The Blog for the Sports Gamer

Just curious if anyone grabbed the new Oblivion expansion yet.

Too bad Microsoft doesn’t sell a 2400 points card. On both the Wii and 360, you have these stupid cards/point amounts you have to buy. It reminds me of buying 12 hotdogs and 8 hot dog rolls.

I am curious about this game though. Let me know if you grabbed it before XBL went down and your thoughts.

Got my Gamefly games yesterday — Virtua Tennis 3 (X360) and Cooking Mama (Wii). Sega sent VT3 already so that one went right back. Played about 30 minutes of Cooking Mama and sent that one back too. What a turd. Neat idea, poorly implemented. Big shock.

Boring week for releases….although the Wii is getting a Medal of Honor game, which I’ll rent and check out.

In the meantime, I continue playing DDR as my exercise. Blog should be updated soon.

I’m still trying to find out what is happening with MLB 07 for the PS3. Trying to go through my old Sony contacts but they are all gone. Grrr.

Dan’s review of The Show (PS2) is up today. This is upsetting. I really don’t want to buy a PS3 (Todd has my PS2 at the moment) but since I have shelved MLB 2K7…the temptation is there. Hey, it’s a tax write off, right?

It’s safe to say that this week looks to be pretty underwhelming. Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV (SNES) on the Wii, Jetpac Refueled on Live Arcade… and um… maybe Sony will put something out this week. (Would it kill them to let us know about titles in advance?)

I remember playing a great deal of Romance of the Three Kingdoms III on the SNES back in the early 90’s, but I don’t know if I could manage to get interested in playing it again today. Micromanagement games aren’t nearly as much fun for me lately.

Back to Puzzle Quest and helping take care of the baby.

We just got home about an hour or so ago and everyone is doing well.

Thanks to everyone for the nice comments…. even Jonah’s. Although I already told my daughter Gaby that she can’t kiss a boy until she’s 30.. and a girl until she’s 20. (I live in Madison, we’re liberal that way.)

The thought of having to give away both of my daughters is a rough one at this point… but it’s something that I’m looking forward to as well.

As for sports, I missed the entire weekend of sports. I wish I would have had a chance to see some of the hockey this weekend as the Gopher games on Saturday and Sunday night sounded like great games to watch. As for basketball, I’ll be pulling for Georgetown, but I won’t be going out of the way to watch it. I just like the story of the son of the old coach (John Thompson III) coaching the son of a former legend (Patrick Ewing Jr.) for the same school. It just seems like a cool story to me.

As for gaming, I put in a ton of time playing Puzzle Quest for the DS while I was up in the hospital. As a dad, there wasn’t a ton for me to do with Alexandra other than just help out when my wife wasn’t feeding her, so I spent a good bit of the time playing on the DS. I can’t give this game enough praise though. It’s a wonderful combination of the RPG/Strategy/Puzzle genres. I highly recommend taking a look at the PC demo if you get the chance.

For now, I’ll be trying to enjoy the weather. 74 in Wisconsin in March? Gotta love it.

Funny, I was also going to post something similar to what Bill said. My cable company only charges $14 a month for HBO though. LOL.

I have to say, Rome did tidy things up nicely, but the ending was kinda stupid and very historically inaccurate. Anyone who knows Roman history knows that the kid dies and Octavian makes a comment about there being “Too Many Caesars.” Of course, in real life, Pullo wasn’t the father either…but it seemed to be so realistic everywhere else.

I’m sad that the show is ending. You could have seen the origins of how the Sopranos started or something…that would have been great.

Like Bill said, with the end of the Sopranos and Entourage, I think it may be time to save the $14 a month and just enjoy the DVDs when they come out.

Speaking of shows, it seems we are in repeat hell tonight with the exception of 24. Who knew that dancing with the stars would kill all the other shows. I haven’t watched last week’s 24 but this year the show is getting old. I have a lot of catching up to do…I still need to watch last week’s Lost as well.

I hope you saw SNL’s Weekend Update and the Sanjaya singing. That was hysterical.

Gamewise, I submitted my MLB 07 The Show review over the weekend. Didn’t really play much else except for DDR trying to burn off those fat cells.

Well, it looks like Oden vs. Hibbert in the battle of 7-footers. I cannot wait to see that matchup.

Rome’s series finale was tonight, and it wasn’t too bad — very rushed, but they at least tried to wrap everything up. With both Rome and Deadwood in the history books, the Sopranos is the only thing left that I am willing to pay for and that ends this summer. I like Entourage, but for a 30 minute show…that’s not enough to keep me as a customer. My HBO costs around $17 a month and I honestly cannot tell you the last time I sat down to watch a movie start to finish on any of the umpteen HBOs that I get.

I was afk yesterday — my work connection was DOA (a nice 300 baud connection, if that) and I went out last night — saw Lucinda Williams at the Orpheum…good show. Drove home in some really crappy snowstorm. Gotta love New England!

Anyhoo, I think I mentioned this earlier, but I picked up a Sirius XACT Visor radio with home and car kit for $27.90 last weekend. I decided to go ahead and activate the radio and listened in my car. It’s funny - I had a great time listening. The sound seemed better than the XM (funny cuz XM is direct while Sirius is FM modulated), and the playlists also seemed better — almost like what I remember XM being in 2002 when I first bought it.

So I’ll keep checking it out. So far I like 12 (Super Shuffle) and 24 (Lithium). Let me know if you have any channel recommendations.

Congrats to Glen on the birth of his second child. Guess he won’t be on much. Heh. I remember those days.

Here’s a picture of Daddy and Alexandra Marie.

Everybody is doing fine.

Two girls… man… I’m screwed.

Go Bucks!

…that’s all I got. Been a crazy day.

The next time you hear from me, I’ll be the proud papa of another child. We tried to find out what the gender was this time around, but the baby was a bit shy for the ultrasound and as a result, we now have the ultimate surprise awaiting us tomorrow.

My wife has been having issues all throughout the pregnancy, so they’re inducing her tomorrow morning at 5:30 a.m.

If things go well, I’ll be back and posting before the end of the weekend about the joys of having 2 children under the age of three at home.

If you have a PS3, make sure you download the latest firmware and the 50MB Folding@home project. This program will allow your PS3 to become part of the biggest supercomputer in the world.

It looks like quite a few of us have signed up and this is fantastic news..you can actually help solve some of the world’s problems.

Click here to view the article or click here to see the stats — you’ll see that PS3 users are really helping out!

Feel free to join the SportsGamer Team…let’s see how many TFLOPS we can push! Our group # is 57557.

It’s Friday!

So I finally was able to download the Resistance patch on the PS3. I still had a few too many ‘network errors’…must be the 10 people that bought the console in Europe clogging the site.

Glen made me buy Tecmo Bowl for the Wii…I can see why that game is fun. But boy, it sure does feel like the Real Sports Football for the Atari 2600 the way the players run (try it on GameTap and see for yourself).

Speaking of GameTap, I gotta play me some of that..been a while…

Anyway, I digress. This weekend is the Golden Tee World Championship in Vegas. Now that’s a golf competition I could get into!

I’m doing the review for DDR Universe for GameShark and we decided it would be fun to do a blog detailing my exercise plan (you can view the blog on Gameshark.com). It’s only going to be about my DDR experience, I’m still here for everything else.

Played my first DDR game last night. That is hard for someone uncoordinated like myself!

Good lord this is not good on the old ticker. First the Xavier finish and now this. If you would have told me before the game that Oden would play 18 minutes due to foul trouble, score 9 points along with 3 boards and that Tenn. would shoot 51% from 3PT range as a team, and that Conley would sit for half of the first 20 minutes — I’d have guessed an easy UT win. This was just an improbable game all around.

OSU may not be playing like a #1 seed for 40 full minutes right now, but to come back like that shows that they’re not going to fade away gently into that goodnight, either. What an amazing basketball game. If OSU was ever going to lose a game, that was the recipe for it right there. I want to thank Tennessee for shooting 8-17 from the FT line, too. How can a team shoot better from 3 PT range than from the stripe is beyond me — but thanks all the same.

I was surprised at Coach Pearl’s comment about Conley shooting 14 FTs and Lofton (Tenn’s amazing sharpshooter) shooting zero, as if the refs were calling a lopsided game. Lofton shot 16 threes and was allergic to the paint…when and where is he supposed to get to the FT line? The game I watched had weird officiating througout (Oden’s 4th foul was a hilarious call). When your team shoots 30+ 3 pointers, getting to the FT line obviously isn’t a top priority.

I was listening to ESPN Radio on the way home yesterday and they mentioned this article in the NY Times from earlier this week and it’s really disturbing to see what college sports have become.

For those of you that haven’t seen the story, it is about how O.J. Mayo (the number #1 recruit in college basketball) decided to sign to play for USC. He didn’t tour the campus until after he signed his letter of intent. He wouldn’t give out his cell phone number to Tim Floyd, the coach at USC. Basically, he decided to go to USC because Los Angeles was the best place to market himself for his NBA future.

If you get a chance, take a look at the story. It’s a very depressing look at the state of recruiting for college sports.