likely NE would have won had NYG not made it out of Lambeau. The build up/hype for that team vs pre-dick pic pre-welfare scam Favre trying to take them down potentially in his last game would have been insane to begin with lol.
Let me start this off by saying: I’m an Earnhardt fan from a family of Earnhardt fans, I don't think he should be forgotten or not brought up at all, the Amazon documentary and stories we hear on the Dale Jr Download are great…
But my goodness, it makes me cringe sometimes how we have to bring him up in every damn commercial, every other pre-race show, in every other question we ask Jeff Gordon/Mark Martin/Darrell Waltrip etc, every day on social media, and every documentary on the sport. I understand he’s still so popular and the first name a lot of people know in the sport, but I wish the industry showed a little more security sometimes in it’s current drivers, and other past drivers’ own marketability and in how cool their own stories are, rather than having to go back to the Big E well so much. Other sports like the NBA for example don’t have this need to go ”Remember Joe Montana?” to sell the sport and get engagement so much.
Its always the same 4-5 races too (1995/99 Bristol, 1996 Rockingham, 2000 Talladega, 1998 Daytona) where he either won a plate race or ran into someone on a short track that gets shown/brought up too and it unintentionally does a disservice to how good/interesting he was as a driver when its always just “He could see the air and he would wreck his mama to win a race”. This whole thing has gotten way worse too now that the sport is less popular than it was 15 years ago and has less household names currently driving. Sorry for the long rant but this has gotten on my nerves more and more recently.
I picked it up for the PS2 in GameStop in their “retro” section for 5 bucks and boy what a steal. Playing this game, then going back to playing a friend as well as the CPU on Madden 26 really puts in perspective how downright garbage EA football gameplay is, particularly on the Frostbite engine. On 2K you get rewarded for using real football logic, for example if you have a good QB and you wanna fire a hole shot into cover 2, or try to lay one out in front of a receiver with leverage headed toward the pylon you can do it, maybe he catches it maybe you miss it, but the receiver won’t get Moss’ed by every freaking CB/Safety.
The thing that probably drives me crazy the most when I play Madden particularly on offense is there’s this annoying shifting meta year to year of some position groups (linebackers for example) being terrible while another (DBs) is wayy too good to compensate. On 2K everything feels balanced, CPU has logic and follows assignments, every game feels different. The defense can actually play well naturally without this ying-yang of “on-ball” defense being cartoonishly good to compensate for “off-ball” defense being crap, no scripted screwups on 3rd-4th down or in 2 minute drills to manipulate games either.
Sorry for the rambling, but man it’s really nice to play a much more sim focused football game for the first time. Madden 11 on the PS3/Xbox 360 has always been the peak of EA gameplay for me, but 2K’s gameplay even makes that look like crap especially considering 2K5’s console generation/hardware to work with. I’m more impressed than I thought I was gonna be even after seeing all the praise over the years.
As a kid who was always told I was too small/too weak/too slow etc, Tom was the absolute man to me and I loved how he played and went about his business (and as a guy in his early 20s with that inner kid still in me), this retirement version of him is hard to watch. Too famous and involved in too many ventures to really say anything other than the occasional opinion on the state of the game, face full of fillers, walking down runways in clothes he can’t walk straight in, this overdone “I am a serious public speaker“ voice, shilling for Pizza Hut and Nestle/Keebler cookies or whatever in Walmart after all the TB12 method stuff and steadfast health beliefs that got him made fun of years ago, always at these kinda weird/silly Michael Rubin events etc.
I know he’s a megastar and this is the kinda shit you gotta expect with a megastar but man I feel like there’s still that really cool guy you hear about in there somewhere that he won‘t let himself show to the public. I’m not sure if this stuff is just a result of him getting too famous, the price of chasing perfection everywhere so hard for so long, or if maybe the divorce stuff kinda pushed him over the edge in some areas, or if he’s deep down just kind of a weird guy with too much money. Either way I hate that it’s turned out this way because I really hoped that it wouldn’t once the cleats got hung up.
I know the whole long ass mediocre promos thing with Triple H has always been a meme but my goodness, I did not realize how God-awful of a promo he was at times and how his post-DX gimmick would have been better if they didn’t let him really talk. Some of this stuff from when he was working programs with Rock/Austin etc would have gotten feces thrown at him if he wasn’t at the top of the card and/or didn’t have that look. He had a great career and I understand why he ended up in good positions and why he got over but I didn’t realize quite how much it was in-spite of his charisma because a lot of his attitude era stuff is just “big dopey looking guy standing next to Shawn Michaels while Shawn slurs words at people”, “Haha funny DX guy”, and “Guy who works with the guy that draws the money who’s talking too damn much”.
This is gonna sound really silly to notice, but Dale Jr‘s voice changed at some point around 2010-2012, before then it was way lower, less expressive, more drawl-ish and throaty, after then it’s more like it is today, higher, more enunciated, more twang-ey and nasally. I wonder if it was Speech Class? Improved mental state? Quittng smoking? This is probably the most neurodivergent thing I’ve ever talked about or put any thought into.