The Blog for the Sports Gamer

This is a steal, folks.

Matrix Games and PureSim Baseball are happy to announce the PureSim Baseball 2007 All-Star break special, for a limited time, cutting its price in half to $14.95 for digital download orders. This ‘All-Star Break Special,’ in recognition of the upcoming three-day event in July, will give customers the opportunity to save on the most unique and enjoyable baseball simulation ever created.

“The All-Star break is a big deal,” said David Heath of Matrix Games. “We want to observe this important event in America’s Pastime by offering this special and giving everyone a chance to see why PureSim Baseball is truly hitting the ball out of the park with this game.”

The All-Star Break Deal will be in effect from midnight on Friday, June 30, 2006 through 11:59 p.m. on Friday, July 14, 2006. Baseball is a legendary part of American history; now here is your chance to create your own teams, legends, and diamond dynasties, or play any historic period from 1900 to 2005!

This has been a pretty bizarre week for me. Mary had to go to Texas and then New York on business. She gets back today. Ashley has spent the week at my parents place, swimming and having infinitely more fun than she has with me on a daily basis. We need a pool.

So it’s been me and the dog since Sunday night. It’s been weird. It’s way too much freedom.

Anyway, with my Head Coach review submitted I am officially shelving the game. Cool idea, at times lot of fun, but if I want a time killing grind I’ll play World of WarCraft…which I started back up this week. WoW remains the best time killer in gaming, and with the wife and kid on hiatus, I can only watch so much TV and play so much basketball.

I wanted to talk some today about Ohio State basketball, and how Thad Matta is turning the program into something very special, well beyond just landing Greg Oden but that’ll have to wait until later. I actually do have some work to do today before everyone gets home.

This also marks the waiting period before the release of NCAA ’07. I’ll be playing the game, most likely, on the Xbox so Dan and Todd can/will provide info on the 360 version.

Simmons is the best thing on ESPN.com

His NBA Draft Diary is priceless. Anyone that jabs at Stephen A. Smith is OK in my book.

I love this line, ‘Phoenix sells its pick to Portland for cash (with the Blazers grabbing Sergio Rodriguez). I love Phoenix’s performance tonight — they should have just put those two first-rounders on eBay. Way to look out for your fans, guys. And what about Portland’s wheeling and dealing? They’re like a drunk college kid randomly putting together an NBA Live team at 4 a.m. What a bizarre night.”

The off season in this game just drains the crap out of me. Oh, yeah, I lost a playoff game to the Jags 17-3. Thanks to the slider mod, I can get a pretty cool game out of this thing. (How you console fellas are playing this I have no idea. You’re a better man– or men– than I am.)

I love intricate detail in a sports sim. I have no issue with that. But the never ending load screens, the rinse and repeat..and repeat…and repeat. GAH! I just want to scout players for the draft, ya know? Why do I need to scout 8 players — see a load screen, skip daily routine stuff, scout 8 players — load screen.

Why can’t I just scout the damn players?

There are something like 10 “Scout Player” days in the off season. (Something like that) So why not bundle that into one, maybe two “days”? EA’s interface does everything it can to force people to snap the CD into pieces. There’s no way I should spend 3 hours getting from the start of the RFA period to the draft in April. And I am skipping a lot of stuff to cut it down to 3 hours. Same with signing players — all I wanna do is sign my draft picks. But no, the game only lets me do 3 “actions” per signing day so I have to sign 3 guys, exit, go to next task, — load screen– skip to the next signing day, repeat. My brain hurts.

Anyway, sorry to keep hashing over old material..but I just got done doing this stuff and it’s fresh in my head. I just do not understand how someone could design this GUI and think it’s even semi-intuative. It makes Wordperfect for DOS look like a thing of beauty.

There was a reason I wanted to make this little post and it wasn’t about the Amityville Interface. It was instead regarding the off season after you play the initial year.

I have a slight problem….

….there are no new free agents. None. Zero. Zilch-o. Well, that’s a lie. The best new FA, by far, is WR Dennis Northcutt, who I failed to resign. Everyone else was in the FA pool at the start of the previous season and was never signed to a team because they all suck. It’s the end of May, 2007 and there are no new UFAs in the league.

Am I missing something? Surely I’m just overlooking something; the game will have new FAs each year, right? Bueller? Anyone gotten this far?

Sweet….

As I wind down my review for NFL Head Coach, I wanted to share a few more observations now that I have played a full season of games with the Abner-Built 2006 Browns. Here ‘goes:

• Without the FOFC PC Mod, the game is ass. It’s a novelty. With the mod, it’s a significantly better game because you can now change quarter length, gameplay sliders (that now work), and the difficulty level (which was preset to Pro w/o the ability to edit it).
• I played the season w/o changing the difficulty and the Browns finished 12-4. This on its face isn’t a huge deal because in the NFL teams can turn it around from season to season. But my team finished 12-4 despite Philip Rivers earning a 68.9 QB Rating. It was a weird year…
• I usually get a lot of flak for ripping big budget sports games for screwing up simulated stats. NCAA 06, MLB 2K, NFL 2K, etc. I ask: is it ok to rip a coaching simulation for the same thing? After the season ended I checked the league stats and saw that the CPU never uses its backup running back unless the starter gets hurt. Are you ok with 4 backs getting *500* carries? 500. Several backs ran for 1500+ yards and only averaged 3.2, 3.5 or 3.6 per carry. 400 carries is a ton for a back — 500 is a literal shitload.
• However, this bizarre blip aside, the stats in Head Coach aren’t too hateful. Not great, sorta Madden-like. (DTs get way too many simmed sacks, for example)
• I saw 4 kickoffs returned for TDs in the games I played. (I played 13 of the 16, and have not yet started the playoffs)
• The CPU returned a grand total of ONE punt. The rest were all fair catches. My returner only returns kicks if I select PR Block. The blockers that race downfield do not attempt to block the gunners. Ever.
• My Dline had 2 sacks the whole year. My LBers and safeties had their share, but the line gets mauled in this game. Maybe it is because I run a 3-4? Whatever it is, the DEs *never*, not once, beat an OT off the snap and got to the QB. Every DL sack (for me or the CPU) was a coverage sack. Maybe a pass block slider change is in order…
• Without messing with the mod tool, the CPU QBs are *very* Madden-like. What I mean by this is that you may play a game where the CPU completes 55-60% of its passes. You’ll play just as many games where it goes 6 of 28 with 4 picks. This goes back to my first point — w/o that mod tool this game is ass. Why they didn’t include sliders when they were already there in the code is anyone’s guess. They make an enormous difference.
• As earlier noted in previous posts, the interface and off the field design might be the most tedious in the history of gaming. Of course you can sim and skip over the practices and the other daily boring routines (really — the weekly staff meeting..could that be anymore useless? Oh, yeah, before I forget — the Browns finished top 5 in pass defense with a DB coach rated an 11 — out of 99. These coaches don’t mean shit, apparantly.) Anyway, even though you can sim past the tedium, it is in your best interest not to because this is where you’ll get the vast majority of your injuries — during contact drill practice that you simulate. My team suffered injuries in the 3 games I simmed. The rest of the games? Not a one. That’s right. Not one injury unless I simmed the practice week.
• In addition, if you sim the week your players do not improve nearly as much than when you manually do the practices, which gets boring real fast.
• EA needs to retool the design of this game so that we can do what we want when we want to do it. Screw the whole “coach time” thing. Let me change my friggin’ depth chart as much as I want to without seeing multiple load screens because I only get two actions per “office hour.” That’s asinine. Everything is a hassle. If you want to sign a FA during the year due to injury (which as I said only happens if you sim) you can’t just call up an agent. You need to go into your calander and hunt for the Sign Players task and switch that with your current task. The entire interface is like this. It’s mind-numbingly ridiculous.
• Gary Gorski, text sim developer who is now working on Total Pro Golf, said this about the GUI on FOFC:
  

  I’m not saying its not realistic – yeah in an hour or half hour block you can probably only sit down and call 3 GMs and talk about trades or call 3 agents about signing their players…and if coaching the virtual Detroit Lions was my real job that would be fine but I despise the fact that I had to play 9 real hours of game play to get to one preseason game.

  My gripe is that they made things realistic that are tedious and then abandonded reality in the things that would have been fun. 30 seconds to make a trade during someone else’s pick in the draft? Why not give me 5-15 minutes there to work the phones and make trades and why can I only try to make like three trades during the draft? Do real NFL GMs contact fewer than three other teams the entire draft day? To me the day to day stuff is just a tedious click fest – that’s great that you can only add two plays to the playbook in a half hour – but doing it that way means hundreds of more clicks to get in and out of that screen over and over again.

  Like I said earlier, the idea is great and the execution was terrible. I think the only reason people are not up in arms about this is because of the idea of a 3D football management sim is such a sexy one that some people are willing to overlook the design flaws because they want it so bad. You tell me though, if you played Total College Basketball and I made you only able to call 3 recruits per session in the day and took away the automatic weekly call list, made you click on every individual player to learn anything about him as opposed to giving you the ability to view stats and ratings for the entire team at a glance and subjected you to pointless meetings with the AD where he tells you for the third week in a row that you need to recruit a power forward or with your coaching staff flip flopping on the same two players every week would you find those things acceptable or would you be ripping it as a tedious click fest? I’m not ripping on anyone who likes it – if you’re satisfied with Head Coach then good for you – I liked the idea and wanted it very much to be that perfect version of what some of us always hoped Front Page Sports would evolve into and to me it was just designed so poorly that its often times more frustrating than fun.

• “I think the only reason people are not up in arms about this is because of the idea of a 3D football management sim is such a sexy one that some people are willing to overlook the design flaws because they want it so bad.”

  This is exactly it. I’m just as guilty. Even with the sadistic GUI and the other football bizarro-ness, I’m still playing it…about to play the Jags in the playoffs. Head Coach is the guy sitting on horseback with a stick, a string and a carrot. We’re the horse.

My Baseball Mogul 2007 review is now online at GameShark. Be gentle on me, I’m not nearly the stat freak Bill is, but I enjoyed the game. It has potential..not perfect, but what is and I love the old school rosters. And the KC like stadium.

In other news, too bad about the Senate being one vote short for the flag burning amendment. I’m so glad they are working on the tough issues, like this one. Funny story, I’m going to show you my ignorance here — did you know there were 27 amendments? I thought there were 26, but in 1992 Alabama ratifed a 202 year old amendment (which didn’t have an expiration date on it), which prohibits Congress from voting themselves a raise in the current session. Of course cost of living doesn’t count as a raise, and I find it incredibly hypocritical that while they vote themselves a raise, they can’t raise the $5.15/hr minimum wage….but I digress…

After seeing the Red Sox win in every which way imaginable, I can see why football fans hate the Patriots success. Of course as a Patriots fan, I didn’t see the problem, but not being a Red Sox fan, I now see it. Still, it doesn’t excuse the refs in the Denver game. .

As some of you probably recall, I was somewhat underwhelmed by my PSP. It was a powerful machine and I had some fun with it, but ultimately I didn’t find enough games for it to make me want to pick it up on a regular basis. It just didn’t really cut it for me as a portable gaming platform, so I sold it.

Over the past month, though, I’ve paid more and more attention to the Nintendo DS. It’s astonishing to me that I see absolutely no one who owns this thing complain about its chops as a gaming platform. So, with the DS Lite now on shelves, this past week I used some birthday money to pick one up. (Ack. 32. I’m now firmly entrenched in my 30s.)

I’m little bit star-crossed on this thing, but ultimately, I think the buzz is 100% dead on. It’s really the best portable gaming platform I’ve ever seen or used. No, it’s not a hardware savant. But the microphone, touch screen and form factor make it, oh I don’t know… about a billion times more enjoyable to use than a PSP. It’s a damn Picasso. I really can’t put words to how much I love gaming with a stylus and touch screen.

The only thing that gives me the tiniest bit of pause is that as sophisticated as the design is, the games really aren’t. It is, after all, Nintendo. They’re geared to appeal to a G-rated audience. So far I’ve played Brain Age (not really a game, but loads of fun nonetheless), The New Super Mario Brothers (retro Nirvana) and Advance Wars DS (how can something so cheesy be so much fun?). They all sport writing/dialogue that is on the basic side of simplistic, which I know is by design and supposedly part of the charm. But as an editor for guys who get paid to write, it makes me cringe. Advance Wars in particular makes me want to strangle the game’s writer, run him over three times with my car, burn his remains and use his ashes for kitty litter. And I would too. But the gameplay is just too damned good.

I’m a little scared to dig into the sports gaming scene for the DS, however. The consensus seems to be that those titles are a little lacking, but frankly, I’ve rather enjoyed my break from sports games of late (OOTP excepted).

Until the past three months I just couldn’t have imagined myself ever owning a piece of Nintendo hardware. The last console of theirs I had was a Super Nintendo for god’s sake. But I have to admit, this whole DS thing is a damn fine system. If you’re on the fence I simply can’t speak highly enough about it.

PS: I feel like I’m channeling some kind of unspoken bond right now with Tony at buttonmashing.com. If you want a corroborating opinion on this thing, well, here you go.

PPS: I’m running late and didn’t have time to proof this post. Please excuse me if the typo list is even longer than usual.

I was just browsing Roar of the Tigers and they posted a quote from Baseball Tonight that just gave me a great big warm fuzzy:

“We’re gonna stop showing WebGems, and just start showing IngeGems.”

That’s in reference to Tigers 3rd baseman, Brandon Inge who has made at least three utterly phenomenal defensive plays in the last two games.

Inge was drafted as an infielder and converted to catcher in the minors because he has a rocket of an arm (no pun intended re: the Tigers facing Clemens tonight), and in 2001 he made his debute for a severely undermanned Tigers club. He was good behind the plate, but he was an awful hitter, struggling to hit .200 in his first three seasons. When Detroit signed Pudge, however, he was used as a super-sub all over the field and then finally converted to 3rd base full time in 2005. He struggled a bit (as one would expect), but lately he’s really putting his entire game together. (Leyland has called him the best athlete on the team, making him the second Tigers manager to say that.)

In addition to his growing defensive prowess the guy has 16 home runs (ties his career high) and 45 RBI. No he’s not an offensive wizard, hitting just .231 this year, but I think most teams would take this kind of offensive and defensive production from a guy hitting ninth in their lineup.

Oh yeah, and the Tigers are now 9-1 in this round of Interleague Play, having swept the Cubs and Cardinals. Is it the sign of the end of times that three of the four hottest teams in baseball are in the AL Central? (The Tigers, White Sox, Twins and Red Sox are all 9-1 in their last ten games.)

GAh! Just finished watching ITA-AUS. Did FIFA have an edict to just award all games to European teams or what? My gawd, what a cheap penalty. Has there been any ‘good’ game in this year’s World Cup..maybe CZR – USA…that’s about it. Every game has been ‘controversial’…it’s getting obscene. Maybe they’ll call a fumble out of the endzone out of bounds at the 1…oh wait, wrong football (see prior post).

I’m grumpy now. I need some more Rumple Minze

Today there was a post on Simmons’ Page 2 about the best YouTube clips. One of them is a viewing of the Patriots-Broncos game. I had gotten over how bad the Patriots got raped in the butt on this one.

These NFL refs have NOTHING on World Cup referees. Nothing. Thanks Simmons, now I’m pissed off.

I’m going to that Denver game this year in NE and I’m going to scream everything at that team. You want In-Com-Plete? I’ll In-Com-Plete your ass. God I hate Denver and NFL refs. Grr. Me mad!!!

Simmons post (it’s #28)
You Tube Direct link.

Marc has posted an extended list of fixes being implemented in Patch 2:

- Schedule evaluation report doesn’t include spring training now
- Improved retiring logic
- Improved contract offering AI if computer teams have lots of money available
- Added two new stat splits: Last Year and 2 Years Ago
- Added an option to automatically delete retired players who never reached the major leagues, saving memory
- Fixed problems with the name database when importing OOTP 6.x leagues
- Fixed importing of HBP, balk and WP ratings from OOTP 6.x leagues
- Added an option to the preferences dialog to select the use of page selectors for sortable lists
- Added accomplishments section to league history
- Fixed crash issues
- Improved pinch-hitting AI
- Tweaked starting pitcher endurance
- Tweaked player aging
- Added milestones to player history summary
- Scrollable player & coaches lists now remember their position
#227 – Fixed wildcard scheduling opponent in initial playoff round
#1694 – Fixed problems with the AI going over the salary cap through trades
#1747 – Fixed problems with releasing player during the offseason, sometimes additional money was added to team expenses
#1770 – Fixed Rule 5 Draft scheduling problems

The FOFC HC Utility is ready, sort of. You can now change the quarter length, but there’s no accelrated clock. Also, even though you can edit the sliders there is a debate on whether or not they work. I played a game last night (Browns @ Buffalo) and Holcombe tossed 5 INTS and Dilfer tossed 6 INTs and thnat was with the INT slider turned down all the way. So I doubt it’s doing anything.

So adding time to the games is meaningless (actually it’s counter-productive) unless more can be done to lower the INT rate.

Anyway, grab it here.

Here’s the instructions:

Unzip the file and run the executable. Click Load and find your career file. Then edit to your delight. When done click Save. The program automatically creates a backup of the original when you save, it can be found as Career[#].bak in the appropriate career folder. As this is a 3rd party program that modifies your career files, use it at your own risk. While it is still in its infancy, I recomend keeping your own backups of everything before you let this little guy have his way with it.

At this point, you can set the quarter length, and sliders which affect the exhibition and career games for the career you edit. I didn’t get a chance to test the sliders enough to know if there is a difference or not. If these sliders don’t seem to work, there is at least one more set that I can try within the data file (go EA storing multiple copies of the same data in the save file).

Along the same lines, I couldn’t get accelerated clock to work yet. It seems that either: A) EA has hardcoded this as disabled, which would make sense with all of the coach in between play crap, or B) I’m changing it in the wrong place (same possibility as the sliders above).

It would be nice if a few of you could test different slider settings to see if you notice a difference. Some of you have played the game far more than me, and would probably notice a difference. In the mean time, I’ll continue testing and trying to track down the true location of the sliders (if currently wrong), and the possibility of making the accelerated clock work.

Come on, I have to use that after today’s World Cup game. It’s been a World Cup weekend for me becuase we’re having our 23094802938507th day of rain.

That goal that Mexico lost on—damn, that was impressive.

I just finished two write ups on two games I really haven’t played much until this week — Baseball Mogul 2007 and Ultimate Baseball Online..both are genres I really didn’t get into (Text Based Sim and MMORPG for baseball), but I can certainly see how they can be a lot of fun. Both have quite a bit of potential, but you’ll have to wait until my write ups are posted for me to get into it more (hey, I have kids to feed).

In other news, GameFly, since Table Tennis was still out, sent over Tomb Raider Xbox360 and MLB2K6 for PSP. I had heard a lot of MLB2K6 for PSP, but I’m not impressed. I’m very impatient and load times like this make a great game poor. I’ll just stick with Sony’s MLB because I’m very happy with it.

In other news, the Orioles signed Ortiz the Pitcher who played like crap for Arizona, but played well for ATL and ATL’s pitching coach is now BAL’s coach. Hey, for the MLB minimum it’s worth the risk. Can get any worse for the O’s, can it?

Well, I’ve tried. Really, I have. I know a lot of people are enjoying this game and hey — that’s great. There’s no accounting for taste, right? You guys know my reasons by now as to why I think this is more potential than payoff:

• 5 minute quarters
• Crazy INT rate
• Poor CPU clock management/Playcalling
• Horrid interface (both in game and in the coach office)
• Terrible draft and FA signing AI
• Tedious design

I need to note that there’s also a lot of very good stuff in the game but it’s just hard for me to rally behind a coaching simulation that combines crappy AI with a crappy interface, no matter how hard-up I am for a good graphics based coaching sim. It’s hard for me to get past some of this stuff.

Oh, I should mention that my earlier player progression complaint was a bit off-base. It’s really not a player progression issue but player rating flucuation. Each player is rated on a sliding scale. A QB might be a 55-81 OVR. What this means is that when he’s at the top of his game he’s an 81 but when he’s at his lowest he’s a 55. This is why all of my players saw their ratings go up during camp. It wasn’t player progression it was that they were all reaching their potential.

I think this is pretty cool, actually. I like it when ratings ebb and flow. Granted I think there is way too much of this in Head Coach as players go up and down like yo-yos, but still…it’s not nearly as loopy as I originally thought.

Speaking of ratings, I love that we finally have more detail such as WR route running, QB short/medium/long accuracy, etc. And on top of that the ratings, at least as far as I can tell, matter more in HC than they ever did in Madden. A WR with shitty hands….has noticeably shitty hands. That’s awesome.

Still, with every step forward, I get frustrated by the lack of what I feel should be absolute no-brainer design decisions.

Why can’t I quickly sub players in and out during a game? Why can’t I say, “Roye, McKinley, Fisk — get in there.” I can’t do that. I cannot make quick global subs during a game which is just beyond asinine in a football game. I can make subs based on formation but what if I want to sit Northcutt’s ass down completely becauise he can’t catch a cold? If there is a way to do that I can’t find it.

Still, I can definitely see the attraction. Hell, despite my groaning I am still playing. Granted, I need to for a review but I think I’d still be tinkering with it even if it was just free time.

As it stands right now, Head Coach is a lot of cool ideas with some good implementation riddled by a bad interface and too much football goofy-ness to be taken too seriously. Unless you just flat out don’t care about CPU GM AI, Playcalling, and stats (which is a legit PoV because just sitting back and calling plays is in fact a lot of fun) it’s hard to recommend the game in its current state.

But wait! The mod squad is, hopefully, on the case.

I was browsing the Old Curmudgeon Front Office Football forum — particularly this thread. I enjoy reading this board mainly because you can just feel the jaded gamerness oozing from your monitor. I respect guys that talk about games like they’re sitting on a porch waiting for those pesky kids to trample on their lawn. I can relate.

In that thread, which is like 24 pages dedicated to Head Coach, Chris Willoughby posted a screen based on some work he has done. In that screen you see Head Coach running on 9 minute quarters.

In addition he states, “Also, all of the slider settings from madden are sitting right beside it. So, I’ll make sure those are editable also.”

and..

“Made decent progress on the utility. I should have it to where you can modify the quarter length, accelerated clock, and cpu/human interception slider tomorrow night. I’ll keep you guys posted.”

*Insert giddy school-girl laughter here*

Now, I’m a realist and I understand that no slider-mod will fix the bad GM AI. That’s simply an EA Sports staple and hey, why mess with tradition, right? BUT — if modders can supply:

• 15 Minute Quarters with the accelerated clock
• A fix for the crazy high INTs — and realize that these two go hand in hand. 15 min quarters even with the fast clock would mean like 10 picks per game unless this is fixed.
• Also, by fixing the clock it would, possibly, mask the poor clock management. I’m OK with the CPU doing timeout oddness with under 2 minutes if it was REALLY under 2 minutes.

I’m not saying this will turn Head Coach into Front Office Football with graphics, but it might just make it worth playing for more than the usual ’2 week new game honeymoon.’

We’ll see.