Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled Game Trial on Nintendo Switch... if you can drive past the legal docs

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - ...I personally couldn't.

Starting today, Nintendo Switch Online subscribers can play a Game Trial, or full version of a game, of Activision's Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled. For a limited time only. (Until January 6 2021, 2:59 AM Eastern.)

You may have thought yesterday's KoopaTV article about the legal environment stopping kart racing was just filler content, but it topically is a shortcut to get in the mood for today's article. You see, in order to be able to start playing Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, you need to drive through a 42-page legal document:

Meet the 42-page Activision Software License and Service Agreement.

You can't just press the A button and start playing. You have to scroll through every one of those 42 pages. You can't just hold down the R button or the rightward direction on your stick either and auto-scroll. It's operated semi-automatically. This is all to a really annoying and short music loop, by the way.

Alright, sure, we can do that and eventually accept the Activision Software License and Service Agreement. Okay, let's start Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled, a game that I've heard so much about...

It turns out that once you defeat the arduous ACTIVISION SOFTWARE LICENSE AND SERVICE AGREEMENT, you must then go through the 42-page ACTIVISION PRIVACY POLICY!

I'm convinced Activision purposefully tried to make both of these documents the same length in pages, because the pages end up looking like this:

Why is this so small? Why couldn't it be spread across multiple pages?

You pretty much have to dedicate one of those days the Game Trial lasts just to get through the legal documentation. Since I actually read through it, I disagreed with it. I didn't like the actual terms of it and the things that Activision is willing to do with my personal data, especially the folks they're sharing it to. (I'm disturbed they're collecting that stuff to begin with.)

And so my experience with Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled...crashed.

By the way, if you get to page 42/42, and press the button that skips you all the way back to the first page, you don't get a button that can skip you forward and return you to the 42nd page. The Accept button also only appears at the 42nd page. That means pressing the FIRST PAGE button forces you to press the next page button over 40 times to be able to accept it. Should you choose to.

This is worse than the forced EULA at the start of Dragon Ball FighterZ, as well as the scary-to-kids EULA updates in Fortnite. At least the Fortnite one lets you accept it at any time through your scrolling, even if that one is physically difficult to read through.

Scrolling is better than pages, especially if there aren't easy ways to jump to/from specific pages. What's the point of pages if you can't do that and can only go one at a time?


Let Ludwig know in the comments section if you think he's a jackass and is missing out on a great game. There are many other things—including PLAYING other games—that he'd rather be doing than suffer through incredibly long legal documents. ...Fortunately, if you got this far in the article, at least that proves you enjoy (or can tolerate) reading relatively short editorials about long legal documents, so more power to you. For all Ludwig knows, there's another 42-page document after the Privacy Policy, but he pressed the HOME button and deleted the Game Trial off his Switch after the last screenshot, so he won't know from personal experience what comes after.