The Blog for the Sports Gamer

It was quite a delegation visiting case del Todd this weekend. My father-in-law’s birthday is next weekend so he and his wife (Angie’s step-mom), her sister, her sister’s husband and her brother all made the trek down from Michigan. I used this event as an excuse to rent Project Gotham Racing 3 and pick up an extra 360 game controller (one of the corded ones that will also work in Windows). Some thoughts:

Once you get used to a wireless controller, wired ones suck eggs. (I just really wanted a controller I could also use in Windows should I try that MVP 05 PC mod that Dan linked to last week.)

PGR3 is indeed gorgeous. I suck at racing games, but it was fun to sit down and alternate races with my two brothers-in-law. There is a certain amount of comedic effect in the notion that you can run a car past 200 mph on a straightaway in this game and run headlong into a brick wall but do no appreciable damage to the car. I know this isn’t really a racing “sim,” but damn, if all cars could take this kind of punishment there would be no need for auto insurance. The game also locked up once on me, which means I’ve now gotten the “dirty or scratched” disc error in two different games (it happens in half my NBA2k6 games). I’m starting to wonder if I should be worried about that.

The real treat though was the Fight Night Round 3 demo. I downloaded that last month and enjoyed it for a night, but since you can only use the same two boxers in a single 4-round bout there’s only so much fun you can have with it in single-player. Going head-to-head with family, though, now that was a treat.

I think EA did well to select Bernard Hopkins and Roy Jones Jr. for the two boxers to use in the demo. I’m not in any way a dedicated fan of the so-called sweet science, but it was obvious the extent to which Hopkins is a power-puncher and Jones Jr. is all about duck, dodge and counter. From a gameplay standpoint the boxing in this demo isn’t a whole lot different from FN Round 2, but on the 360 the graphical improvement is just astonishing, especially when projected onto a 90+” screen.

We started out just trying to beat the snot out of each other and every time the guy controlling Hopkins was the big winner. As we alternated controlling each fighter it didn’t take long to realize it was 100% mandatory to completely change your strategy depending on which boxer you used. When we (more accurately, “I”) started to get more stealthy when using Roy Jones Jr. it became damn near impossible for Hopkins to land a punch. And with every miss Jones could doll out a couple of counter-jabs and hooks that consistently took their toll. Yeah, I know, that’s boxing 101, but of the three of us I was the only one who had played the game before so it was a faster adjustment for me. They did catch on though and that’s when it really got to be a lot of fun.

In fact, this was by far the most fun I’ve had with my 360 and I’ve gone from being merely interested in the final release of FN Rnd3 to absolutely craving the point at which I have some spare cash to pick it up. (I think it started to hit some shelves last Friday.) Maybe at the end of the week I’ll have some cash to put towards it. Then again, if I get canned before that I may just say f#$@ it and buy the damn thing. Sort of like in the pilot episode of Friends (the first season is good, the rest is crap) when Rachel says about having bought new boots instead of finding a job, “These are my I don’t need a job, I don’t need my family, I’ve got great boots, boots.” Except, you know, instead of boots it’s a video game with loads of fake blood and a bunch of beat-downs.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2006 at 12:08 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.