Glebe220 wrote:
You guys make lots of good points. We're getting to the point that they're running out of new countries and I 'd like to see them explore countries more in depth more often.
The alternating urban and rural used to be very common on TAR and added to the feel of variety. TAR1's two India legs with urban Delhi followed by desert Rajasthan is another one as well as their two Tunisia legs with one partly in crowded Tunis and the next in the Sahara.
And now they tend to stick the urban/rural contrast in the same leg, which ends up just glossing over both. Just since season 9 it's happened in Greece, Tokyo (sort of- they go to this amazing city just to spend half the leg driving to and visiting an amusement park outside the city), Hanoi, Helsinki, Kiev, Quito, Santiago, Amsterdam, and Taipei to some extent. The whole leg design of "go see some cool site in a neat city then immediately leave to go to some usually generic countryside" bothers me. Sometimes the rural/urban split works more organically where the leg doesn't feel so divided and that works a lot better (Vilnius, Krakow, Warsaw, Bangkok in S9, Munich).
I love love love a good airport scramble (and dare I say there's nothing that makes me love an episode more than a good airport scramble) but moderation is key. I don't really feel like I've experienced the locations in recent seasons like in the earliest seasons.
Which Munich leg? The one in TAR3 where they went in and out of Germany was very good, but the one in TAR9 was blah (multiple sources of product placement,
a craptastic RB and a Detour that consisted of either waiting for a cuckoo clock to make the task take longer or rely on the generosity of the judges).
In addition, I'm almost always disappointed with the "modern" legs in Asia. The tasks either feel really generic, don't capture the
essence of the city, or take a superficial look at the city. Compare Hong Kong in TAR2 to Hong Kong in TARAS - it's clear which leg was superior (see also:
Osaka, KL, Tokyo, and Shanghai).
