The Blog for the Sports Gamer

So, I heard that Best Buy had been starting to demo Rock Band and I just had to find out how I felt about it. 

Someone was on the drums when I got there so I got a chance to try out the new guitar, and it’s safe to say that I didn’t care for it.  The strum bar has no click and it just feels very loose.  The fret buttons also seem to take more pressure to register and I was having a much harder time on medium than I thought I would have. 

Now, onto the drums. 

None of the demo units have a kick pedal.  As a result of this the drums difficulty is greatly reduced.  I was able to jump straight into Hard difficulty and get some pretty decent scores in the 4 or 5 songs that I played.  Here are a few things that I noticed about the drum kit though, in no particular order.

- Playing the drums while standing up is too f’n weird. I felt like I was Sheila E for a while.  Which was nice, because I don’t feel pretty all that often. 

- The pads are going to take a beating.  Unless you’re a long time drummer, you won’t be hitting the center of the pads and the outsides will get pretty beat up… and the Best Buy ones were getting a decent amount of wear in less than a day. 

- The yellow drum is the high hat and the red is the snare.  I really hope that the full version will allow you to reverse those two.  When I played about 5 or 6 years ago, I was always crossing my right hand over my left to play.  So, the natural position for me would be to have the red be the high hat and the yellow be the snare. That’s just a drummer thing though. 

- There wasn’t a single song that I played with someone where they were able to finish the guitar section while I was playing the drums. Every single person was having really bad issues playing the guitar.  The only person I saw finish a guitar section was a Best Buy guy who went to some conference where they got to play the game a month or so ago. 

Every person who got ticked playing the guitar section immediately walked over to play Guitar Hero 3 and was just nailing things on that.  What that means exactly, I can’t say for sure.

- The on screen singers lip synching was spot on.  That part looked really good.

After putting in about 45 minutes, I did enjoy playing the game with the drums.  I hated playing it with the new guitar and found myself wanting to use the new GH3 controller on Rock Band almost immediately.  Will I want to spend $170 on it?   Not a chance.  I can see myself buying the drums and game seperately next year, but I wouldn’t want the bundle right now.  That might just be me though.

I don’t know why that popped into my head, but it’s one of my favorite moments from that show.

- Now it looks like PJ Hill won’t be playing in the OSU game. Bummer. I would have liked to have seen the Badgers go into the game with their best weapons, but I guess it’s time to find out what the freshmen can do in their biggest game of the year.

- I guess I’ve been in an internet coma for the last year or so, but I came across a story about how the original guys from MST3K are going to start doing their thing again at a new site called Cinematic Titanic. What I didn’t know was how much has happened since the show ended. Joel went off to do his own thing during the main run of the show and is now going to run the Cinematic Titanic thing. Mike who took over for Joel now does a site called Riff Trax where they record DVD style commentary tracks for big name movies.

The primary ‘villian’ (Trace Beaulieu, who was also the first voice for the robot, Crow) for the show is going to be at CT along with his first (Josh Weinstein, who was also the first Tom Servo) and second ‘evil sidekick.’

Over at Riff Trax, they have the second version of Crow, the second Tom Servo, and a few of the other writers along with Mike…

Oh, and they have another site called Film Crew Online, where they parody old movies again as well.

Now, over at MST3K.com they are going to be doing a flash based series with the robots… with some of the other writers.

It’s just amazing to see how many of the people for that show… all ended up doing the same sorts of things 10 years later.

- My laptop got fixed yesterday and as a result, I was able to play through the Crysis demo.

If you have the newest hardware your experience may differ, but to me, it played out like Metal Gear Solid as an FPS. Your suit can be changed at any time to fill different roles. You have this stealthy camo that allows you to become invisible to all soldiers… except for the ones that are on boats, as they seem to be able to see you no matter what you’re wearing and can shoot you without any problems. You also have a strength suit that allows you to jump much higher, and you can also throw things that you pick up much further. There is also a setting on your suit that will let you run very fast as well, but it seemed to me to make a lot more sense to run while invisible rather than to run at 2 times speed but still visible. It’s all about options, I guess.  Oh, and there is the armor suit which makes you a lot less vulnerable when you’re using that…

Graphically, if you have the hardware, I’m sure the game is the cats meow. I’m running Windows XP and have a GeForce 7900 Go video card, which has been terrific for everything that I’ve played up until this point… but it appears that time has passed because even on a low video setting (1024 by 640) with everything turned to High, the game became a slide show whenever anything was going on.

A lot has been made of the fact that the terrain is highly destructible and while it’s certainly cool that if you put enough rounds into a tree that it will snap and collapse. This is also silly as I watched a soldier trying to shoot me from behind a tree. He managed to put about 20 rounds into the tree before it snapped and collapsed onto him. Funny? Yes. A.I wise? Pretty bad.

I’ll be curious to hear what other people’s thoughts on the demo and the game are though. I might give it a whirl again in the future when I have hardware that is good enough to handle it at a higher resolution and with more detail, but for now it seemed like a mish-mash FPS with the potential for very good graphics.

- Oh, and I edited Dan’s post from before to put carriage returns after each point he made… it was just too hard to read.  Are you text blogging now Dan?  heh.

Happy Halloween everyone. Ashley won her school’s costume contest for “funniest” by going as Mac and Cheese. It’s a 100% custom made costume and I’ll post some pics soon. It’s unique to say the least.

The Home Theater goodies are on the way. I will be EATING mac and cheese for the next two months because of it, but hey…I’ll make that sacrifice. I like mac and cheese. The good people on the AVS forums helped me tremendously when it came to picking out the hardware.

We start with the Sony Bravia SXRD KDS-60A3000 60″ 1080p Rear Projection HDTV
I went with the Yamaha RX-V661BL Receiver
The Athena Bookshelf series of speakers with two stands and the center channel.  
The Velodyne VX-10 Subwoofer.

I think I’ll be getting the Omni center channel holder as well to place on top of the TV.  

With a new HT system you gotta get furniture, right?

The new Ent. Center (w/o the top hutch part)
The two-piece love/seat recliner.

I’m still debating on the Blu-Ray HD DVD thing. Not sure which one I will go with eventually. I’m also most likely going to get the DirecTV HD DVR and, sadly, saying goodbye to the Series 2 TIVO (sigh).

So obviously we’re really excited about all of this. This is going to be Christmas this year, but hey…Christmas is basically for Ashley more than it is us. We’re also “adopting a family” this year so Ashley can start to see what the season is really supposed to be about: helping others, kids in this case,  who don’t have the luxury of getting toys on Christmas morning.  My father had to deal with that when he was a kid, and he drove that lesson home to me years ago. So while I’m pumped about our new toys (really pumped) I always feel just as good when I can help someone out, even if it’s anonymously.

1. Make sure you pick up the new Buccaneer table for the Live Arcade game Pinball FX. It’s available for the low low cost of zero and it’s a great table.

2. The new Mutant Storm game is a lot like the old Mutant Storm game.

3. I picked up Manhunt 2 yesterday….boy the graphics are not great. In the first minute, my character was pissed on by one guy, another guy threw his own shit at me, and then I killed someone by popping him with a syringe. Interestingly enough, I do not feel the need to do this today at work. Sorry, CBS! I will say this game is rated M for a reason and if anyone actually lets their kid play this game, DCYS should be called.

4. Virtua Fighter comes out for Xbox today. Yay!

5. Is anyone buying or has anyone bought Hellgate London? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

6. Since this is a sports blog, I will talk about sports games. I’ve been playing quite a bit of FIFA for the Wii, which I’m enjoying despite some of it’s shortcomings like piss poor MLS tables and asstastic commentary. The controls have won me over. Of course MLB Power Pros is still getting some attention as well. Right now the game I’m playing the most however is Guitar Hero 3 for the 360. My god the songs on Medium (right now I’m at the 7th level I think) are just insanely difficult. I was up until 3AM and I need to give my arm a break, I’m not suffering from GH-itis.

7. Okay, off to work. We had our trick or treating yesterday (our city does it on the 30th, I guess to beat the crowds or something), so it’s just a regular day for me.

- Man, the Packers just keep finding ways to win games.  Nothing like an 82 yard pass on the first play in overtime to win a game though.  I guess Brett can still throw the deep ball.

In no way are the Packers close to being good enough to beat a team like New England or Indy, but man… it’s fun to see them winning games and sitting at 6-1 nearly half way through the season.

- Bo Ryan is one of the funniest coaches in college basketball.  It’s silly, but I really laughed at a coach doing a dance like this.

- RIP: Max McGee.

Max scored the first TD in a Super Bowl.  He was also hung over as he was out drinking the entire night before the game, because he wasn’t supposed to play.  He went into the game when the starting TE was injured and went on to make a spectacular catch and score the first TD in Super Bowl history.

He was a terrific storyteller and color analyst for the Packers Radio network until he retired a few years ago.   He passed away just over a week ago and speaking for the Packer fans amongst us, he will be sadly missed.

-  In other sports news that most of you probably don’t care about, UND and the NCAA settled their ongoing dispute regarding UND’s use of the ‘Fighting Sioux’ nickname.  All UND has to do is get the approval of the Sioux tribes and they’ll be able to use the name without violating any NCAA sanctions.

The NCAA was all over the board on this one… they allowed Florida State to keep using their nickname, but wouldn’t let UND keep theirs, even though they had the support of the Sioux tribes.   Glad it’s close to being done…

- So, a technician came out to replace the motherboard on my laptop today to fix my video card, and no big shock, they had the wrong part… so they’ll need to come back tomorrow or Wednesday to try again.  Super.

- I had to rip apart my whole living room last night to clear it out so that we could get new carpet installed in the house (damn cats tore it up before we found a new home for them.)  The bonus to that was the fact that I was able to remove at least 7 or 8 cables that I wasn’t using (Component for the 360 and PS3, VGA for the Dreamcast, Composite for the Wii, and some extra cables for when I had a DVD recorder.)   It’ll be nice to see how much better it all looks when it gets put back in place tonight.

- If you’re interested in some sports games from last year, Circuit City has the following for the Xbox 360, Top Spin 2, NHL2K7, College Hoops 2K7, and March Madness 2007 for $16.96 on clearance.

I am finally getting an HDTV. Long time blog readers will know that I was going to get one back when we built our new house. Then I sat down at closing of the old house and was cut a check for $186. Whoops. Then, my wife was assaulted by two lowlife thugs in a restaurant parking lot and we received a little money from said restaurant. She wanted to use that money to get a TV, but ya know…I couldn’t do that. Every time I turn on the thing I’d think “wow my wife got the shit beat out of her so I could watch the Buckeyes in HD.”

Blood Money TV. Not good.

Anyway, Christmas is coming early this year and here’s what we’re looking at:

Sony 60″ SRXD KDS-60A3000 (on sale for $1900 at Circuit City)
Micra-6 5.1 speaker system w/ Subwoofer from Athena – we have an 11×13 room so these little beauties should work great.

We’re also on the fence about getting an HD DVD player.

I’m still debating the receiver, as well. Was thinking about the Pioneer VSX-516 or spending the extra cash on a Yamaha RX-V659.

Anyone have any experience with any of these?

Hey look at this, Red Octane has released the first downloadable track pack for Guitar Hero 3, and you’ll love the price: FREE.  I wonder what Glen “I never pay for downloadable content” will do now? LOL.

 So the Red Sox won — congrats to them, but I still don’t understand why pepole use “team sports victory” as an excuse to torch everything and riot. Things weren’t as bad as they were in 2004 (no one died) but still, this is just stupid.

UPDATE: Although I received an E-mail alert that Major Nelson posted a new Guitar Hero TrackPack, I see it’s been removed from the main site and I am unable to download it. So strike that

Okay, now moving on to football. Are there any big games coming up next week?

The Wisconsin versus OSU game will be on the Big Ten network at 11 am CST.  Madison’s cable system doesn’t carry the Big Ten Network.

Thankfully I have DirecTV and will be able to watch it without any issues.

Go Bucky.

- Dan stuck the landing before.  Bill Harris couldn’t be more wrong about Guitar Hero III, based on the time that I’ve put in thus far.  I picked up the 360 version earlier today and the hour or so that I put in has been terrific.  The game difficulty seems quite a bit higher on medium and I’m not 5-starring every song on that level like I have in the past games.  Another great thing about the game is the Wireless guitar.  I, L-U-V, love it.  The weight of the guitar just seems so much better, plus the star power activates without any difficulty at all.

I thought that I was really interested in Rock Band for a while, but I have a very similar feeling to what Dan does.  I see myself having to spend $170 on a game that comes with two accessories that I will never use (Guitar and Microphone) and doesn’t have an online co-op campaign mode.

Sure it has a local campaign mode, but I can’t recall the last time that I had 3 friends over at my house that would be good enough at the game to make it fun to play.  I’ve played Guitar Hero with some friends, but how often are you going to want to sit around and play Rock Band on Easy because that’s all your friends can muster because they don’t own the game.  Even if I got 3 people together that have played games like Guitar Hero before, it’s going to be a fight every time to see who plays the drums.

Also it’s a $170 this year and that’s our only pricing option.  Let me take a look at it again next year when I can just pick up the drums and the game… and I might think about it.

Oh and don’t forget that it will have album download options that I’m sure will be in that ever so attractive $15 to $20 range.

Ok, onto things that aren’t Rock Band vs. Guitar Hero.

- Hot Shots Golf 2 for the PSP looks spectacular.

- Since Bill posted about Warhammer for the DS, I think it’s nice to link to the demo for the PSP version.

- If you’re looking for the Spiderman Trilogy on Blu-Ray this week, Best Buy has it for $60.99

- C’mon Red Sox… just finish the freakin’ game so I can go to bed…

Since it’s Saturday night, I had a long week, and I wanted to relax, I stayed home with the wife for a passionate night of fun. Just kidding, actually I went to GameStop to pick up Guitar Hero 3. Apparently I was not alone as seemingly every other male loser who had nothing else to do on a Saturday night also went out. (Yes, I include myself in the group of losers). I mean seriously, you would have thought this were a Halloween party the way these guys were dressed — and keep in mind this is their ‘normal’ attire. It was a complete sausage fest and man, these guys should really take a shower. I really needed to question my life plan at this point. I mean that’s how bad it was.

 That being said, the attendance was HUGE. the line went out the door of the store and around the corner of the strip mall. The 360 of course was the game of choice, but people were buying every version available — PS3, Wii, PS2 even. I’ve been to a few midnight launches and I’ve never seen anything like this. That being said, I did not go to the Halo 3 event because we’ll even I have some self esteem.

Anyway, the general discussion among the masses was that Rock Band would be better. I disagree with this (although to be fair I haven’t played it), but to a man, every single person there could not wait to play the drums. You are going to go online with this $170 game and find 3,000 people trying to play but they will only play drums. I have to say I may pass on this one.

Now, onto the game. I just don’t understand the negativity I’m seeing about this game (Yes, Bill Harris, I’m talking to you). I love this game. I was up until 3am last night playing it. The boss battles were fun (and freaking difficult) and even playing on medium isn’t the cakewalk it was on GH2. I enjoy the wireless guitar, I just wish that it would accept the 360 battery packs. The one issue I have to agree with Mr. Harris on is the “helpful” messages that really f-up your concentration. It’s great to know I have a 50 note streak but man, it really wrecks your planning ahead for the next note.

 While I was there at the midnight launch, I got the PS Eye (but not the game) and EA Playground for the Wii. Playground is going to be fun for the kids but I am not moist about it. The Eye is pretty good. In the words of GameSpot, If you like console based web cameras, you’ll love the PlayStation Eye. It’s fun to use the downloaded software and create movies and transfer them to the PC. They run in MP4 format, and for the first time I’m considering doing a podcast — that’s how much I’m impressed with it. What does it do that a regular PC webcam doesn’t? Uhh…not sure. It looks cool and works with the PS3 though, so there’s that I guess.

Alright, I have a FIFA Wii review to do and I’m supposed to go to BJs today (not get one, but go there — think Costco, you freaking pervs) and then there’s the Pats game.

 PS Glad to see BC survived another week. fingers crossed….

Penn State is a very, very tough place to play — especially at night. It’s incredibly loud and defines the term hostile environment. That’s pretty much all you heard leading up to the PSU/OSU game last night. The last time OSU lost a regular season game was in 2005 at Penn State in the infamous White Out game. Typical of the sports media they failed to mention a few things about that game.  

Most important of those is the fact that the 2005 Penn State team was very good. So good in fact that they beat a mighty SEC team in a BCS game.  OSU lost in 2005 17-10. This year, Penn State isn’t nearly as good as that 2005 team and the 2007 Buckeyes are better. Yes, this Buckeye team, at this point of the season, is much better than the 2005 Buckeye team when they played Penn State. (That was the OSU team that dismantled Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl.)

Last night’s game didn’t surprise me at all. Bill Harris emailed me Friday asking what I thought would happen. I said we’d win by 14 all things being equal. The PSU fans can dress in all white or go into the stands naked. I didn’t think it would matter.   This OSU team is very, very good and unless we self destructed Penn State simply couldn’t win.

OSU’s defense played their worst game of the season last night. And gave up 10 points and 260 yards of total offense.

I’m not saying the final three games are lay-ups for OSU. Wisconsin ALWAYS gives OSU fits, even in the Shoe. (Hill’s injury will be key) Illinois took us to the mat last year, and Michigan is Michigan. But last night’s game was a statement that this OSU team can play. Anytime. Anywhere. And beating up on PSU at their place, at night, in primetime, should give Michigan fans pause. The Big House is nowhere near as intimidating as Happy Valley. The Big House is actually pretty quite considering they pack 100,000+ in there.

The bad taste from the Florida game is still there with a lot of these players. And it’s showing. Despite being #1 all through the 2006 season, OSU fans knew — there where chinks in the armor that showed up several times last year.  NIU’s Garrett Wolfe running wild in the opener, a tight game with an overmatched PSU team at home, a 17-10 struggle against Illinois, a defensive collapse against Michigan, beating up on demoralized teams like MSU, Northwestern, and Indiana who gave up at halftime, and, most important, going into the title game with a feeling of entitlement. This year’s team is different.

In a year that was supposed to be a rebuilding season for Ohio State, and in a year when every team and every conference is up and down like a 4th street hooker, OSU’s consistency is paying off.

Can we stop with the “White Out” nonsense now? You need the horses before your fans can make a difference.

Interesting stat:

Troy Smith 2006: Effenciency Rating – 161.9
Todd Boeckman 2007 Effenciency Rating through 9 games-  164.3

Number of QBs with a better ratings than Boeckman? Two. (Tebow and Bradford)

… the Wisconsin Defense finally decided to show up today.  Indiana came in averaging 35+ per game and were held to 3 points today.

That was the kind of defensive performance that people were expecting from this team all year.

I’m not going to say that they’re good enough to beat OSU next week, because I don’t think they are, but I would just like to see them in the game.  Hopefully P.J. Hill’s injury wasn’t too bad, because without him it could get ugly in a hurry.

In gaming, I’m planning on picking up Guitar Hero III at some point this week, but that’s about it for now.

Oh, and I’m downloading the Crysis Single Player demo that came out yesterday.  I’ll try to give that a look before the weekend is done.

My thoughts are posted today.

I’m also about halfway through Jericho (PC). Still dunno what I think of it. It’s not as dreadful as the 3/10 EGM review would lead you to believe, but there IS something missing. Maybe it’s the similar enemies? On rails gameplay? Or the unsatisfying combat? That’s proabably it.  

Oh, yeah, and I think I know what my first DS game is going to be — the one that forces a father to “borrow” his 7 year old daughter’s new toy. I can’t help it. It’s Warhammer. This is a PSP vid, but still…

Quite the conference… Too much free food and booze though.  I put on 5 pounds in 5 days.  Ugh.

Other than feeling like crap, I had a decent time and learned some things that will help out at my day job.

- As far as gaming is concerned MLB Power Pros is down to $19.99 for the PS2 at Amazon.  That’s a great price for the game that I consider to be the Game of the Year at this point.

- Glad that I found out that the PS3 guitar for GH3 doesn’t support the older games.  I guess that means the 360 version has my name on it.

- If you have a DS, you need to pick up Picross.  Tons of fun in 15 to 30 minute bursts.