The Blog for the Sports Gamer

Sorry for the delay in getting this stuff posted. Anyway –

I’m wrapping up my MVP NCAA review (I’m leaning B/B+ right now) and wanted to share a few thoughts. First off, I really like this game. I was always on the fence with the MVP series. While most people loved it to death, there was always one or two things that irked me to the point that I could never get into it like I did High Heat. I can say right now that I’ll end up logging a lot of games with NCAA 06. That says a lot because with sports games I either play them to death or shelf them after the review. There is rarely a middleground. This is not getting shelved.

That said, there are things I hope get fixed next year (and there better be a next year, damn it).

• If you want to show the batters screwing with their batting gloves, knocking dirt off their cleats–let me skip that crap if I want to. It’s like not being able to skip a cut scene because they do this ALL THE TIME and if you have read the Gamer’s Tome …you know that’s a big Bill No No.
• Fix the AI issues. I have seen the CPU SAC bunt with back to back batters just to put a runner on 3rd with 2 outs. Not good. I have seen the CPU steal 2nd in the bottom of the 12th of a tie game with a man on 3rd. Really not good. I have seen a runner on 2nd advance to 3rd with 2 outs (good) but on a grounder to 3rd base, the 3rd baseman tries to tag out the runner rather than throw to 1st to end the inning. Totally weird. I don’t see these things every game but I see them enough to know that they need fixed.
• Fix the sound bugs. South Carolina and OSU is not a “tough conference match-up” and a 80 MPH slider is not a fastball. Oh, and if you are going to pay to have a color man…maybe he should have more than say, 3 lines of dialogue?

  Glitches aside, I haven’t had this much fun with a baseball game since High Heat 2002. I think HH2002 (PC, fully modded) is the better, smarter, game but MVP NCAA 06 is a steal at $30.

Anyway, on to Runebound. I got a lot of mixed feedback on this boardgame from several people but after reading a lot about it, and how it’s very similar to the GW game Talisman, I figured I’d give it a go. Plus I found it, and 3 of the card expansions, on sale at the mall.

Anyway, we had a lot of fun with it. If you do like Talisman, this is a definite buy. That said, it’s not a quick game — in fact you need to clear a 3-4 block of time to play a full game with 3-4 people. There’s some downtime between turns for each player, but I found the game interesting enough to watch other players take their turn without losing interest. I’m glad I bought it, but I doubt it sees a ton of playing time simply because we need to clear an entire afternoon or an entire evening to get a game in, and without a way to keep a game on the table overnight right now…hmm…maybe when we move. Still, Mary had fun with it (she won, in fact) and she’s by no means a hardline gamer.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2006 at 4:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.