The Blog for the Sports Gamer

I’m sitting here at 11:45 at night playing a 20 year old boxing game and I’m thinking to myself… I’m not sure if any boxing game has been as much fun to play as this one.

I’m also amazed how much I remember of the game. I’m stunned that I have the timing down for Bald Bull’s Bull charge still.

Little Mac rules, no doubt about it.

I’m running on fumes, but I promise a post tomorrow (Friday) about:

Forza 2 with the Wheel
Shadowrun
New WW2 demo on XBLA
my download column

and other stuff i can’t remember. toodles…

Well, my take on UFO: ET is live today. Not a horrid game but when they said they wanted to remake X-COM I never dreamed they’d literally remake a decade and a half old game.

We also have a look at the next Brothers in Arms game on the 360. World War II will no doubt go on forever…

Anyway back to my lost weekend in North Carolina. When I said we listened to music, ate bad food, drank untold amounts of alcohol and played games…that’s pretty much what I meant.

I have no idea what is or is not in Raleigh, NC outside of a grocery called Harry Teeter or something like that, a campus pub that serves deep fried pickles (that was a first for me) and a Bob Evans restaurant just outside of town.

During our stay (there was 5 or 6 of us depending on when one buddy could escape his house)from late Thursday night (we came in around 12:30 AM) to Monday morning, we played:

Gloom (I lost; neat card game though)
Settlers of Catan (twice) (I split)
Marvel Heroes (I tied as the X-Men with the F4)
Railroad Tycoon (I won. With my wife at home in Johnstown I actually have a chance to win this)
PitchCar (I lost…horribly.)
Citadels (I lost; this is a great game though)
Arkham Horror (a 6 hour marathon game..but we beat back Cthulhu)
Monster Mayhem (a criminally bad horror game and I have no idea who won. I think we just quit)
HeroScape (Team game and we lost…bad. Not a huge fan of this. It’s a real money sink.)
Guillotine (I came in 2nd…which I guess is still losing)

That’s a lot of gaming in a few days. But it was a great way to spend a weekend.

Of course I get back and play ball in my Tuesday night league and take a jumper and land on someone’s foot–popping my ankle again. It’s swelled a bit, my ankle boot is back on and I’m taking it in srtide. It’s my yearly 2-3 week Injured Reserve time.

Ugh… work has been insane of late. I’ve got about 6 different projects all with different project leads all trying to get me to get things done at the same time. Oh, well.

News bits for the day…

1. Brewers are, well…. sucking it up to the extreme. I can’t believe how bad the central is though. The Brewers had a 7 game lead when they were 14 games over .500. They’re now 5 games over .500 and have a 5.5 game lead. If they would have gone .500 over this stretch they would be leading the divsion by double digits. Oh, well. Hopefully things settle down soon. One thing that has been amazing though is the Home Run power of Prince Fielder. Man, when that kid connects… he crushes the ball.

2. The new version of the Gametap client is out. New games for the week, Tomb Raider Legend, Metal Slug 2, Metal Slug X, Another King of Fighters game, and something called Panzer Dragoon… I think Dan’s interested in that one.

3. Is there anyone that reads this site that didn’t write reviews at one time or another? heh. Judging by the comments, looks a lot of us have that in common.

4. I’m really behind on getting my next and final segment of the Pro Yakyuu Spirits 4 translation and guide up, but there is going to be a huge update next week. One of our readers has gone above and beyond the call of duty and has put together a hell of a guide for the Spirits section and is now working on the Pennant Chase mode as well. When he’s all done with it, I’ll be putting together one big HTML guide, containing all of my parts as well as his work, on one of my web sites. Currently the work that he’s done amounts to a 10+ meg Word Document…. so there is a ton of stuff there. Having looked it over though, it’s going to be a terrific guide for those of you who have the game, or want to try out the Spirit and Pennant Chase modes.

5. For those of you keeping score at home, here’s how Dan ranked this years baseball games for the PS3.

PYS4
MLB2K7
MLB 07: The Show

I totally agree with those rankings. Both MLB games are decent, but not great, but PYS4 is in a league by itself.

6. Speaking of Dan, where’s the trivia? What gives?

Hey what a surprise that A-Rod would do something unsportsmanlike. Shocking isn’t it? I mean when he’s not knocking a ball out of a Boston Red Sox player’s hand, of course.

Honestly I saw the play, and it was tough to see whether or not A-Rod said something, but he did admit to yelling just like someone in little league would.

Yeah, it’s legal, but it’s definitely unsportsman like and right up A-Rod’s alley.

Next thing you know, fans will catch outs and umps will call it a home run. Oh wait, that happened. Good thing I’m not bitter!

I’m guessing Yankees fans will cite that it’s within the rules and the rest of the world will say A-Rod is a loser.

Twenty five years ago today, May 30, 1982, Cal Ripken played consecutive game #1. On the BAL-KC game they had highlights of the game vs. Toronto…ah, Memorial Stadium…the Busch sign looks so stupid compared to the National Bohemian sign that lit up whenever there was an Orioles home run…..any way…I’m old.

Since Bill has been elevated to whatever his title is on GameShark, I have had to become more critical of my own writing. At the risk of sounding like a suck-up, Bill knows writing.

This becomes more apparent to me after reading the Forza Motorsport 2 review at IGN. Hilary has been at IGN for some time, and despite years on the job, either him, or his editor allowed this sentence in the review:

“If you love cars, you will likely love Forza 2.”

You are kidding me right? Likely? Nice qualifier so that it isn’t a finding of fact. But I mean seriously, it’s like saying, “needless to say Forza 2 isn’t for fans of soccer.” WTF?

Obviously it didn’t take Bill to make me notice this example, but you see what he’s trying to do at Gameshark to move above drivel like this.

Dan’s spin on the PS3 version was posted on Monday.

I just got back from a long weekend trip to North Carolina to see some old college buddies. Everything was a big blur. Lotta fun, though. Good music, bad food, a lot of alcohol, and about a dozen board games. We were total chick magnets.

The long weekend is over which means of course, more games!

My local Gamestop informed me that Forza 2 and Shadowrun were “shipping” today and not released, which really sucks. MS is usually good about getting product out for ‘release’ dates, but this was not the case this time around. In the 15 minutes I was there, the phone was ringing off the hook about Forza. Lots of people are bummed.

The GameStop only received two game guides for Forza…which is terrible. I normally don’t do game guides unless I get ‘em free, hey I’m a cheap bastard…but after seeing the track layouts and the 250+ manual, it seemed like this was money well spent. Photos and track layouts don’t look good in ASCII on gamefaqs….

In other news, my Wii downloaded the two games this morning, although it did take some time. Basically, my first thought was $15 for this? Although in JJ& Jeff you do have to jump over attacking birds who will kill you by pooping on you, so that is probably worth $6. ActRaiser, on the other hand, I’m just not feeling it.

Tomorrow we are going to get Mad Tracks for the 360, which according to Major Nelson is similar to Re-Volt….let’s hope it is. I still think one of the stupid things that was done with the original XBox Live beta was to have Re-Volt but then NOT have it for the final…grrr…

In other news, Mortal Kombat was released for the Wii today so I picked that up…I also picked up the DS lawyer game becuase it was 33% off and I broke down and bought a fan for the 360 after it locked up in Star Wars …it was on sale for $10 so what can you do.

In case you missed it my MLB 07 the Show review was posted for the PlayStation 3 yesterday, click here to view it. Definitely a letdown for me.

For the past two weeks, I keep getting error code 204038 when purchasing a game from the Wii shop. Nintendo support says to ‘try again later, try turning off all wireless appliances and change the wireless channel from 6 to 11 or 1″. I’ve done all that and still no dice.

Anyone else having problems, or as usual is it just me?

1. The US and Iran held formal talks for the first time since 1980, when Iran took US people as hostage. So just to make sure I understand this, we can talk to Iran, we can re-establish diplomatic relations and travel to Vietnam whom we had a war with but a country 90 miles away from Florida we can’t talk to because they are Communist. It doesn’t make any sense to me.

2. Sorry to hear that Charles Nelson Reilly died. I think he’s the reason why there’s a Game Show Network.

3. Not sure if you heard about Venezuela shutting down the opposition TV station by ‘not renewing their license,’ but I didn’t see it on the regular news over the weekend. You know where I heard about it? Telemundo. Nice to see our news reporting sucks compared to any other station in the world. Well that may not be true, but you know what I mean — we can spend 200 hours talking about Anna Nicole’s will and Lindsay’s drinking problem, but we can’t talk about the actual important stuff….unbelievable..

Seeing as how the Brewers are about to lose their 12th game out of 15, I figured I would bore all of you with a quick story about my daughter.

We’re really big hockey fans, Wisconsin hockey in particular, and my daughter has been going to games since she was 1 month old, so she’s pretty used to all of the cheers at this point. Whenever Wisconsin scores a goal the crowd chants “Sieve” at the other goalie. They’ve been doing it for decades and my daughter really enjoys it.

The other day my wife and daughters came to my office to have lunch with me. I helped load the kids back into the car and was just saying goodbye to my wife when my 2 year old daughter said from the back seat, “Love you, daddy” and blew a kiss. I was in the midst of saying something to my wife so I didn’t make the motion to catch the kiss right away. I’d say that it took me maybe 2 seconds before I mimed catching the kiss.

Without missing a beat, my daughter starts chanting “Sieve! Sieve! Sieve!”

Going from telling me she loves me to mocking me in less than 2 seconds. There is no doubt that kid is mine.

Trivia is taking a hiatus for the weekend — but I did want to follow up and say the worst game I played by MS for the PC was absolutely MS Soccer. God it sucked and sucked hard….Joel agreed with me on that one!

So far, it’s been a very shitty Saturday.

1. Despite thinking I have a three day weekend, I was called into work to handle an issue. When you’re the ultimate boss, sometimes that kinda sucks. Oh well…

2. I received a notice today as an abutter that the undeveloped land past my backyard lot line will now be “Shitty Estates == A Really Crappy Community.”

3. I received a notice from my cable company that their fake Tivo will increase in price from $9.95 to $12.95 monthly with the same crappy features like not recording shows and random reboots!

4. Other than that, it’s a nice day outside! Wee!

PYS4 is the best baseball game on the market.

I wouldn’t have a single hesitation in recommending that people buy a PS3 for this game. If you like baseball, this is the game you want to be playing. Sure there is a language barrier, but once you’re in the game, it’s just another baseball game.

You know it’s a great game when you give up 1 run in the top of the 9th and you don’t even mind losing.

I also can’t remember the last time, in a console baseball game, where I was able to drop a bunt down the 3rd base line and get a hit out of it.

I’m getting someone’s help with the Pennant Chase mode in the game, so hopefully I can dig into that soon. Honestly though, I wouldn’t be upset if I didn’t get a translation for that mode. I could play the MVP, Online, and Exhibition modes all day and still be an incredibly happy camper.