The Blog for the Sports Gamer

Just how lame I think this looks. The DOOM movie trailer. It’s a movie! It’s a videogame! FPS baby!

This is just to let everyone know I’m still around. The week’s almost over and I don’t even remember it having started, let alone set aside time for blog posting. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to re-rent Madden tomorrow and post some more rambling almost-deep-enough-to-be-noteworthy- thoughts up next week.

Monday night we kicked off our inaugural office fantasy football league at work. It was a riot. We staked out a conference room and landed a video projector. So I whipped up a set of Excel spreadsheets listing each round’s draft order (it was like a snake draft, but every other round the basic draft order was reshuffled), player’s taken and the current team on the clock. I then linked those to a PowerPoint presentation and just like that my laptop was churning out scrolling draft update slides on a huge projected screen while I made updates on my laptop’s LCD. We’ve got wireless at work so half the guys had their laptops there and were looking up updated injury information, training camp stuff, etc. with each pick.

With ten teams we managed to get through all 14 rounds in just two and a half hours. That had to be some kind of record. On the whole I was fairly happy with my lineup. I started out with the third overall pick. Tomlinson and Manning were already gone after the first two so I went with Shaun Alexander. Along the way I manged to pick up Clinton Portis, Marc Bulger, Andre Johnson, Nate Burleson and Jason Witten for my starting lineup, with Carnell Williams, Michael Clayton and Larry Fitzgerald for backups.

Certainly I’ll have the deepest team in the league as a lot of guys picked at least a couple headscratchers. Brandon Stokely in the third round? Mewelde Moore the first pick in the seventh (with Fred Taylor, Chris Brown, Carnell Williams and other still available)? One team is going to be leaning on Jake Plummer as their primary QB (interceptions count in this league). Scary. Some nutty stuff, in my opinion. Regardless, a good time was had by all and it should be a fun league since half of us end up in the same meetings at work.

I’m watching the O’s courtesy of MLB Extra Innings which seemed like a great purchase when teh O’s were in first…anyway, they just mentioned that today is Cal Ripken’s 45th birthday. I remember when he was a rookie. I’m now old.

$1,199.83 for a fukcing video game?

(yes, I misspelled that on purpose)

Sony’s PSP 2.0 software is finally available. Just downloaded!

Don’t forget that our Yahoo Fantasy Football Draft is on Monday August 29th at 2:15 PM. If you can’t make it, you can tell yahoo who you want and go from there. May I recommend all the 200th + ranked players?

If there’s anything I hate more than inane comments, it’s the spat of spam comments that show up in the blog. You know what I’m talking about –

Bill Says: I am playing Madden PC
And then there are 23 comments like this:
Yes, I agree, I have a mountain bike too. Great blog. Click here to download luscious jugs of my girlfriend.

Not only is the link bad (the jugs certainly aren’t luscious), what’s even worse is that the poster really doesn’t know anything about our sports gamer blog goodness.

Bill then spends time deleting this crap. Luckily Google has added word verification, so that should hopefully stop many of the bots here. I guess we’ll see.

This Friday I am going to write a check with several zeroes. After years of saving money, slowly and steadily, it’s time. We close on our land Friday around 1PM, which officially means we’re going to build the house out in the country-fied outskirts of greater Columbus. 2.46 acres of land, a treeline, on a lot next to a small horse farm. This is either going to be the best thing we ever did, or it will be more work than we possibly could imagine. Maybe both.

I actually spent my Monday night at the model house picking out carpet, counter-tile, and siding colors. I am officially uncool.

Another new Blitz vid at IGN. Heh worth checking out.

Here’s a list of the music tracks in Madden PC. If you don’t want to hear anything but the NFL films stuff just move or delete these from the audio DIR.

A few more notes about the PC version before I start my bookwork for the day.

It’s definitely slower than the Xbox version, which was slower than NCAA 06. Personally, I don’t mind the slower pace, although I know for some it’s going to be a tad annoying.

The gameplay is very similar, although not exactly the same as on the Xbox. The CPU QBs are infinitely better on the default settings on the PC version. In fact I haven’t felt the need to touch the slider settings on All Pro and on the Xbox my slider settings are drastically altered. The PC game seems a tad more sim-like. It’s MUCH more difficult to rush the QB and to break blocks on the PC version as well. While I usually get 2-5 sacks a game on the Xbox, my sack total on the PC is much, much lower.

There is a bug in the PC version that doesn’t start the next week of the Tony Bruno show unless you save your franchise and reload it. Nice.

You can’t enable/disable specific music tracks on the PC version. There is an audio folder in the Madden DIR that has the files but they aren’t named…so it’s guesswork as to which is which.

I had to update my Catalyst ATI drivers in order to avoid choppy gameplay. If you’re having performance issues make sure to do this. The latest 8/17 drivers fixed the problem.

I can’t help the fact that I just love having a damn mouse to scroll around the menu screens.

It looks a lot beter than the Xbox.

There is a pass lead slider that I do not think is in the Xbox version so if you think it’s too easy to use the precision passing it makes it tougher (or easier) to lead receivers.

Right now the biggest gameplay difference that I notice is the CPU QBs. I see a lot fewer deep balls in the PC edition, which I think is good. And like I said, I haven’t seen a CPU QB with a completion% under 45 after about 5 games on the default AP settings and I NEVER saw that on the Xbox. Hell I even have the CPU accuracy at 20 on the consoles.

Speaking ofd that, I just want to reiterate that the slider settings are on a 1-100 scale on the PC version. Why is it not the same on both console and PC? I have no idea.

I have not played online yet, BTW.

Quick anecdote re: Madden. I play basketball about 4 days a week now. I also play with mostly the same group of guys and we tend to talk about a lot of stuff in between games and Madden is the latest headliner. Of the 10 guys who love Madden (as in talked my ear off about the cone prior to release, trying to glean info. Note: Never tell people that you write about games for a living unless you are willing to talk endlessly about them.)

Of those 10 guys — ONE plays franchise mode, NONE ever touch a gameplay slider (5 had no idea what I was talking about and sounded amazed when I described it to them), and all 10 play it primarily for the online game. I found that fascinating. Not surprising, just very interesting.

6 had never heard of the NFL2K series.

Interesting preview at GameSpy.

I’m selling my Apple 1GB iPod shuffle. Works fine, just use my 40GB regular iPod more. It’s used, but only for maybe 3 months, if that. You’ll get headphones, manuals, yadda yadda. Asking $110, shipping included and I’ll throw in a set of 5 lovely color lanyards. Paypal accepted. Email me off list if interested.

The folks at Grey Dog have announced another text sim that is in the works, this time focusing on college hoops. I really liked their pro game so hopefully this will be as good. Check out that link for a feature list. Also, you can check out the Grey Dog home page for info on how to join the Bowl Bound developer chat held on August 25th.

Played a game tonight of Madden 06 PC. Since it’s pretty much the same game as the Xbox I’ll keep the notes brief.

-Sliders are still 100 point based so you can make tackling, say, 27 rather than “4 clicks left”. I love that.

-The graphics are astoundingly better on the PC. No jersey flicker, no muddy look. It looks pretty damn clean. Of course I have an advanced Radeon video card which helps but hey…you pay for a good video card you get some bang.

-Learning a new control scheme is a pain. My gamepad has dust on it; it’s been a while.

-Played a game on default All Pro and the CPU (Peyton Manning) ate me ALIVE. This has never happened on default Xbox settings. In fact it’s been the big sticking point with the console version. Manning tonight went 16/24 for 225. He went deep (as in 40+ yards) one time. The rest were 8-12 crossing routes and curls. I was shocked. A fluke, maybe?