The Blog for the Sports Gamer

If you want accurate MVP NCAA 06 rosters and would like to avoid the weird random names, like my starting pitcher, Julio Snelling, grab them at OS.

Big thanks to “Cubsfan203″ for doing a lot of these on his own.

Sorry for vanishing like that yesterday. I was going to post my follow up stuff after playing basketball, but I landed on someone’s foot last night and tweaked my deteriorating ankle. It’s nowhere near as bad as it was back when I was locked on the couch for 3 months (3 for each ankle, actually), but its hurting enough to piss me off. I did hit the 3-pointer, but came down on a guy’s foot, and boom…turn-city. Even with my hard plastic ankle brace, it turned. W/o that brace I’d be in serious trouble, but if you can turn your ankle in one of this braces..you have very slippery (bad) ankle ligaments. I’m guessing I’ll be on the shelf for 1-2 weeks. No IR this time, at least I hope.

Theo Epstein, I just lost any respect I had for you.

Seriously, what sort of idiot quits a job because they are so frustrated only to come back to it 2 months later?

I know it’s hard to live with a decision you make like that..but once you’ve made it you have to move on. I can speak from experience on this. Seven years ago, I left a comfortable job to become a CEO. I was frustrated with the internal workings of the place and I knew there was no way I’d ever be a CEO if I stayed there. It was sapping my energy and I never, EVER felt as though I was treated with any sort of respect. It was always ‘the high school kid’ who had been there for 10+ years. You don’t want to move on, but you don’t have any choice.

So I left. I commuted 2 hours a day of drive time, but I often thought of what might have been. In fact 2 months after I left, I was called by my old employer, asking if I would take the CFO job. It was pretty difficult not to at least go back and see what it was about. I went back, but at the end of the day, I knew I had already made my decision and there wasn’t much other choices to go back — despite a $20,000 increase. You don’t always change for the money, you know. The same reasons that you left still exist.

Since taking that CEO job, I’m now at another job as CEO — but in direct competition with the place I left. Ironic, don’t you think…like rain on your wedding day. I use that analogy way too much.

So I digress — the bottom line is once you leave, you are done. Now by going back it sure does look like you’re whipped. I don’t get it. Well, leaving $1.1 million or whatever compared to my non-profit salary probably has something to do with it but still — the way the whole thing was played out makes the Orioles look good.

Alright, I digress. Personally I’m beat - stressed out over the new location and having worked 12 straight days of 9 hours plus. It caught up to me today. I think it’s now affecting family life. I am resolved to fix everything, work, home and everything else. I’m also resolved to make sure our business is the best one :).

I can’t believe this! I mean seriously, that was the whole point of E3!! Oh , what’s that? It was about the games? Oops. My bad.

I just got an email from a reader who forwarded me this link to a BBC story about problems with the 360 version of Kong. Seems that there is a brightness issue (in that there isn’t any) with the game on certain TVs or under certain settings. The wording of the statements sound like it’s more an issue with playing the game on a standard TV instead of HD, but I think the problem is beyond that. Any game that requires me to put my HDTV into torch mode to see what the heck I’m doing is too bloody dark.

Thanks for the heads up, Jeremy!

So far I’ve had a few hours with NBA2k6 and King Kong for the 360. Let’s dispense with Kong. I’ll get into NBA in my next post.

It’s a pretty game. At times it’s a breathtaking game on our HDTV. It makes me wish my 360 was hooked up to our projector for the mega big screen affect. But a re-invention of the genre it clearly is not. Maybe that’s setting the bar a bit high, but so much was made of Peter Jackson’s involvement with the making of the game to ensure that it was every bit the experience that watching the movie is supposed to be that you can’t help but think it’s something of a letdown. (For the record, I’ve not seen the King Kong movie, old or new.)

For one, the game is dark. Really dark. Watch the latter half of the movie Pitch Black and you’ll get an idea of the kind of dark I’m talking about. After the first few caves I had to set my HDTV to Vivid (also called “torch”) mode to brighten the screen and make it possible to figure out where I was going. But even torched out there are places where the game is just too damned dark and that’s gotten me killed more than once. You can see enough to play and appreciate the beauty of the graphics, but I found it a significant eye strain that’s not an issue in NBA or the free stuff on the Live Marketplace.

I’m also just not a fan of the controls. It’s not uncommon to find yourself attacked from the sides or from behind and in those instances it just feels monumentally slow trying to turn around to engage your attacker. Worse, the camera is a discombobulated mess when you’re controlling Kong. One minute it’s behind Kong, then it’s to the side, then it’s straight in front of the big guy and so far I feel like I’m fighting the controller just as much as any dino-monster and that’s not good. (It is, for the record, too fracking cool for words to hulk Kong out with that chest-thumping manuever, though.)

Then there’s the save system, which gives you the initial impression you can save anywhere you want. In fact you can. Just pause the game and select Save from the menu. Just don’t expect to be restored to that point if you die. Like too many other games, it uses specific save points that determine where you’ll appear after your character has endured a few bites too many from the native inhabitants of Kong’s island. God help you if you get stuck on a challenge 2/3 of the way between save points since you’ll have to repeat that 2/3 over and over again. Now to be fair the save points are fairly frequent so it could be much worse, but I’m a PC guy who’s a proponent of the save now, save anywhere school so it just bugs the hell out of me.

Right now I’ve only played through Kong’s initial rescue of Ann from a horde of marauding dinosaurs and bizarre winged creatures and I’m just not feeling it. Kong’s not a bad game. It’s really, really pretty. And there’s a lot of inventive design to the gameplay. There’s one moment where you’ve gone racing up the stairs of some ruins where you’re a few feet away from a trapped NPC (he’s across a small chasm). When you get there another Raptor comes rushing up the steps behind him and he tosses you a gun just as the Raptor starts charging towards you, leaping across the gap. It’s a very Hollywood action moment that’s perfectly executed as you start shooting the beastie while he’s leaping right at you, jaws flashing a maw full of nasty, pointy teeth.

There’s several classic moments like that, and if you love console shooters (I miss my mouse and keyboard too much), you’ll probably take to Kong better than I have, but right now I doubt I’ll see this one through to the end.

I have some stuff to do this morning that involves driving to Washington Courthouse (That’s a city, not a courthouse) so I’ll be talking about these things later today, but when I get back I do want to talk about Dynasty Mode in MVP NCAA (which shows a ton of promise), weird AI logic in MVP NCAA (which shows a ton of weirdness), and a hitting breakthough in MVP NCAA (which will show you just how bad I am at this game…or how hard the game is…you can decide) and another board game report on the game Rune Bound. All that and more when we return to “Bill Drives Back from Washington Courthouse!”

God I need some coffee…

Today at work I received a call from a Rep from Texas. Someone I hadn’t heard of before but he said that on behalf of the National Republican Congressional Committee, I have been nominated and have won their National Leadership Award!

Of course, a few minutes of laughs later, and I googled it. Apparently this is a fundraiser for the Republicans and if you put money in to defray the cost of the ad, you get your name listed as supporting Republican values.

Needless to say I didn’t give any money. But I guess I can put that on my resume. That should get me, uhh, nowhere. As soon as the award shows up, but I’m not holding my breath…

Yesterday Gametop had College Hoops listed as being released this week. Today it’s listed as a 2/21 release. Bummer. MS and 360 game developers had best come up with a plan and soon if they don’t want a PSP-like lull in quality post-launch follow-up titles.

The lack of power in MVP NCAA 06 now makes a whole lot more sense.

Steve Bauman and I talk baseball a lot. I mentioned to him the neatness of MVP NCAA, but also the fact that there seems to be a lack of power in the game. Being the baseball stat geek heads that we are, we started to look up some college baseball stats. I freely admit to not being a college baseball junkie so I thought, as did Steve, that we’d see a lot of offense, little pitching, and a lot of homers due to the aluminum bats. Wow were we wrong. Well, sorta.

In looking at the Big 10, USC, Fresno State, and Arkansas State (to give us a fairly wide sample) a few things seem to ring true throughout:

• Homers are rare, particularly when compared to MLB. Most teams average less than a homer per game. Most teams will have one guy that is their slugger. It was rare to see a team with 2 legit HR threats. Ohio State hit 43 homers in 63 games. Muderers Row they are not.
• Doubles are also low. Again, teams are hitting 1-2 per game, tops.
• If you don’t hit .300 in college, you suck.
• There are a LOT of singles hit in college baseball. Lots.
• Walks are high. The teams we looked at averaged about 5 per game
• There are a lot of runs being scored as most teams average at least 6 per game. OSU beat Penn State last year 29-2. You do see some low scoring pitcher’s duels, but for the most part games have a combined 10-12 runs per game.
• The reason for this, it appears, is that the bullpens are devastatingly bad. Most teams, even good ones, have 1 or 2 solid starters (who also serve as relief pitchers when needed) but the rest of the staff is filled with 5+ ERA guys. That was a common theme with most teams.
• Most teams, in the Big10 at least, have a team BA of .300 or higher. If your team hits under .300 as a team, your team cannot hit. Purdue was worst in the Big10 with a .290 BA. Colorado eat your heart out…
• In the Big10, team ERAs hover around 5. OSU lead the league with a 3.98, but 5 teams came in over 5 with Michigan State having the worst at 5.68. Interesting stuff, the Big10 Stats.

So, based off this statistical sample, there is a lot of small ball being played in college baseball. Lots of singles, (a lot of hit batters as well) horrid pitching depth, and a lot of runs.

There are power hitters in college ball, don’t get me wrong. There’ sa 1B for Arkansas State with Bonds-like numbers — but those guys are very rare. Most hitters will hit less than 8 homers in a 60 game season and its very common for a guy that hits over .300 to hjave a SLG% of less than .500

Anyway, I just thought this was interesting, and I think if you want to tweak any settings to reflect the college game that stuff like this should be kept in mind.

For once having a child puke all over me was worth it. No, really. On Thursday Ana got a touch of something that her little belly didn’t agree with. My shirt didn’t think much of it either. But she was acting fine and slept through the night without incident so off to daycare she sent the next day. No sooner do I get to work, though, than I get the call that she’s got problems with… put delicately, the other end. So back I go to pick her up and take her home. Of course on a whim I checked the Best Buy inventory locator before leaving work and wouldn’t you know it, the Best Buy near daycare had some 360s in stock. Finally my stockpiling of BB gift cards, narco-study money and Christmas cash became worth it. I don’t know if I got the last premium system they had on hand, but I’m sure they’d of been gone had I waited until the end of the day. It even made up for the fact that when I picked up a crying Anastasia from her crib at 10:00 that night she puked on me again.

For those keeping score at home, my daughter has now vomited on me on three separate occasions in the past year (not counting baby spit ups which are nothing compared to good old-fashioned spew). My wife: not once. Yeah, that’s fair.

On to the 360 (pt.1 of this post is focused on the hardware)…

Gotta say, it’s the little things that I like about this console. The fact that the wireless controller can be used to power it on and turn it off without having to physically walk over and do it manually. I hated that about the Xbox. I also love that I was able to easily get remote control codes for it for my Harmony remote control. It’s incredibly easy to hook it into your home LAN and play music off your PC or view pictures. It’s fantastic that you can so easily jump from a game to the Xbox dashboard. The excellence of the Live integration people have been raving about isn’t just a bunch of hype. It’s done very, very well.

In fact my only beef with the much bally-hooed Live Marketplace is the inan credit purchasing system. The notion that I should have to buy points in order to purchase little things like additional skins or gamercard avatars is silly. I get it for some of the arcade games, but for skins? EA, for example, has put up avatars and skins for all the NFL and NBA teams, but you actually have to pay to get them? Why? They’re skins and team logos for heaven’s sake. I wouldn’t mind so much if you could actually get these points through playing games, but near as I can tell the only way to get them is to buy them. (Someone correct me if I’m wrong about that.) Ain’t no way, no how am I buying skins and avatars that ought to be given away for free or made available to you for buying the game associated with them. (For example, getting the NFL stuff for free if you buy Madden.)

I also think a lot of the games Live Marketplace games are overpriced. I mean I like Joust and Guantlet as much as the next 30-year old game geek, but 400 points (which I think is like $5) is a rip off. It makes it doubly-annoying because I already have most of those games form the Midway Arcade Classics collections (1 and 2) and those aren’t listed on the compatibility list. Make of that what you will conspiracy-theorists.

The 360 also serves as a far better DVD player than did the Xbox (even with the HD pack). I mean just being able to turn the thing on and off via remote is nice, but the picture quality it produces is visibly better than what the Xbox could do. And although I haven’t tried it, the docs indicate you can hook up a USB keyboard to type data into games, online chats, etc., which is just gravy. (Oh, and for those who might be concerned about it, transferring your Xbox Live account to a 360 Live Gold account is fast and easy.)

As for the controller, I thought I would miss the black and white buttons. I never cared for the four trigger design of the PS2 controller, but I think MS did a good job here. The additional triggers are much smaller and are better spaced away from the larger triggers and it makes it much easier for me to use the right ones. On the PS2 controller, the few times I used it, I always had trouble with tapping the wrong triggers. It’s also nice that the controller shuts itself off after a few minutes of inactivity so it’s not wasting battery power.

So, what’s not to like? Honestly, not much comes to mind. The power brick is indeed a paper weight of massive proportions, but the console itself is mercifully light so I don’t mind so much. The component cables seem like they’re on the cheap side, but I don’t know enough about cable construction to know that for sure. In any case, the HD pack for the Xbox was a more convenient design because you could use any component cable with it that you wanted thanks to a breaktout box. The one that comes with the 360 uses the proprietary connector at one end and the component cables at the other, without the breakout box in between.

I’m also a little ticked that it didn’t come with a remote (was that only on release day?), but since the IR receiver is built in that shortcoming is mitigated by the fact that my Harmony controls it just fine (as does the wireless controller, for both games and DVDs). Overall I’m not blown away by the look of the console, but then I don’t really care about that stuff.

As easy as it is to use the dashboard and connect to your LAN for music and pictures, there’s very little customization you can do to keep things organized. It does a credible job of using digital music file tags to organize your music, but if you’re like my family and have your pictures organized into about a billion different subfolders, getting to a specific one is something of a nightmare. (Granted I don’t plan to do much picture viewing via my TV, but it just could’ve been implemented better.) I also don’t understand why you can stream images and music from your PC, but not video files. You can play movie files, but they have to be on the Xbox hard drive? And my guess is that means the only way to do that is to download movies from Live because there doesn’t appear to be a way to copy them over. Again, a minor quibble, but I think it would be cool to download movie trailers and such and stream them to your TV via the 360. (And hey, not to mention all that downloaded porn, right?)

Right now I’ve got two games for the console. I bought NBA2k6 with the console (surprise, surprise) and last night I went out and rented King Kong. I’ll talk about those games a bit in my next post.

Looks like NBC finally recognized what West Wing fans have been saying for four years. The show is crap with without Aaron Sorkin and Tommy Schlamme at the helm. The show will finally, mercifully be cancelled at the end of the season.

At halftime, it’s going well for PIT, just as I thought, becuase Denver sucks without bullshit calls made in their favor. Incomplete this Denver fans.

At least I’m still not bitter over last week.

So there’s that.

In other news, anyone ever see/heard of this magazine? Instead of sportsgamer.blogspot.com, I went to sportsgamer.com and this showed up.

Just a few actually. Right now, about 8 games into testing — this is a very good baseball game. There are walks! It’s rare when I do not walk at least once per game. Granted, I’m not issuing a lot of walks but I have not touched a slider yet so hopefully I can lower my control a bit. OSU picthing should not be this good. heh

Still, I am thoroughly enjoying myself.

I have two peeves right now. First, I like my baseball games to be fast paced. Get in, get out, no jacking around. MVP 06 has a lot of jacking around. I can turn off the replays, and the throwing of the ball back to the pitcher but I can’t stop the batters from going through their Carlton Fisk routine every at bat. It slows the game down something awful. I want each game to take no more than 35 minutes unless it’s an extra inning marathon or a game in which each team scores a lot. A standard game should take 35-40 mins tops.

Again, I use High Heat as the measuring stick. I could fast forward through everything; I could throw a picth every 3 seconds. I do not NEED to see the extra animations. This was a huge, huge, benefit to HH for me.

“Yes, looks nice, very good. Now let’s PLAY.”

My other issue is that there seems to be a lack of solid contact in this game which is not what college baseball is all about. Folks, the ball should LEAP off the aluminum bats. It doesn;t. I have no problem making contact but GOOD contact is tough. Again, I may just need practice (the CPU suffers here too though) and I have not touched a slider but each game I have played has been a pitcher’s duel.

More later — and still, despite all this stuff I am totally into the game right now, more than I have been into a console baseball game in a long, long time.

Can we get a PC version? No? OK, figured I’d ask..

Earlier this week, ESPN debuted their new site. All I can say is ugh….remember when you could just go there and find the news you need? Now there are more ads than a porn site and videos running everywhere. Maybe I”m getting old, but I guess I’ll just read the AP sports news wire from now on…