The Blog for the Sports Gamer

Was just reading what has become my favorite libertarian democrat website this morning, Daily Kos, and one of the contributors put up a great comment about a recent Q&A with Al Gore and how the experience reinforced his hatred of the national media for bastardizing the value of candidates who might actually have more than two or three active brain cells to rub together. Check out both links if you get a chance.

Honestly. Yet another mark of an ongoing era that I will never forgive, and never forget. The elevation by the supposed masters of our discourse of vapid, boozy barroom conversation as the mark of national leadership. Anti-intellectualism embraced now for perhaps twenty five years by pundits that pretend mightily at being erudite, but can only manage it in the confines of their own swelled heads and whose eyes gloss over like those of dolls if a conversation makes it beyond the first few words they can scribble down.

Dear pundit class: bite me, and I mean that sincerely. Dear Al Gore: whether you ever run again or not is up to you. But I’m glad to know you, even if only for a ten minute stretch, and I’d give my eyeteeth to have a beer with you.

I was talking to a friend the other night and he turned me on to this French lass, Alizee. Of course, he wanted me to see this video of her because let’s just say she works it — it being the thing that Beyonce wants you to check on. It’s rather impressive video and probably would be an FCC issue.

Just hit up youtube.com and search for Alizee. Now, the problem is that I have that damn song in my head. Look for J’en ai marre, which I think translates to I’m fed up. It’s pretty catchy en francais…bu en anglais, it sounds pretty stupid (there’s an English version on YouTube as well…bubbles and water? WTF..it sounds so much hotter in French…kinda like 99 Luft Balloons).

Anyway, she could be the next Nena in America if anyone in America would release her stuff. Of course, maybe if the US would buy her music, she could buy a new outfit. Look at all the videos of J’en ai marre, and you’ll see the same two guitar playing guys, and her in the same outfit doing the same routine. I think I hear other things besides guitars in the song……

Alright, I know you guys are lazy. Here’s a link to one video.

PS . According to Wikipedia, her little dance was the inspiration for the Night Elf’s dance in World of Warcraft…

Last night, with the O’s having a 4-0 lead in the 8th and Chris Ray getting ready to pitch, I thought I could relax and hit the hay. Another shitty day + shitty World Cup = bummed Dan.

Little did I know that it was about to get worse. I woke up this morning and heard that the Orioles pitchers suck so bad,they can’t even do an intentional walk.

Todd “I suck” Williams, who sucks regularly for the Orioles came on in the 10th after Chris Ray gave up 2 pinch hit HRs…then the Marlins got a bunt single…then he went to intentional walk a player.

Except he threw the ball over the plate and the hitter nailed it for an RBI single. It’s hard to believe, but since I was stupid and bought MLB.TV to watch the Orioles, I used their on demand service to see all the Todd Williams singles given up last night. You have to see this video if you have MLB.TV. It is hysterical. And very sad , if you’re an Orioles fan. 5th place, here we come. I hope we can beat KC..

No, not me. Definitely not me. But evidently that does describe Tigers owner Mike Illitch these days. And who could blame him? Bob Wojonowski of the Detroit News put up an excellent column today, in which he interviewed the oft-maligned owner. (And hey, when your team is the losingest in baseball over a ten year span, you’re going to be maligned.) Anyway, it’s really good stuff and worth a look. Here’s the usual snippet:

Luck helps, absolutely. And no one will forgive 12 ugly years for one special season. But there is joy in Tigertown, and the 76-year-old owner who spent much of his fortune and his reputation chasing it, doesn’t mind being seen again.

Near the end of the interview, I asked Ilitch what it’s like in public these days. Slowly, he grinned. He told a quick story of taking his wife and daughter to the airport Thursday morning. He said he handed the luggage to a baggage handler, and when the worker recognized him, she threw her arms out and hugged him, squeezing hard.

“It almost welled my eyes up,” Ilitch said as he almost welled up again, right there in his office. “But that’s the town we are. Growing up, we were so infatuated with baseball, that was our life. Everybody used to sit at the kitchen table and talk baseball. The Tigers were ingrained in everyone’s lives.”

They’re ingrained now, undoing some pain by doing so well. Technically, the Tigers haven’t accomplished anything major yet, except maybe one thing. By winning, by stirring a city, by reinvigorating veteran players and one persistent owner, they’re reminding everyone why it used to hurt so badly, and now feels so good.

Ugh! I am so pissed off.
This morning, I read the Boston Globe and caught up on the World Cup action. If you lose in the World Cup, apparently it’s solely due to the official and not because you can’t score a goal. That being said, I do think our group was a true “Group Of Death.” The Czech Republic was ranked #2 in the World and is also going home. Meanwhile, Mexico, as seems to be the rule, gets the “group of lamers”.

Sometimes I do think there is an anti-US conspiracy, but that being said, if you score 1/2 your goals through the opponent’s team, you have a problem. There were no goals called back because of offside that were questionable (the ITA game was the correct call) and so forth.

A poster on the last game said that Reyna sucked, well my opinion has dropped significantly after yesterday’s game and I would go so far as to agree with him. Nice way to give up the ball for the first goal. Another article mentions how Arena was creating a Frankenteam with Reyna at the center, but he wasn’t good enough to spring free people like Beasley.

The only thing that I’ll take out of the US team at the World Cup was Clint Dempsey’s “suck it” goal from yesterday that was awesome. Reyna crossed over to him and he just blasted it. Dempsey is a player for the Revolution so after that goal I’m sure MLS will give him a transfer to some European team where he’ll make lots of $$ but warm the bench. See, it’s a European conspiracy!!

I watched the MLS game between Columbus and NE Wednesday, and aside from “WTF were they thinking having this game mid-week in Columbus during the World Cup,” the game itself was pretty good. MLS is not bad soccer at all these days. I just wish more people would support it. It feels like Arena Football has a bigger audience…then again, most Americans hate scores of 1-0, but a score like 85-78 is supposedly more exciting, even if you’re playing on a pinball field (hey I enjoy Arena too, but that ball bounces like crazy)….

Marc Duffy has posted a fix list for patch 2, which has now gone out to the beta testers. No word on an ETA for it. Naturally, that’ll depend on how the testing goes. Here’s the fix list:

1.0.2
—–

- Fixed a series of memory leaks causing the game to perform badly the longer it was left open and simming
- Improved the memory footprint of the game when handling large amounts of data
- Improved loading time and game speed
- Trade offers no longer expire after using the back button
- The game now remembers position filters when on the lineup or ratings page
- The free agent pool after creating a league no longer contains top prospects
- Player list now sorted by last names instead of first names
- Fixed scrollbar bug on player history page and other pages
- The AI no longer adjusts lineups for human teams when managing a game
- Fixed problems with the usage of depth chart settings
- Added Wild Pitches to the team pitching stats table
- Added passed balls to the team fielding stats table
- Added player league level to the options available in the filter dialog for player lists
- Tweaked Passed Ball and Wild Pitch frequencies
- Tweaked player position rating calculation & importing
- Fixed importing of OOTP 6.5 HBP ratings
- Middle Relievers are valued less in trades
- Adjusted salaries for closers
- Improved 40-man roster selection AI
- Improved bullpen AI
- Tweaked injury severeness
- Fixed rare crash when viewing league history

I just got home from a day of golf (one of the perks of my job, if not the only one), and played back the games on ESPN and ESPN 2. Hey what a surprise, a phantom penalty kick and a 2-1 loss.

Of course, the referee whining gets tired. I will say, I don’t feel so bad about MLS after this disaster of a World Cup. That being said, you have to score some goals in order to move on, ya know?

What a massive disappointment. Let’s assume that the USA drops from #5 to at least #17, becuase they sucked.

Getting back to Todd and Uno, I just submitted my Uno review to GameShark. It should be posted soon. It rules, I haven’t had any of the disasters that Todd mentioned — Todd should post his GamerScore card like someone else did :).

Meanwhile it seems insanely difficult to rent from GameFly these days, or as I like to call it “ShortWaitFly.” Getting a hold of Table Tennis is like getting a Cabbage Patch Kid circa 1983. Oh well….

I need to take a HC break due to other work stuff but after last night’s 6 hour session and playing it most of the morning I just think this is a super cool idea that is poorly executed.

The devil is in the details when it comes to games like this and the more you look at what’s going on the more you feel as if you’re playing in bizarro-world.

The draft AI is just plain goofy. Hawk goes #1, Bush #12, Young #20, Santonio Holmes #9 to the Lions (who need every wide out in the league I guess). I know the game doesn’t know it’s Bush, but his ratings are very very good…and he goes #12.

On draft day you get like 30 seconds to contact a team to work a trade. 30 seconds. Good luck. At least you get 5 mins to make your pick. The scout system is really neat, but again, the draft execution is just plain poor.

Training camp is a GREAT idea, getting your team ready and learning specific plays (I also like the play designer) — problem is that if you manually do camp your players go WAY up in ratings. I finished camp and the Browns were ready to win the Super Bowl. If you SIM parts of camp, your players take a ratings hit, at least mine did. I ended camp with nearly every starter listed in green (meaning an 80+ rating) even 36 year old vets saw their ratings skyrocket. Sorry, but that’s batshit crazy.

Trade AI isn’t too bad, really. I landed Rivers from SD for a 2nd round pick, which sounds crazy but Rivers’ ratings were not very good at the time. Of course after camp he was Kosar-incarnate, but still..

The 5 minute game clock is a problem for me. I get about 90 plays per game which is about 30 shy of what a real NFL game is, on average. The real issue is clock management. The CPU sees 2:00 as being the real 2 minute warning, which of course it isn’t. It starts burning time outs way before it needs to. The killers in terms of the games are the crazy number of INTs (in the 3 games I played I saw 8 INTs on average per game), the fact that there are next to no penalties called (I get called for clipping on an off-tackle running play, which I’d LOVE to see…) and the CPU playcalling is just plain broken.

Here’s what I mean: Browns 17 Eagles 14, :55 secs to go, Philly at midfield w/o any timeouts. They call a run. Hmm, ok, maybe trying to catch me off guard? No gain. They come back, call a toss sweep to Westbrook, who gets 5 and stays in bounds. :20 secs to go, they run a HB screen for no 4 yards. 4th and 1 at the Browns 41 with about :08 to play and they finally call a deep pass, which is picked off. Game over. Back to OOTP and PureSim.

Friggin EA Sports…

Whew. I just put in about a 6 hour HC session tonight (thanks honey!) and I have a ton of stuff to talk about. Tomorrow. I’m pretty much fried right now.

I’ll leave you with this, though:

With the #12 pick the Cleveland Browns select: RB Reggie Bush, USC

Seriously.

Also, remember how I said the Browns sucked? Well, I’m almost done w/ camp and my player ratings EXPLODED. Most of my starters are in the high 80s or low 90s, ratings wise. I wish I knew how this all worked because my team looks like a world beater. Maybe it keeps changing…either that or the Browns had the best camp—ever. Even Trent Dilfer’s ratings went up to an 85 overall.

Oh, yeah, and if you are keeping score, that’s about a 6 hour seesion and all I am still not through training camp yet. I haven’t played a GAME yet (in this career anyway).

TeamXbox has posted some pretty good-looking videos from NCAA 2007 on their site. Visually, the game is starting to look really impressive. We’ll never see this generation of consoles produce the level of detail as the wetdream Madden images EA was throwing around a year ago, but it’s still a huge visual improvement over the Xbox version. Anyway, they’re a bit better -in terms of execution- than the IGN videos that also went up this week.

I’m sure by now some of you have the game and are tooling around with it. For those still on the fence, well, so am I and I’ve had it for a couple of days now.

On the field, I’m not sold yet. I haven’t played enough games in order to categorize the oddities as blatant flaws or the unpredictable nature of football. Until I can classify something as a pattern I think it’s unfair to slam it outright.

The “office” portion of the game is pretty deep. I think the interface is a mangled mess, comlete with oodles of time wasting animations such as hand shaking new coaches and watching fired coaches get up and leave, but that’s what you get with a big(er) budget sports strategy game — you get needless, time wasting animations.

On day one of my tenure as new Browns coach I fired pretty much my entire staff. This game HATES Cleveland. I dunno if every teams’ coaches are like this but based on the Browns coach roster, the team is lucky to get to the stadium on time. Also, based on roster strength, the game has the Browns as the worst team in the league. Even if you aren’t convinced that the Browns are a playoff team, do you really think they’re the worst team in football? They did draft 11th ya’ know.

Anyway, some funny stuff: I fired a lot of coaches and then turned around and hired Romeo Crennnel to lead the defense. Ha. He would have taken a job as the LB coach! Seems a tad odd to me.

The office portion is broken down into tasks and you can only do such much each day. After firing like 7 coaches I didn’t have enough time to interview and hire all of the guys I needed before the owner got mad. You also just can’t sit back and play sandbox with your playbook. When you alter it it eats up your allowed tasks.

One thing that could be problematic is the owner goals. My owner wants me to win 8 games, draft a 75+ rated QB, and finish in the top 8 in sacks allowed and rushing yards. All well and good (the top 8 thing is kinda silly but hey…owners are a fickle lot). What could suck is if I somehow make the playoffs with the lowly rated Charlie Frye, finish 15th in sacks and say, 18th in rushing. Will the owner still get pissed? I know you’re thinking, “no way” but remember NHL 2005? If you didn’t follow the task list you got fired, regardless of how well your team did. Hopefully Head Coach will not follow the same pattern.

I’ve officially caved on the whole Uno thing. I downloaded the demo a few weeks ago, thought it was neat and cast it aside. But on a whim this past weekend, I downloaded the full version and it’s just about every bit as addicting as Dan says it is. It’s one of those games that’s just so simple to play that it’s hard not to get wrapped up in it.

That is, as long as you’re not playing with one or more complete and total wonks at the table. In that regard it’s like every other multiplayer game. If you’re playing with a bunch of people that act like grown-ups and are just looking to kill some time it’s a riot. If you end up with a guy like this monosyllabic stooge at one of my tables last night, it’s a miserable gaming experience. First the guy refused to make a play, letting Uno timeout on each of his turns and force playing his cards. Then he announces his presence by slamming us a geeks with fat @#@ mothers hanging out in our basements. Etc. Etc. Then the inevitable slamming of Detroit as a wasteland (I have a Tigers logo for my profile now). Then came the moaning. Seriously. You can’t make this up. He moaned. For like sixty seconds straight the guy moaned. Then he started to do it again and I finally just muted my headset. (The only reason I hadn’t up to that point was that I was chatting with one of the other guys at the table.)

Don’t get me wrong. I’m neither shocked nor offended by this. The number of socially maladjusted puddles of abhorrent humanity that populate any online environment can be well and truly scary. I just don’t get the motivation. I mean it’s Uno for god’s sake. How pathetically starved for attention do you have to be to go that far out of your way to stir up trouble in online Uno? It really just boggles the mind.

Been a long night. Tuesday being basketball night I’m exhausted, sore, and ankle-weary. Still, I wanted to get more Head Coach time in tonight. I really should put the game down for a sec because I have other reviews to work on, but…ah well.

I’m still just playing default exhibition games, but a few points of note:

• The game loves the big play. Just loves it. Im my game against the Chiefs the Browns gave up a staggering amount of HUGE plays from Priest Holmes going off with several runs over 35 yards to the KC defense returning three INTs for TDs. This is pretty consistent with the other games I have played. This could be from bad playcalling, though. Still, the AI is struggling to stop corner routes when the QB decides to hit the proper target. Don’t trust Dilfer to do this. heh.

• The AI is weird — I say that because in the my first game it took a knee on its own 20 with 1:00 to go in the half but in this game KC was up like 28-7 and canme out guns blazing with :50 secs to go until halftime. (Yeah, the Browns are God-awful in this game..or maybe I’m a shitty coach…)
• You can’t “pause” the game to survey stats, etc. If you do stuff like that during the game your assistants call the plays while you check to see how well your QB is doing. Not sure if I like that or not. I see what they are going for with this, but still…it’s a video game. I’d like to look at stats and not feel like I am playing an RTS.
• With the games set to 5 mins, fatigue is not a problem. Sigh. This is just bat-shit dumb to force us to play 5 min games.
• There is no play by play. Again they are going for the whole “coaching from the sideline” experience.
• I love how you can do pre-snap stuff to tell your QB to look at a certain receiver 1st, 2nd, etc. You can send guys in motion, call audibles from the sideline and other similar stuff. Thing is, going back to the time issue, if you DO that sorta thing, which I assume to be kinda important, it really runs that clock down so your play count is going to be low. The CPU AI never struggles to gte a play off BTW. I have also yet to see the AI send a guy in motion. Maybe I just missed it.

In a stunning development, the NHL figured out it makes more sense to let everyone have their game licensed. (yeah, F U MLB and NFL). Click here for the story.

Some musings while the Severe Thunderstorm watch continues:

1. I’m not a big follower of the NBA, but if there’s anything I’ve learned in the past two days, it’s that it makes World Cup soccer officiated games look well done. Hey, you know we all make mistakes and in soccer, it’s tough to catch every little thing that happens (giving red cards for shit fouls, that’s another story)..but my gawd, hearing the WWE like impressions most people are giving about the NBA — coming from people who don’t even care, I am awestruck by how bad that game is. Oh well. No biggie for me, but I’m just very surprised.

2. MLB.TV Mosaic is looking much, much better and I can now recommend it. I still wish you could put the games you want to watch on one page (you’re stuck with the 6 they give you, so as I type this I have FLA @ BAL, NYY @ PHI, STL @ CWS and PIT @ KC. Damn, Pit @ KC, now that is a turd of a game.

3. With MLB.TV doing so well (or so I hear), why won’t the NFL do something similar? Can you imagine the $$ they would make?

4. My FIFA World Cup review is now online, click here.