The Blog for the Sports Gamer

Hey, how about that Saturn commercial that looks like Pac-Man and that new song “Game Over (Flip)” with videogame samples? Way cool stuff.

Speaking of cool, how about that Buddy Rice winning the Indy 500? Did you see the Codemasters game being demoed? Sure looks interesting. I wonder if it will have a lot of the F1 style mechanics as TOCA 2 does…..

Finally, while you’re all enjoying the Memorial Day weekend, let me tell you my weather forecast for tonight: Mostly clear. Scattered frost after midnight. Lows in the mid to upper 30s. Northwest winds around 10 mph this evening… Becoming light and variable..

I don’t think I’ll be opening up the pool this weekend. It’s almost @#$@#$ing June and there’s @#$#$@ing frost. I’m cursing like I’m going to (*)(*ing Deadwood because I’m so @#$@#$ing mad.

Okay, I’m going to finish watching State of Play (fantastic mini series on BBC America), perhaps play some Xbox Live (can’t decide what yet) and get some sleep. Have a good night, everybody.

Ok so I guess I blatantly lied about backing off the blog for a bit. I actually have a few things to talk about, so I figured I’d share. Problem is, none of it is sports game related. Right now, my sports game time is very limited (actually it is completely limited to my OOTP6 and Front Office Football leagues). After the baseball rush, it’s time for me to get back to work doing other genres until the football games come out. Oh, I do have an opening in my FoF league if anyone is interested. If so, let me know.

I’m currently reviewing Warlords Battlecry 3, a real time strategy game from Enlight and Infinite Interactive. Pretty cool game. I love real time games that allow you to pause and issue orders, otherwise it just becomes too frantic for me. The problem with WBC3 is that the multiplayer code is broken–literally it doesn’t work. But if you want a good solo fantasy RTS, give this a look.

But the real reason I’m blogging today is that we’re in the process of buying some land and having a house built. Actually, the house building isn’t close to starting, but we’re considering buying some land (1 1/2 acres for about $42,000). It’s north of Columbus, actually I’d consider this in the country–we’d be about 15 miles from the north end of Columbus. Check out the street name: N 3 B & K ROAD. Yeah, I don’t get it either.

Anyway, if anyone out there has had a house built and has any advice, feel free to email me or leave a comment.

Here’s something weird that I saw at my old haunt, Operation Sports. There’s a new 86MB Grand Prix Legends demo. Yeah, I said new. Yes, this game is from 1998. I have no idea how they figured it out and who did what. Vivendi doesn’t even list this game on their website (although it is in an old Sierra knowledgebase). Anyhoo, if you want to see what people can do when they really love a game and have six years to make it better, grab it here from the folks at BlackHole Motorsports.

Well since my last post I’ve recieved 3 emails asking to continue my political rants. Now I’m not so sure what to do. Please leave comments below this thread. Should it stay or should it go?

Gamefly brought over Rugby 2004. This game is going back in the mail ASAP. This could have been fun. That AFL game for the PC years ago was a blast but this is bloody frustrating. I don’t have a lot of patience for games I can’t seem to ‘get’ and this is one of them — I mean I understand Rugby — I just don’t understand these @#$#@$ing controls. Oh well. Back to Links .

I’m just playing a round of the new Gallery course. There’s a very, very long par 5. It’s great to play a course that is really a new course — the Kapalua course was fun, but I had played it before on numerous other golf games as I recall. This one is a real new challenge and I’m enjoying it.

Have you checked out the new MSN Messenger with the Xbox Live tab? That is pretty darn cool. The MSN Xbox Live alerts are bordering on annoying — I set them all up at first to see how they would be — however now I have 23 messages telling me that someone was playing PGR 2 at 5:30AM my time. A little too much information, if you ask me. So I think I’ll turn off the alerts and just let the tab tell me what’s going on when I want.

Finally a quick note about the comments, a few days ago, I had posted one of my political tirades — as I’m often wont to do and Shamrock posted a comment and emailed me back about it. As much as I totally disagree with Shamrock’s positions, the poster is correct — this is about sports gaming and I’ll save the rants for another blog. That being said, if there is news outside of sports gaming, I believe I can comment on it — whether it be American Idol, Alias, or anything else. Hope that shed’s some light on it. Now back to the games.

Those of you addicted to Links like I am will waste no time in ponying up $4.99 for The Gallery course. It’s rated “Arizona’s Best New Private Course” and the first stop on the PGA tour. It’s a 3805 block download and I’m soaking in it right now. GO check it out!

Hey, folks, those of you using MSN Messenger can now view Xbox friends and what they are doing by clicking the Xbox tab. Pretty cool. Just FYI.

Sorry for the lack of posts this week. I’m just not in the mood to ramble on about gaming right now. My ankle injury has completely sapped the energy out of me and I’m at a pretty high “bummed out” level at the moment. The doc told me this week that it may never heal properly and that my hoop days may be over. For a guy who just got back into shape by playing basketball 3-4 times a week since January, it’s pretty devasting news. I’m not a treadmill/bike machine/running kind of guy. For me, exercise just for the sake of exercise is as boring as James Joyce. I just can’t do it. I need the competition factor.

There’s still a chance that my ankle will heal fine and that I’ll be back on the court this fall. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe this guy was just covering his ass by telling me that I could always struggle with this injury? I dunno. I guess it would be riskier for him to say, “You’ll be back playing in 3 months.” I can understand that. Still, this news was like a punch in the gut. Here it is going on 5 weeks since I goobered up my ankle and I’m still in a walking boot. I can put pressure on it, walk up the steps, etc. But ANY kind of sideways movement is like a a needle being shoved in my foot. But it is progressing.

So, anyway, I’m taking a blog break for a bit, most likely until NCAA 2005 comes out, which will give us all a WHOLE lot to talk about.

-bill

Well, here comes Memorial Day weekend — time for some auto racing, and if you have an Xbox, you are awash in amazing racing titles — RalliSport Challenge 2, Colin McRae Rally 4, TOCA Racing 2, Project Gotham 2…what more could you want. Okay, maybe those aren’t indy car (excett TOCA0, but still.

What other Indy style racers are there….not many, unfortunately. Unless you count a Midway PS2 launch title, CART Fury Racing, which was kinda fun. Also if you still have a Dreamcast, Flag to Flag has some great moments…of course if you only have a GameCube, I’m sorry.

The funny thing is that one of the most popular PC racing games is almost 10 years old or more — every play Papyrus’ IndyCar Racing or Grand Prix Legends…these games (considered prehistoric era now) are still modded and updated to this day by dedicated unpaid modders — I urge you to find copies of these games and try em out. Very cool stuff!

PS How about that Terror threat. This terror threat is so bad, the threat level isn’t being upgraded. Hmm, interesting. Can you say “I’m losing so bad in the polls that maybe I’ll scare people some more into voting for me?” Yeah, I thought so. This one should just be filed under bizarre. Of course, they are covered if something happens becuase they warned us. They just aren’t doing anything about it (ie raising terror level). Whatever George.

Hello all, sorry for the lack of updates, it’s just that I’m spending my day loading every Xbox live game I have and then downloading a patch for it. I’m now officially annoyed. And what’s the deal with the whole ‘reboot’ everytime you use ‘content download manager’? What is this, a PC?

My Xbox is getting all the usage. Well that and my PC. The PS2 is really starting to collect dust. I don’t think I’ve turned on my GameCube in a looong time. I’ve been playing Battlefield Vietnam and that British Sims like game with nudity. Heh heh. You can make the Sims do it. Huh Huh Huh. Settle down, Beavis.

I’m still waiting for my eVGA 6800 card. I bought that 5700 back in March and I have 3 months to trade it in and get 100% of the price for a 6800. My 90 days run out in June and the #$#$ing 6800 isn’t out yet. Remember when NDA’s would expire and then the card would be available? Those were the days.

Anyone have a cheap notebook for my real job? I could use a real cheap (sub $500) one. Please let me know on email. Thanks!

Well GameSpy posted Part 1 of my baseball round up today. I turned this is on April 25th and it appears today, May 22nd. I love the editors at GameSpy (really, good guys to work with) and I blame E3 for the long delay, but it makes me look like a doofus when I say this about ESPN PS2: “As of this writing, the PS2 version of ESPN Baseball is still on hold, due to be released on May 4th, so we’re focusing solely on the Xbox version of the game.”

Why this wasn’t edited…I have no idea. Needless to say the article is a tad bit late as most people already made their choice as to which game they want to play. Still, it’s here for the readin’.

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I received a surprise phone call from a friend of mine that works at EA Sports yesterday. He’s definately “on the inside.” See, this is as close to an “insider source” as game “journalists” get. It’s my version of Deep Throat. Only not as important. Let’s call him…Kiddy Pool Sized Shallow Throat.

Anyway, he told me that, “NCAA 2005 showed like shit at E3. There was slowdown, and it wasn’t optimized. It’ll be better come ship time.”. He also said that a lot of people were going to be pissed off about the Home Field rankings but that there was no way to avoid that. Heh, now that I understand. Everyone wants to think their home field advantage is the best.

Let’s hope the Xbox slowdown is fixed. I heard a lot of buzz about this from those who saw the game on the show floor. So there you have it. How’s that for a scoop! (insert sarcasm here). I tried really hard to nudge some dirt out of him re: the NFLPA license buyout thing but he told me to kiss his ass. Understandable. Of course that can be taken several ways– kiss my ass as in it’s true and I can’t say it, or kiss my ass this rumor was already put to bed. Or…kiss my ass I’m not that high up on the food chain and I have no idea if it’s true. Or maybe it was kiss my ass I’m tired of talking to you. That’s prolly it.

Well, I shelled out the $5.00 (reviewers don’t get teh downloadable content for free either, feel my pain) for the new PGR 2 downloads, and I can say if you play the game, you’ll get a lot of mileage (get it) out of it. The Paris track is pretty well done. Not that difficult but it has a few of those ‘quick go left or right’ things that are always adding to the fun of a race. I didn’t try out any of the cars, and there are a bunch of new ones. I do think like the Kapalua course, it’s well worth picking up if you’re a fan of the game.

In addition, there’s some new Rainbow Six content, a Splinter Cell patch (yup, you read that right) and some new (well old for most people but Bill is new to the game) Crimson Skies downloadable content — of course you have to be an XBox Live subscriber, but if you have an Xbox, why wouldn’t you be an XBL subscriber. This has to be the most successful online service, since, uh….hsa there been a successful online service? Sega Channel was ahead of it’s time, but was that really online? SegaNet was definitely not successful…..

Reviewing games is a pretty cool job. I get free stuff, make a little money, work in my sweatpants and hang out with my little girl. Pretty cool. The drawback is that when you review a lot of games you undoubtedly review a lot of shitty ones to go along with the good ones. Also, I don’t review console games (long story). This means that I tend to miss out on a lot of the great games that I don’t get to review. Sports games? I play them all. But the other genres I tend to miss out on unless I am assigned to review the game. There’s only so much time in the day, ya know?

I was ultimately pissed when I ripped my ankle apart three weeks ago. I can now hobble around the house without the walking boot and can walk up the stairs (slowly). Running? Out of the question. But my foot looks like a foot instead of a bloated fish. I see that as progress. Physical therapy kinda sucks but hey…it’s working.

But there has been a weird kind of silver lining in all of this. Being locked onto the couch for the first two weeks allowed me to play some quality games that I missed earlier this year and late 2003. I tend to do this from time to time. Usually once a year I’ll take a month to play catch up and try to play all the games that you guys said were great but I just never had the time to play. So I’ve been gorging myself on some amazing games of late:

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time

Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (PC)

Tron 2.0 (PC)

These are all Grade A titles. As much as I love Bioware, RPGs, and Star Wars I feel like a doofus that I’m just now playing KotOR. But hey, like I said, tough to find free time for a mammoth game like that during the year.

At this rate I’ll get to stuff like FarCry and Battlefield Vietnam around Christmas time…

***

Oh, the word now is that the EA Sports to Rule the World rumor was just that–rumor. I still wouldn’t put it past EA to do this, though.

***

I’m still stunned that Roy Jones got his ass handed to him on Saturday. I’ll talk more about that after I see the fight when HBO runs it.

Psst..have $5? If so, you can grab a ton of new stuff for Project Gotham Racing 2, including new tracks (Paris — bonjour!) and new cars. Sounds like it’s well worth the asking price, especially if you’re a huge fan of the game. I haven’t personally tried it yet but I will come back with my thoughts when I do!

First, I wanted to point out this post on the eVGA message boards that the GeForce 6800′s are hopefully coming out next week. Very cool, even if it’s $500.

In other news, Links is still taking over my life. Although last night I had to mow the lawn before the massive T-storm showed up. And once the T-storm showed up, I watched 24 and then shut everything down for fear of lightning. Someone actually got hit on Sunday, so I’m a little more paranoid than usual. LOL.

Over on the TV thing, I voted for Jasmine on American Idol. I just want someone who sucks really bad to win, and make reality TV get what it deserves. In other TV news, today we found out that both 24 and Alias won’t be on until January but on the good side they will run uninterrupted and repeat-free, which is excellent news considering we got one episode and then in the credits “In SIX WEEKS, 24 returns with an all new episode”..ugh! That’s damn frustrating. Maybe network execs are finally figuring out why people stop watching shows — when they go off air for a month, it’s pretty stupid.

Alright, I have to go refi my house (got the lock in before rates soared), so I will talk to you later. Maybe I’ll check out Shrek 2 or something.