Mario Kart World Wins Sports/Racing Game GOTY, MLB The Show 26 Information Released

The Game Awards 2025 are in the books, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was the big winner securing a boatload of awards, including Game of the Year. It’s likely my GotY as well so no argument there, but as usual, the Racing/Sports game category was a hot mess.

I try not to be too hard on The Game Awards when it comes to sports games because my understanding is that basically one or two panels essentially do all the category work. I think what happens is there are some weak spots in their coverage and expertise by only having a small number of people covering every video game, and this means racing games and sports games are poorly represented most years.

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I’m not totally excusing them because the biggest awards show for games should probably have proper vetting and experts for all its categories — imagine if the Oscars had people who only watched domestic films giving out the award for best international feature film — but sports and racing games are not a big part of the awards show either way.

Still, it’s not even that Mario Kart World won the award, it’s more the nominees overall that tend to be the issue. Last year, College Football 25 wasn’t even nominated, and it seems no matter what F1 and EA Sports FC are always nominated (FC somehow won the award last year even).

It’s a definite problem, and even if Mario Kart World is technically a racing game, it feels a little disingenuous giving a kart racer the award. It’s also a game that a lot of its most ardent fans have turned on, so I think I’d sooner give it soundtrack of the year honors over this award (it really does have an incredible soundtrack).

Ultimately, I don’t get too worked up over this stuff because sports and racing games live in their own little worlds, and it’s not like it’s the only genre that faces this issue. I think fighting game fans would have a similar bone to pick with The Game Awards, and I think that fiefdom is probably the closest comparable to the world of sports games.

My only wish is that at some point they get a couple more “experts” in there for specific genres so The Game Awards can give a tad more respect to more parts of the industry in between hyping the next 12-24 months of new releases that are on the horizon.

MLB The Show 26 Franchise Mode And Gameplay News

SDS continues to give some updates on next year’s game, and this week we got franchise mode and gameplay news for MLB The Show 26.

The gameplay is harder to parse for now because you just want to see it in action to better understand it, but I think the PCI Sensitivity slider will be a big deal for online gamers for sure.

I think the new ratings could also be promising on defense as we’re getting a pop-time rating for catchers. In addition, the reaction rating for fielders is being split up into four categories, so I assume that will determine how fast you’ll move in each cardinal direction, which should hopefully make fielders more unique.

On the franchise mode side of things, we got a concrete look at how lineup logic is changing. There is going to be more of a focus on OBP, and then in-season lineup changes occurring based on performance.

I will say I am always a little wary when I see “streamlining of franchise” as a selling point because that sometimes is a stand-in for “we stripped stuff out” somewhere, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt for now.

Obviously, I hope this isn’t all we’ll be getting — and I doubt it is — for franchise mode, but lineup logic and rotation logic being worked on is a big deal because it’s something we’ve had to babysit via 30-team control for years and years.

Small Madden Patch, Week 15 Roster Update

Right before the Falcons decided to add more chaos to the NFC South title race between the Bucs and Panthers, EA released its Week 15 roster update for Madden. Philip “Old Man” Rivers was added into the game, and Stafford got a +2 boost to 97 overall while Mahomes was given a -3 and dropped to 94 OVR.

There was also a minor Madden patch this week. This patch mostly just fixed up a couple specific plays and now allows you to change the coverage shells in some formations that were locked before. It’s also supposed to make the KO abilities work as intended.

On the CFB side of things, their most recent patch came out last week, and I think it’s helped in some areas for sure, but I do have one weird bug that is happening every so often now — I call it the “force field” bug.

What happens is the CPU QBs will sometimes not want to cross the LOS no matter what on designed pass plays. It’s almost like they run into a force field, and so instead of picking up easy yardage — or even just throwing the ball away — they’ll run sideways at the LOS before going out of bounds.

It’s not something I see every game, but it’s certainly an odd bug, and I believe it was introduced in that patch.

Steam Sales And Skate Story

Lastly, holiday deals will continue to be a thing, and right now the Steam Sports Fest is going on. This means there are sales for various sports games, but I more call it out because there are deals on sports games that go beyond the “major” titles.

We’ve seen better prices for the biggest sports games via Black Friday deals, but this Steam sale allows you to poke around into some corners of the sports game market you might overlook most other times of the year.

Being able to grab something like Lonely Mountains Downhill for $4 is a steal, and so I would urge y’all to at least look around the store a bit.

Skate Story is also out now. It’s $20 or “free” if you have PS Plus. It’s getting great reviews, and I can’t wait to dig in and play it this weekend. I can’t say there are too many sports-adjacent games where you square-off against demons, so I’m here for the weirdness, and I think it’s almost better if you know as little as possible about this game before experiencing it.

Until next time y’all. And, as always, thanks for reading.

-Chase