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NFL Blitz, for a brief period of time, was among the yearly football game offerings alongside Madden and NCAA Football, but while those two games tried to deliver a simulation experience, Blitz was focused on an arcade one. “Da Bomb”, unnecessarily large player models, and non-realistic physics were a staple of the franchise, but it also wasn’t what Blitz was most known for. That would be the laughably over-the-top slapstick violence. NFL Blitz was notorious for being a game that glorified the cruder parts of football from the violence to the cheerleaders, NFL Blitz embraced it for better and worse. Eventually, the NFL pulled the plug on its license and the series went dormant until an attempted reboot in 2012. While the reboot was a decent attempt at recreating the experience, it lacked a lot of the over-the-top fun that the original arcade games created.

So when Arcade1Up announced that it was going to be bringing NFL Blitz back from the dead, and putting it into an arcade cabinet as NFL Blitz Legends, there was a little bit of skepticism. After all, how were they going to bring back a game that the NFL ended its licensing issues with because of everything it glorified? We talked to Chief Technology and Product Officer of Arcade1Up, Davin Sufer, about what it took to bring Blitz back from the dead.

“This was really really challenging.” Sufer told UPROXX. “It’s another game that everyone really loved. It was really well played, well enjoyed, and there are some aspects of it that just aren’t keeping with today’s reality, and we had to go back and we had to address that right out the gate. So we actually managed to dig up what we need to dig up to be able to rebuild the game and tweak out some of the, you know, more violent aspects of the game that don’t really cater to today’s player health and safety aspects, and sent the wrong message for kids, and we were able to address that without killing the soul of the game.”

Those more “violent aspects” that Sufer is talking about are obviously the extremely late hits that the games were kind of known for. After plays were done the player was free to move around at their leisure and most players would take this time to go cause chaos by jumping on the tackled player’s head or tossing the QB around. It’s all very slapstick and played for laughs, but it’s unsurprising that a league as obsessed with its image as the NFL wanted to move away from the franchise back in the day.

This does not mean the entirety of that slapstick violence is gone forever, however. According to Arcade1Up’s official website, 84% of the game’s original tackle animations are still within the game. We just likely won’t see players spearing into each other head first anymore, or jumping onto someone’s head to dogpile after a play is over. Of course, the games were fun for more than that.

“The gameplay is still what you remember, it’s still very dynamic and fun [like] the way that NBA Jam was too.” Sufer said. “There’s always something happening on the screen, the animations are really fast and fun, and it always seems to come down to the wire whenever I play.”

As stunning as it is to believe, NFL Blitz really has come back from the dead. Who knows, maybe if the arcade machine is popular enough we can get a second try at a modern version. The NFL has been less stingy about handing out its license and it would be fun to see some more arcade-style football games.

Last week, Dr. Oz starred in a hilariously bad campaign video where he pretended to go grocery shopping, and clearly, had no idea what he was doing. Not only did he mispronounce the name of the supermarket, but he awkwardly attempted to buy random ingredients for a “crudités.” Granted, that’s the proper culinary term, but to the vast majority of working class Pennsylvanians, it’s a veggie tray.

Naturally, Oz’s opponent, John Fetterman, went to town on the embarrassing video that only further emphasized that Oz has nothing in common with everyday voters in PA on top of actually being a New Jersey resident. However, it appears that the crudités video did more than just give Fetterman another opportunity to relentlessly troll Oz on social media. It also made for one heck of a fundraiser. Fetterman’s campaign reportedly brought in $500,000 within 24 hours of the Oz video going viral. Via CNBC:

The spike in donations between Monday and Tuesday afternoon was “well above” the campaign’s average rate, Fetterman’s communications director, Joe Calvello, told CNBC on Wednesday.

The campaign raked in $11 million in the previous fundraising quarter, Calvello noted. ”$500,000 in one day, it’s a nice bump,” he said.

The fundraising windfall marks a seemingly endless parade of blunders for Oz in the PA senate race. The situation has gotten so bad that Donald Trump is reportedly telling people in private that Oz is going to “f*cking lose.” (It also probably didn’t help that Tucker Carlson tried to show the crudités video on his show and couldn’t stop laughing.) To add insult to injury, Oz started trending over the weekend as Twitter users unearthed his old tweets about poop. Fetterman has yet to capitalize on that recent development, but give him a minute.

(Via CNBC)

Drake’s dominance is disputed but he’s got a compelling new argument in his favor. Shazam, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, has confirmed that Drake is the most-searched artist of all time. Fans have Shazamed Drake’s songs or songs on which he’s featured over 350 million times — which, considering he’s only been around for about half of Shazam’s lifespan, is really impressive. His most Shazamed song? “One Dance,” from his 2016 album Views, which has been searched 17 million times since its release. Whether or not Drake’s really got “more slaps than The Beatles,” he’s become one of the most ubiquitous artists in the world.

And that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon. During his recent appearance on Nicki Minaj’s Queen Radio, Drake rejected the possibility of retirement. “I’m not at that point where I even consider that being an option,” he said. “One of the best feelings I have in my life is completing a song or project. And, by the way, those things are painful as well. A lot of nerves, a lot of confidence wavering. But I feel like I’m reaching a new level of fun. I’ve reached a new level of comfortability where I want to try things. Like this last album, I put out something I wanted to do to challenge myself.”

It looks like Rod Wave’s recent arrest for battery didn’t cool off his musical hot streak as his latest album, Beautiful Mind, becomes his second to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. The Florida crooner last topped the list with his 2021 album, SoulFly. Even more impressively, he’s done all this without the benefit of algorithm-boosting features; the album’s only two guest appearances come from Jack Harlow and December Joy. He racked up 115,000 equivalent album units with 113,000 from streaming.

Meanwhile, Megan Thee Stallion’s new album, Traumazine, bows at No. 4, marking her fifth consecutive top-ten debut and pretty much perfectly highlighting the whole “misogyny in hip-hop” problem (the guy accused of strangling his girlfriend in front of their children outsells one of rap’s most outspoken survivors of domestic violence? You couldn’t write it in a prestige drama on HBO). She accumulated 63,000 equivalent album units with 54,000 streaming units and 8,000 album sales.

Also in the top ten are Bad Bunny, whose Un Verano Sin Ti was finally dethroned (again) after eight weeks at No. 1, although his equivalent album units earned only dropped less than 1%. Beyonce’s Renaissance is No. 3, down 29%. No. 5 is YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s The Last Slimeto (there’s another guy whose treatment of women hasn’t deterred him from success). Morgan Wallen, Harry Styles, The Weeknd, Future, and Olivia Rodrigo round out the top 10.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

It has been exactly three weeks since the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s golf club and private residence in Palm Beach, Florida. And in the weeks since, we’ve heard a litany of bad, sad, pathetic, and plain laughable excuses for what prompted federal investigators to search the home of a former president for the first time in our country’s history. While many versions of these stories have come from Trump directly, Ohio congressman Mike Turner has now joined in the fun — and might just have come up with the most inane reason for Trump to be in possession of highly classified documents.

On Sunday, Turner appeared on Face the Nation, where he chatted with Ed O’Keefe. While discussing Trump’s tricky situation, O’Keefe asked Turner — who Newsweek notes is “also the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee” — what possible reason a former president might have for keeping top-secret documents when he’s no longer in office, and for bringing them to his home in Florida. Turner’s response?

“Well, I don’t know. I mean, you have to ask him. But certainly, we all know that every former president has access to their documents. It’s how they write their memoirs. They don’t have… great recall of everything that’s occurred in their administration.”

Which only begs the question: Why would Trump be writing about top-secret details of his presidency in a memoir? But we’ll save that answer for another day.

(Via Newsweek)

Rudy Giuliani seems to have been feeling pretty emboldened in the days following the violent attack on our Capitol. As Vanity Fair reports, by way of The New York Times, in the wake of the January 6th riots, a Giuliani associate sent a letter to then-president Donald Trump directly, asking that the former New York City mayor be treated like a hero.

These revelations all come via an upcoming book, journalist Andrew Kirtzman’s Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor, which is due out in mid-September. In it, Kirtzman shares that Giuliani associate Maria Ryan penned a letter to Trump stating that, “As you know, [Rudy] lost his job and income and more defending you during the Russia hoax investigation and then the impeachment pro bono.” As a result, the unofficial Four Seasons Total Landscaping spokesman was asking for $2.5 million for himself, and $45,000 for Ryan, plus a couple of other major perks — because why stop at millions of dollars?

“Mr. Giuliani rarely asks for anything for himself,” Ryan wrote. “He is praying you present him with [a Presidential Medal of Freedom] on Friday, January 15 or Monday the 19.”

But Rudy “I Rarely Ask For Anything For Myself” Giuliani was not done. Ryan also requested a general pardon for the president’s former personal attorney, despite the fact that he swears he did nothing wrong in helping Trump to attempt to overturn a totally legitimate presidential election.

According to Vanity Fair, one of Giuliani’s advisers managed to get his hands on the letter before it ever made its way to Trump. According to Giuliani’s legal team, Rudy wasn’t even aware of the requests, and would have put the kibosh on the letter himself as “he never asked for a pardon and told President Trump that if he was offered a pardon, he would decline it because he didn’t do anything wrong.”

Not everyone would necessarily agree with the last part of that statement. Though he is currently the subject of a criminal investigation in Fulton County, Georgia, where he was forced to appear last week in order to answer a series of questions about his presumed involvement in helping Trump try to push The Big Lie.

This is, of course, all separate (but semi-related) from the matter of Giuliani being sued for $1.3 billion from Dominion Voting Systems for his frequent assertions that the machines were hacked, while offering no evidence to back up the claim.

(Via Vanity Fair)

Keeping up with new music can be exhausting, even impossible. From the weekly album releases to standalone singles dropping on a daily basis, the amount of music is so vast it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. Even following along with the Uproxx recommendations on a daily basis can be a lot to ask, so every Monday we’re offering up this rundown of the best new music this week.

This week saw the first Blackpink in a good while and Red Hot Chili Peppers similarly kicking off a new era. Yeah, it was a great week for new music. Check out the highlights below.

For more music recommendations, check out our Listen To This section, as well as our Indie Mixtape and Pop Life newsletters. Also find our Uproxx HQ Spotify playlist, which is updated weekly with the best new music, at the end of this post.

Blackpink — “Pink Venom”

It had been two years without a new Blackpink single but that changed last week with “Pink Venom,” the first look at Born Pink. The tune has a lot going on, a hip-hop-heavy tune with a rhythmic, engaging, sitar-driven instrumental on which the group members deliver lyrics in both English and Korean.

Offset — “54321”

As the future of Migos continues to remain uncertain, the trio’s members are out here doing their own thing. Last week, Offset flexed some solo muscle with “54321,” which includes some possible allusions to the group drama, including lyrics seemingly referencing Takeoff and being in a group.

Nicki Minaj — “Super Freaky Girl (Roman Remix)”

Minaj’s alter ego Roman Zolanski pops up every now and again, and made a fresh appearance last week on the “Roman Remix” of “Super Freaky Girl.” Uproxx’s Aaron Williams notes of the rework, “While the Rick James-sampling beat remains the same and she uses the same pre-chorus, she restructures the song to add a third rapid-fire verse that sees her continue the spelling exercise from the hook and boast about her career longevity.”

Maren Morris and Zedd — “Make You Say”

Maren Morris and Zedd had one of 2018’s defining hits with “The Middle,” and now the duo has reunited on another collaboration, “Make You Say.” This one is ready for summer, starting with a warm and simple instrumental before the energy picks up and leads into a radio-ready hook.

Red Hot Chili Peppers — “Tippa My Tongue”

RHCP has been on a roll since guitarist John Frusciante returned to the group; They dropped Unlimited Love earlier this year and they recently announced yet another 2022 double album, Return Of The Dream Canteen. They offered the first look at the LP a few days ago with “Tippa My Tongue,” a characteristically funky tune that shows the near-40-year-old group still operating at a high level.

Jean Dawson — “Three Heads”

Dawson isn’t an artist who’s easily placed in a single box when it comes to genre, so new music from him could sound like just about anything. In the case of his latest single, “Three Heads,” Dawson sings and raps over a mostly guitar-driven, alternative rock-inspired instrumental.

Milli and Jackson Wang — “Mind Games”

88rising continues to establish itself as an important force in the modern music landscape, and a couple of the label’s artists continued that track record of excellence on a new collaboration, “Mind Games.” Uproxx’s Armon Sadler notes of the tune, “Labelmates Milli and Jackson Wang have no interest in the complications of love, singing their hearts out in full rejection of anything that doesn’t bring them pleasure in the track written by Gallant and produced by Monsters & Strangers.”

Demi Lovato — “Eat Me” Feat. Royal & The Serpent

Last week was relatively slow in terms of new albums, but the most recognizable figure to drop a new LP was Demi Lovato. She returned with Holy Fvck, a highlight of which is the Royal & The Serpent-featuring “Eat Me,” a heavy and guitar-driven tune that’s emblematic of the rock/alternative focus Lovato had while crafting her new material.

Hit-Boy — “Fire Proof”

Hit-Boy is best known for his many collaborations on which he’s played the role of producer, but last week, he put on his rapper hat for “Fire Proof.” Over the course of two minutes, he more than holds his own on the exemplary sort of beat with which he’s built his empire.

JID — “2007”

It’s been a minute since 2018’s DiCaprio 2, but now JID is finally returning with a new album, The Forever Story. That’ll be out in just a few days now, but he previewed the effort last week with “2007,” a 7-minute story-telling tune on which JID is joined by J. Cole, J. Cole, Dreamville president Ibrahim Hamad, and even his dad.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

If you’re in mourning today, the first Monday without Better Call Saul, maybe this will help: the New Yorker published a lengthy interview with creator Vince Gilligan. In it, he discusses alternate endings, growing up in the south, and Kim’s normie “yup” boyfriend.

The whole thing is worth a read, but one particular back and forth caught my eye. Gilligan was asked about whether he thinks Jimmy McGill had a “triumphant” ending on Better Call Saul, which is how he once described the end of Walter White’s journey on Breaking Bad. “I’d like to believe that, unlike Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul has a somewhat happy ending. I think Jimmy rediscovers himself and gets back to his roots,” he said, adding, “There’s a bit of Dickens’s Christmas Carol in it — there’s redemption, of a sort. I don’t think you see that with Walter White.” You sure don’t.

As Gilligan has moved further away from Breaking Bad, he has “less sympathy” for Walter, and more empathy for Skyler, especially after all the “extreme sexism” from toxic fans that actress Anna Gunn had to deal with. “Back when the show first aired, Skyler was roundly disliked. I think that always troubled Anna Gunn. And I can tell you it always troubled me, because Skyler, the character, did nothing to deserve that. And Anna certainly did nothing to deserve that,” he said. Gilligan continued:

She played the part beautifully. I realize in hindsight that the show was rigged, in the sense that the storytelling was solely through Walt’s eyes, even in scenes he wasn’t present for. Even Gus, his archenemy, didn’t suffer the animosity Skyler received. It’s a weird thing. I’m still thinking about it all these years later.

Gunn has said that all the hate for Skyler “shook me. As an actor, my job is not to always play characters who make everybody happy. That’s not interesting. In fact, characters that are more difficult in a way are more interesting. But when you are on a show that has become that big and people are identifying you so much with somebody that they dislike, you can’t help but feel like you get folded into it.” At least her performance wasn’t ignored by the Emmys: she won Outstanding Supporting Actress twice… which is half as many times as Bryan Cranston won Outstanding Lead Actor. Still more than Kim Wexler!

(Via the New Yorker)

Despite weeks of chaos at HBO Max and its parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, a new sizzle reel shows sure makes it seem like the HBO brand is as strong as ever. After naturally leading with House of the Dragon, a prequel to the network’s juggernaut Game of Thrones series, the promotional video confirmed the return of a whole slew of shows and surprisingly unveiled the first look at The Last of Us.

Based on the short clip, it’s clear that the adaptation of the hit Sony video game series is being primed as the next big HBO Original coming down the pipe. Starring Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie, The Last of Us will take the characters on a post-apocalyptic journey where they’ll have to not only contend with zombie “clickers” but questionable survivalists like Nick Offerman‘s Bill.

The Last of Us sneak peak should go over well with gaming fans, due to the attention of detail:

Here’s the synopsis via Entertainment Weekly:

The Last of Us takes place in a post-apocalyptic United States, 20 years after a fungal plague decimated humankind. Joel, a hardened survivor, is hired to smuggle a 14-year-old girl, Ellie, out of their militarized quarantine zone under suspicious circumstances. This seemingly simple task spirals into a dangerous odyssey across a crumbling America filled with cutthroat factions and zombified mutants.

On top of debuting the first look at The Last of Us, the sizzle reel also confirmed the return of Hacks. The Jean Smart series will apparently be surviving whatever the heck is happening behind the scenes at HBO Max. For now.

(Via Entertainment Weekly)

The House of the Dragon series premiere had sex, violence, and dragons. It’s good to have Game of Thrones back. But while the episode was entertaining, one scene was hard to watch. In “The Heirs of the Dragon,” we learn that King Viserys and Queen Aemma have been trying to have a male heir for years, but after multiple miscarriages and stillbirths, they remain without a son. The king is certain this time it will happen, however, so much so that he orders the maester to perform a C-section on his wife, who dies in the process. So, too does, the child, Baelon, the so-called “Heir for a Day.”

In an interview with Vanity Fair, House of the Dragon co-creator George R.R. Martin compared the scene to an iconic Game of Thrones moment. “That scene is… you don’t want to use the word ‘enjoyable’ for a scene like that, but it’s incredibly powerful,” he said. “It’s visceral and it’ll rip your heart out and throw it on the floor. It has the kind of impact that the Red Wedding had. It’s a beautifully done scene of something horrible.”

I don’t necessarily agree with Martin that Queen Aemma’s death in “The Heirs of the Dragon” has the same “impact” as the betrayal committed in “The Rains of Castamere,” arguably the best episode of Game of Thrones. But the two moments do share one thing: moms who deserved better.

For more on the House of the Dragon, check out our Contenders vs. Pretenders recap.

(Via Vanity Fair)