The Blog for the Sports Gamer

When life gives you lemons, you tend to not blog as much.

Mary’s eye surgery was a success in that she’s doing fine. The problem is that she still has double vision when she looks up or down. The doc said that she needs to do eye exercises to strengthen the muscles, but she’s feeling dejected at the moment and I don’t blame her.

On the plus side I found out about the Columbus Victim’s of Violent Crimes Relief Fund (the infamous CVVCRF) , which will help pay any out of pocket bills that insurance doesn’t cover so hopefully this won’t cost us anything. Surgery isn’t cheap.

With all of this going on, we close on the new house Monday. The appliances were delivered today and last night we went furniture shopping, blowing $1,000 on a kitchen dinette and a new sofa. Hey it’s only, money, right? I’ll post some pics when we get some stuff moved in. I love the house. Just love it. 2 1/2 acres of land, room to breathe and I can actually see stars at night.

Actually, we have some left over cash from our loan PPI which helps us furnish things a bit. This is where the new TV money is coming from. I’m still on the fence as to whicn TV I’lll be getting but it looks like I’ll have around $2,000 to play with.

Of course we’re still sweating the fact that our current house hasn’t sold and the showings are slowing down so I’ll have to lower the price. I expected this to happen but it’s still really annoying. We can afford both mortgages (at the expense of not putting any money into savings — I really want to open a ROTH IRA, btw) but the sooner we sell this sucker the better. I am ready to move.

I’ve been playing GalCiv II which, for me, is easily just as fun as CivIV, and is far and away the best “4X” game since MOO2. This game should win some kind of award for game AI. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It anticipates, reacts, and totally surprises you.

I knew I was playing something special when one of the races I was about to invade contacted me, saying that he saw what I was up to and knew he couldn’t defeat me but would do whatever he could to make sure I lost. Sure enough, he signs a pact with the only race close to mine in terms of power (the humans) — giving that race ALL of his tech and ships, which effectively turned them from #2 to #1 in one turn. Ouch. It really is a great, single player, turn based strategy game. It takes me back to when I played more of these types of games…you know..back when people developed them.

I’m still waiting on Oblivion to be delivered from Bethesda but Bill Harris has some good impressions of it on his blog. He, like me, is a real Morrorwind geek so he knows of what he speaks. Well, in this instance, anyway. har har

Lastly, my E3 flight is booked and once again I’ll be there working for GameSpy with some blog updates time permitting.

Hey maybe I’ll see NCAA 07 on the floor and tell you how much I think it looks a lot like NCAA 06. I can’t wait!

I find this hilarious. It’s the end of MARCH!

Oops, sorry for no post yesterday, I was still in mourning over Adam leaving the Patriots.

In other news, I am apparently one of the only 360 owners that didn’t go out and buy Oblivion. When review assignments were coming out I actually begged off. I mean seriously, a game that deep, how can you do it justice. What’s funny is that for this game all of the big review sites are taking their time with the review. Nice. Of course, I am assuming they’ve had the build for sometime. I seriously doubt they went to the store on Tuesday and purchased the game like us common folk.

What’s funny about the GamerScore system is that on gamercards you can see the last couple of games being played. Since Gamespot’s article about how to inflate your gamerscore, it’s kinda funny how shit launch titles are now popular again because of the points they provide…

One of my favorite Microsoft employee blogs talks about Peter Moore and the annoying questions that the big 3 sites asked him. He did a press junket (like they do in the movies — So Tom, tell me how it was working with Steven Spielberg was replaced with Peter, will we see any more Xbox 360s in stores soon). I know the sites wanted the scoop and you can’t blame them for asking the questions they did. But it was funny to see it from the ‘other side’.

Thanks to Jim Cassinelli for providing this post about IGN’s Top Cyber atheletes. I’ll give props here, this was a neat idea. Looking forward to the Baseball one. They better give props to the guy who lead off Hardball on teh Blue team. I think his name was Molina.

Finally today I leave you with this hysterical rider for the Vice President. Like Bruce Springsteen, Vice President Cheney has a rider for his hotel room. While there’s nothing as jaw dropping as what rock stars ask for (ie brand name water in a bucket of ice pre-chilled to 49.5 degrees), there are some funny things in there — in a shocker, the VP requires all TVs turned to Fox News. Check it out here.

I just watched NESN’s interview with Bronson Arroyo about his trade. Apparently the Sox signed him for a hometown discount in January, said they don’t have any intention of trading him in the near future. Apparently Bronson didn’t see the asterisk next to that which defined near future as 1 month, 28 days because on the 1 month 29th day, he was gone.

After getting fucked like this, it’s no wonder why players take off, even to play for the dark side (Colts, Yankees).

The Patriots one really hurt. I don’t think anyone can argue that Adam has dropped off recently, but it’s still hard to see that happen, and he hasn’t dropped off that much. I mean really, are the Pats better off signing Mare? Isn’t he like 83?

Just a shitty day all around, and hell, I don’t even like the Red Sox. I cheered for a team that had 2 steroid abusers last year. Oh btw, David Wells is about as fat as I am, and I’m nowhere near a pitching mound and I have almost 10 years on him. Just thought I’d point that out.

Just got this email:
“ESPN and Boston sports radio station WEEI are reporting that Adam Vinatieri has agreed in principle on a contract with the Indianapolis Colts. “

Now I see the pain of Johnny Damon. Well except for the fact that Johnny Damon didn’t single handedly win two Super Bowls. Unfuckingbelieveable.

You know, all I heard from the fat sportswriters was how great football is, and it’s not like baseball with their contracts. I call bull shit. The fact that a K is a free agent and someone so meaningful to the Patriots and this happens. My god, this is the year of death. So far, the Pats have lost McGinest, a WR, and now this. Oh well, at least tickets will be aplenty this year.

And there’s still the Orioles I guess. Man, I’m just dumbfounded. Like Craig said, “I hope that they don’t trade Kickers.” We don’t want Vanderjerk. Ugh.

Quick question:

The area where we are moving only provides one local cable company, one that I think totally sucks (Insight). I’m most likely going to go with either Dish or Direct TV with Sprint as my high speed/phone provider (my only choice for high speed Internet, sadly) and I was curious if you folks had any experience with either and if so — what’s the perferred choice? (And yes, I’ll be using HD.) Any customer suppoprt horror stories or anything I should know before signing up?

I should probably just let it go, but the depths of how bad I think StarForce’s methodology in enforcing copy-protection is, I can’t help but pass on two more links.

The first is to a CDFreaks story with quotes from FutureMark, who has been studying how the software works. Here’s the most damning:

“Now, Futuremark has uncovered a very dangerous anti-piracy system Starforce is now using. This copy protection system installs a driver that runs at the highest level of access on the system, which gives it low level access to the PCs hardware and any drivers and processes. This driver runs regardless of whether the game runs; keeping an eye out for any suspicious activity such as attempting to copy a protected disc. If something suspicious is detected, it forces the PC to make an immediate reboot, regardless of any other applications running and whether or not the user has any unsaved work.”

Suspicious activity, according to several user reports, generally consists of such damaging actions as putting in a music CD while playing Space Rangers 2. There are no words… well, there are, but I’ll refrain.

The second link is a list of StarFroce “protected” games. There are a lot of notable titles on this list. (Sorry, Bill, Chaos League is on the list.) If you have any of them installed and have had stability issues with your PC, well, you may find your answer here. If you have any of these games and want to replace the infected (allegedly) driver on your system this site includes a mirror link to a removal tool StarForce provided. It’s always a good sign when your software is so useful that you’re obligated to post a tool for removing it from users’ systems. Just ask Sony.

All that junk inside your trunk. Sorry, my son keeps singing it. It’s rather funny.

As predicted on Friday, my ass has now been handed to me in the bracket. I’m next to dead last. Keep in mind that the last place person didn’t even make picks, so I could have done just as well by not picking anyone.

I hear that some new RPG is being released tomorrow, anyone hear anything about that? Man it’s been quiet. /sarcasm.

In other news, the NFL Commish announced his retirement. Apparently this last deal made him decide it was time to step down. No word on how much the whole “that exclusive contract to EA” deal played a role in that decision.

Bill Harris posted a fantastic, scathing bit on the ineptitude of StarForce (from both a design and PR standpoint). Excuse me, alleged ineptitude. I wouldn’t want to be sued, after all (read the link). Anyway, it makes for a good follow-up from my post last week for those of you who just can’t read enough about how impossibly bumfuddled (allegedly) a company can be. (And hey, who can’t get enough of that?) Actually, it’s also got more food for thought for anyone who thinks StarForce offers an important service for publishers trying to stem the tide rampant piracy.

…It’s worth noting that I nearly vomited all over my keyboard just putting “StarForce” and “important service” in the same sentence. Maybe if I run to the bathroom and brush my teeth I can cleanse the taste of bile from my mouth.

As I type this my 360 is sitting in a box in the back of some UPS Store room waiting for a ride to the airport. If Dan’s right (I’m sure that he is), I’ll be very pleased to have a replacement in-house by Friday. College Hoops, over the course of about five games, crashed two more times on me over the weekend. The first one, mercifully, was on the title screen, so no harm done. The second was seven minutes into the first half of a conferences tourney game. Very frustrating, but at this point I’m convinced these particular crashes (read errors) are the console and the not the game.

After getting stomped several times in a handful of games with default sliders at All-Conference level in my first season with Sacred Heart, I opted to try out some MOP sliders I ripped from DSP, which were themselves ripped from OS (a Jistic slider set for the Xbox version, I believe). Not surprisingly, using an MOP slider set on All-Conference made the game far too easy (could hold the AI to under 35% shooting while hitting 60+% myself), but after bumping it up to All-American (one game so far) I think there’s some promise to these.

That one game was a Round 1 NCAA tourney game, Sacred Heart vs. Oklahoma State (I won the conference tourney after simming the regular season). It was a very fun game, in which the lead see-sawed a lot in the first half, but saw OSU make a run early in the second. I was able to close the gap and even tie the score at one point, but then OSU made another run and I just couldn’t hang. I lost, I think, by about ten points after going stone-cold trying to force plays late in the second half. Good stuff. There really is no better experience in video hoops than working an open three-point shot in College Hoops 2k6 and nailing it.

At this point I’m still just futzing around with stuff in the game. I really would like to see VC revamp the recruiting a little. I think it’s a good base and offers a lot of depth, but at the same time I still can’t abide the weekly tedium. The assisted recruiting option and the ability to designate targets are both a nod in the right direction, but I think more can be done to eliminate the tedium of a full-season of weekly emails, phone calls, scouting visits, etc. Some examples:

- The target list is 15 players long and it’s numbered, but you can’t seem to designate priorities between those players (if you can, someone please tell me how). How about being able to rank your targets so that when you have assisted recruiting on they focus their time/points on your preferred target players first?

- When using assisted recruiting it needs to be made much more clear what my assistants are doing with their time. A weekly “this is what I did” email would not be out of line and would give a clear indicator of whether or not they can be trusted to run the show for Legacy players that don’t want the level of involvement the game offers.

- Taking that a step further, I think it would help a lot if you could just set a recruiting plan for your targets and let the assisted recuiting handle the scheduling details. I’d rather just set a target recruit and enable a checkbox that says what I want my assistants to do before that phase of recruiting ends and leave it at that. Not having to go in and make ten phone calls every week, no weekly emails to everybody with a pulse (w/o really knowing if it has an effect or not), etc. The AI would just know to do it and would be far more capable of knowing how to balance its time/point allotment to make sure it could bring everybody in. At that point all you need is to review your email each week and decide if the results you’re getting require any changes to your core plan. If you get too ambitious have your assistant coach send you an email that says, “We can’t bring player x, y and z in before the end of the season. We have to narrow it down to two.”

- When getting reports on recruited players or reviewing the recruit’s information page, the game really ought to tell you if your efforts are having an effect. I can’t keep two numbers in my head for more than a second. Asking me to remember whether or not my target’s interest level of 76% is significantly higher than it was a month ago is sheer torture. One entry on the recruit’s page that indicates if his interest level has increased or decreased over the past week or month would pay huge dividends in deciding if a guy is worth the time/effort.

Ultimately, I think it would just be more effective for those of us who want to run a Legacy but dont’ want to spend more time recruiting than playing games if you could just spend an hour of gametime at the start of the season setting your recruiting plan and then just monitoring it between games for the rest of the year.

At any rate, all the great College Hoops gameplay is, without question, intact in the 360 version. If some of the glaring bug issues can be patched up (the OS thread I linked to last week indicated a patch was in the works) this will probably be the best College Hoops game to date. At the same time, however, I think it’s time for VC to raise the bar:

- The commentary and presentation, especially at conference and NCAA tourney time, need more work. When you win a conference tourney or or a big NCAA tourney game (not talking about just the finals) it shouldn’t just be same old same old from the players and an extra sentence or two of commentary. Nor should the favored team in an NCAA tourney team have an obvious advantage from the crowd, which this weekend’s real NCAA tourney action can confirm (go Bradley!). No way should Sacred Heart walk into an arena of a round 1 tourney game facing a crowd loaded with Oklahoma State colors, nor should the crowd be entirely in their corner. NCAA crowds, by and large, love the underdogs in the early rounds. We should see more of that in the game.

- I also like the concept of the News page in the Stats section, but it just doesn’t work as implemented. Most of the entries are very over done and they make every win sound ridiculously significant. A lot of it just reads hacky (being an editor this is a pet peeve of mine) and the “constructed” highlight reel (of one replay) just slows the console down (it takes like 30 seconds to load, during which you can do nothing but wait and it stops being neat after one viewing). That said, there are good points to the page text, in terms of referencing stats and such. But the real issue I have is that it doesn’t reference any of the most newsworthy stuff. When Sacred Heart wins a conference tourney and goes to the big dance there should be something about it beyond the usual game recap. If you land a big recruit, or have a player named an All-American there should be news about it. If there’s a week left in the season and you’re contending for a conference title there should be news about it. If you’re losing and you have a disgruntled player, how about a story with the player complaining to the press about lack of playing time? There’s loads of room to get creative here.

- Get more content on the screen. Roster management is the most frustrating aspect (for me) in any console team sports game. You cannot get all the information you want to see when you want to see it without a half-dozen back and forth button presses and a whole lot of scrolling. There wasn’t much to be done about that on standard definition consoles, but an Xbox 360 game should take better advantage of HD resolution so that you can put more information on screen at once without having to scroll for a virtual mile and a half.

- And to go beyond that point, you should be able to better customize what information you do get to see: That means more sorting options (the recruiting screen in College Hoops does quite well in this regard), but also the ability to generate custom views. Given the sheer number of gameplay sliders and options this can’t be that hard to do. Give us a screen with every stat and bio category in the game and let us choose (and save) what content we want to see. It would make roster management, much, much easier, especially if saved to a custom reports file that gamers could share amongst themselves. And as long as I’m having my cake and eating it too, why not export that stuff to a generic data file that could be imported into a spreadsheet or database on your PC (don’t worry, I’m not holding my breath for this).

- The Coach’s Clipboard: Don’t ever, EVER, cut that feature. Love it! I’ve still hardly used it, but I’ll dig into it more when I get my 360 back.

- Yes the sim engine may need work, but this is overanalyzed to death. If George Mason or Bradley made the Sweet Sixteen in College Hoops 2k6 gamers would be going bonkers, but obviously, it does happen. That said, a #1 seed should really never lose a first round game (#2’s, hardly ever). I know there are stat-balance issues with this, but I think the brackets would look better if games were decided based on a low seed’s odds of winning. A #1 vs. a #16 = .1% chance of the #16 winning. A #4 vs. a #12 might be 20%. A #8 vs. a #9 would just be 50-50. (I’m sure some stat nut has actual figures on how often low seeds get upsets.)

- It’s probably my imagination, but there still feels to me like there’s a bit of a mechanical rock, paper, scissors aspect to the on-court gameplay. A lot of the time it feels like if a player with x ability takes a shot contested to y-th degree it has zero chance of going in. Period. Like I said, I may just be as hallucinatory as the people convinced of the “catch up code” in the High Heat Baseball (no way), but College Hoops has always had that semi-predetermined feel to it. If I’m right it’s reasonably well hidden, I’ll grant VC that, but it just isn’t sports. Everything should be variable to some extent (if it’s not already).

I could go on, but really, are any of you still reading? If so, you deserve a cookie.

- Most surprising lost in the first round, to me, is Kansas. In my blog bracket I had them in the elite eight. Ouch.

- After round one I’m in a tie for second in the blog brackets. Woot! Missing an elite eight team (Kansas) hurts, but the only other sweet 16 team I’ve lost is Iowa. I figured Iowa would go in the tank. In my “work” bracket I had Northwestern State winning that game.

- While I had MSU in the second round of both my brackets (but no further) I’m not the least bit surprised that they lost to George Mason. Everyone made such a big deal about their strength of schedule, as if that matters if you still lose the games. You just know a lot of people’s brackets went poof with that loss. (cough - Dan - cough)

- Is it me or were there very few blowouts among the top 4 seeds? Nearly all of them seemed to have tight games for at least 20-30 minutes. Memphis losing at halftime? Tennessee needing a last second shot to clinch a win? Not what I expected to see in the first round. (But nothing would surprise me less than Tennessee losing to Wichita St.)

- So what’s the second round matchup people are most looking forward to? I’ve got my eye on Indiana vs. Gonzaga and Washington vs. Illinois.

Hard to believe, but this week marks the two year birthday of the blog. I can’t believe it’s two years…take a look back and you’ll see lots of familar posts…an MVP review, Microsoft dumping their sports games…the MLB game for the PS2 getting rave reviews, etc.

Funny stuff — unfortunately, I thought Blogger showed the number of words you typed — they don’t show that anymore. Not that you care. We do have almost 1800 posts, which does work out to 900 a year…damn, we talk a lot. Not as much as Bill Harris, but you know what I mean.

Source: Joey Harrington, one or two weeks ago

That’s not really news, but still, wow. The Lions signed two quarterbacks this week, Jon Kitna and Josh McCown and now we know why.

The Lions new coaching staff has been very careful in the media these past couple months to do nothing but heap praise on Harrington’s potential. New OC Mike Martz then brought in all the QBs to a QB school two weeks ago. Harrington was supposed to be available to the media by Friday. On Wednesday they sent word that he would not be. Then there were rumors (probably true) that he had left town for Thailand last week.

I’ve been soaking this all in this week. When Kitna was signed I figured, “hey, they needed an en experienced QB be it backup or starter.” But then the rumor-mill reported that the Lions were still chasing McCown. At that point you knew something was up, but evidently it’s not the Lions saving face. The more the Detroit media reports the clearer it is that it’s Harrington who wants out of Detroit and not Detroit going out of its way to dump Harrington.

And you can’t really blame the guy. He’s been treated like dirt the last four years in Detroit and a lot of it isn’t deserved. Today the Detroit media is talking all about how he “endured” and “held his head high” despite a coaching staff that hardly spoke to him, an offensive gameplan out of the Paleozoic era, and players lambasting him in the media. Funny, that’s not what they were saying about him when it was actually happening.

All that said, that quote (the title for this post) is just shocking for it’s bluntness. (Bear in mind it’s being reported second-hand and is not something Harrington said to the Detroit media. I mean I knew it was bad, but I didn’t think it was on the level of mutual “hate.” Evidently, last week Harrington went so far as to tank himself at the QB school refusing to take notes, responding slowly to questions asked, etc. Finally he left and told management he’d restructure his contract however he had to so long as it got him out of Detroit. Well, Joe, you’re gonna get your wish. Best of luck to you.

My instinct is to resent a player who goes to these lengths to get out of dodge, but the Lions took a promising talent and basically broke him, so it’s probably best to just wave goodbye and wish him good luck. I really hope he can salvage his career elsewhere because there’s no doubt in my mind he’d have been a better QB had a team more capable than Detroit (at the time) drafted him.

This leaves the Lions with Kitna and McCown as the possible starters next year. I still haven’t decided how to feel about that. Kitna was solid the last full season he started in Cincy and he had an okay year or two in Seattle. McCown can sling the ball and take a beating, which may make him a good fit in a Mike Martz offense. It’s hard to judge the quality of a QB whose career has thus far been based in Arizona, which is probably how potential suitors will view Harrington’s tenure in Detroit too. I still expect that it will be a rocky start to the season, maybe even as bad as 2-6, that will follow-up with a good run to end the year and hopefully lead to something worth watching in 2007. Hey, a guy can dream.

Well given my crap tastick pics, I was surprised to find out I was in a tie for 7th place. Of course, with some of my losing picks I said they were going far, so my maximum score is going to push me to the bottom of the pile.

So, right now I’ll just rub it in that I’m higher than Bill Abner, because that will go away tonight or tommorrow :).

Well, how about that NCAA Tournament. I think everyone is now eliminated from the pool with those upsets. Heh.