You can all watch the video and form your own opinions, but here’s what stood out for me:

The acting made me cringe. There’s a point where EA needed to stop shoehorning these really lame storylines into a racing game, and they’ve clearly passed it. The focus should always be on the cars. Stop trying to make an American version of Initial D, it just ain’t happening.

Hopefully that was only a taste of the visual customization. The first two Underground games were landmark achievements when it came to personalizing your ride, and later games like Carbon and Pro Street took this even further with the Autosculpt mode. When I see an option called Apply Preset Wrap, I gotta admit it’s cool how the game automatically applied the contingencies of the brands you used on your car (I think Juiced did this too), but I’m praying to god there’s a layers system like we saw in the previous Underground titles. The last thing this game needs are the same ten palette-swapped liveries on every single car. You only need to check out the showroom of NFSCars.net to see how creative people can get with just four layers and preset designs.

Is it really going to look like that? Maybe I’m just getting old, cranky, and pessimistic, but that’s a pretty big leap in graphical quality for only taking a year off. You’d think companies would stop the whole yearly development cycle ideology if this is what in-game pre-alpha footage looks like after taking an extra year to work on the game.

What was the AI doing? Are you sure it’s not pre-rendered? For an event called Drift Attack, not one AI car gets sideways. And pay attention to the HUD – I don’t know about you but that probably means he’s supposed to be sideways. Yet, there is no leaderboard that indicates what position the player is in, nor is there any indication of how the event is even scored. His rep builds up at the top of the screen, but at the conclusion of the event the viewer can’t determine what purpose that race served, why rep is important, or what place the driver finished. What’s going on here?

What retard tweets about illegal street racing? At the end of the race, the player receives what appears to be a tweet from a higher ranked competitor. , so either the police in Need for Speed Underground 3 are the world’s worst cops who dedicated all police resources to cyberbullying instead of illegal street racing, or all of those mean tweets directed at Bruce Jenner are secretly talking about some epic LA street race we all missed out on.

In that case, I want in.