The Blog for the Sports Gamer

- You have to love Japanese game trailers. I saw this one for We Love Golf for the Wii earlier this morning and couldn’t help but to laugh when I see the level of excitement they have in the commercials. It’s too damn funny. The game actually looks like it could be a lot of fun, so there is that as well.

- Last night I intended on playing a few games, but ended up putzing around with the Guitar Hero III demo that was leaked onto the interwebs, as well as a demo for G4 Jockey (a Japanese Horse racing game) on the PS3.

GHIII played almost identical to the earlier versions of the game, but the biggest thing that I noticed was that the star power activated for me a great deal easier than it had in previous games. I played through Even Flow, Rock you like a Hurricane, Lay Down by Priestess (that song seemed insanely fast on medium,) and Hit me with your Best Shot. With the song lineup that they have for announced for the game, I can see myself picking this up without much hesitation.

As for the Japanese horse racing game, I couldn’t have been more mystified by the game. It didn’t matter if I beat the hell out of the horse or if I didn’t touch it. I always ended the race in the exact same place. Graphically it looked pretty good, but without any English in the game menus, I was at a total loss when playing it. I figured I had to take one for the team and try to play it though.

- So, UCF falls to Rutgers last night. Who would have thought that Rutgers would have games two years in a row that would have a major impact on the BCS picture? This years college football season looks like it’s going to be a jumble of 1 and 2 loss teams at this point… it’s been a ton of fun to watch.

- Is it just me or do the Yankees look like complete idiots right now? Did they actually think that the offer that they put on the table for Torre was going to be looked at by anyone as a legitimate offer to retain him? I’m glad he turned it down. He deserved better from that organization. I wish him the best.

So I’m finishing up both Live and 2K8 and I wanted to mention a few things today about the franchise modes. BUT — before I do that, I’m curious about something. I have always been a big franchise guy, going back to my FPS Football days. When I saw that game’s franchise mode, a light when on. Wow…multiple seasons…an easy interface…player progression! WOW!

That fiery joy, first experienced in oh…around 1992-ish, is now a small burnt piece of smoldering coal. I am of the opinion that today’s franchise modes, at least the console stuff, TOTALLY misses the point.  Utterly. Completely. Entirely. Um…immensely! 

Part of it is feature bloat. Part of it is free agency. Part of it is just lack of giving a shit. Prioritizing is what they call it, actually. I wonder how many people actually play the franchise modes in these games because if they did, you would think they’d be better than what they are now.

I think they miss the point by making it way too complicated, way too finicky and full of busy work. Yes, you can automate a lot of it but it’s all just a time consuming mess. Training players? Really? That’s fun…how exactly? Hiring STAFF? WOW! Thrillsville!

All of this outside noise should be scrapped and replaced with stuff that actually, you know, matters. Like player progression, realistic ratings, an age model that makes sense. Sharp trade AI.

Even the $$ part I dislike. I know it’s part of today’s sports world but I’ll tell you this: I never had more fun with a franchise mode than I did with FPS Football and High Heat Baseball — neither of which dealt with money– AT ALL. Now, I did use a utility for High Heat that simulated free agency, but it worked just fine, kept the rosters dynamic and took almost NO TIME to get through. See, a TEXT game Like OOTP can get away with all the numbers, deals, and minutiae of sports. IN games like that you need it.  Consoles games can’t get away with it. The interfaces don’t support it and it ends up being a whole lotta busy work.  

Example: Madden (and Live 08). Free agency consists of you offering a player and they either say yes or no. No bid wars, nothing like that just “take it or leave it buddy.” That’s just 5 ways of stupid. I would much rather play a franchise mode on a console before the days of free agency all together. Let me draft and trade my way to the top. Money just screws it up because the AI can’t deal with it. So why bother?

These modes need stripped down so you can get through an off season in less than 10 minutes. No staff nonsense. No player training sillyness.

Anyway, on to Live and 2K8. Clearly, 2K8 is the better game. Lots better. By no means perfect and I think should not win any post season Sports Game of the Year awards because it’s just too flaky. But it’s a whole lot better than Live even though that game is much better than Live 07.

2K could learn a few things from the Live team, though. I simmed several years in each game (which takes too long but anyway..) 2K’s is deeper, and better in a lot of ways but tell me this. Which looks more realistic and more importantly less game breaking to you?

After the first season (2007) the number of players rated 90+:

NBA 2K8:  41
NBA Live 08: 12

Year Two:

NBA 2K8: 53
NBA Live 08: 13

Yes, after a few seasons 2K8 is LITTERED with stars. Not the fictional players, they mature VERY slowly, but established players keep zooming up the charts. Now yes, age starts to take its toll but that too happens too slow. It doesn’t keep pace with the progression of the younger players. What you get then is a league full of studs and one where a lot of rookies and 2nd year players manage to get 5 minutes per game, stunting their growth.

Live 08’s franchise mode is pretty crappy too, don’t get me wrong but they did nail this part down. A 90 rated player is bad ass. In 2K8 after year five there were SEVEN 99 rated players. That’s INSANE.

As for 2K’s rookies. I grabbed six rooks at random and watched their progression over five seasons. Here’s the breakdown:

#1 overall 76er . Started out a 72 OVR and progressed:
76/79/83 — so that’s 72/76/79/83/83

#2 pick Hornet
77/85/84/89/88

#3 Pacer
68/73/73/73/74

#4 Clipper
79/84/86/86/86

#5 Blazer:
75/79/84/83/84

#19 Heat
66/73/75/76/77

#24 Celtic
72/75/76/74/76

The best rookie in this class was the Hornets #2 OVR player who topped at 89 (when I stopped). This would be GREAT…if the rest of the league were not loaded with 90+ players. Development starts to slow down after year five it seems.  You usually know if the guy is going to pan out or not and I didn’t see any HUGE busts. That Pacer pick wasn’t the best, though. Actually, yeah, that’s a bust. a 74 OVR is a backup at best in this game. In fact the #1 OVR pick to Philly isn’t too great either considering he gets about 8 minutes per game.

I’ll have more on this stuff later, but it’s just frustrating to want to play these games in their franchise mode inly to see them half developed. But I wonder — is it that big of a deal? Do enough people even play them to worry about it? If they don’t…why are they even there in the first place?

- Dan is out of town for something involving Blackjack or something. I don’t know all the details. All I know is he’s at a casino and he keeps sending me messages saying, “Shoe money tonight.” (Sports geek points if you nail the reference.)

- My unabashed love for all things MLB Power Pros continues. It’s too damn cool to see a popup on the screen telling you what hits you need to complete a cycle, or telling you that you’re 7 home runs away from 200 on your career. Those touches are just a thing of beauty. Everyone needs this game. Maybe I should start something like that $100 laptop project. EMHMPP.com (Everyone must have MLB Power Pro) We could have people donate money to give all these poor gamers the baseball game that they’ve always wanted. Maybe even a telethon… you know, without Jerry Lewis and gay bashing.

- Okami has been confirmed for the Wii. I never played the game on the PS2, but it was proclaimed to be one of the most visually pleasing games ever made. I’ll definitely give it a look now though. Hopefully the controls work out.

- Brian Lara’s Cricket makes it’s debut on Gametap. I just have to give it a shot tonight. I tried to watch Cricket a few years ago and the game just mystified me. I have absolutely no idea how to play it, so it should be a blast.

- I’m heading to Vegas next week for a conference. I’m planning on doing some sports betting, drinking, oh and attending the conference. Any shows worth seeing? I’m not big on gambling, other than small wagers on sports, so I’m looking for suggestions as to what to do while I’m out there by myself.

- Got a chance to watch Transformers tonight and while it’s not the best film of the year, it’s one of the best looking and sounding films that I’ve had a chance to watch in HD.   Well worth the $15 that I paid for it today.

- I did run back to Circuit City tonight to try and take advantage of their unadvertised HD DVD sale (or pricing error, depending on who you ask) and picked up Polar Express for my wife and kids and 40 Year Old Virgin for myself.  One of my issues with HD DVD and Blu-Ray is that I have a hard time replacing movies that I already own.  If I didn’t have a problem with that, I would have spent well over $150 on movies today… thankfully I didn’t.

- I wanted to note that All Pro Football 2k8(Both PS3 and 360)  has now dropped to $19.99 at Best Buy.  Well worth it at that price.

- Madden 08 is being re-released in a spanish language version for the Playstation 2 and Xbox 360. It sounds like a really cool idea, as they’ve managed to get the Spanish announcer for MNF to do the commentary. The bad news is that they have another cover athlete, Luis Castillo, to subject to the cover jinx.

- A demo for WWE Smackdown versus Raw 2008 is out on Xbox Live this morning. The last console wrestling games that I played were the WCW games for the N64, which were a ton of fun to play. Any reason to look at them again?

The last handheld wrestling game that I played was the Fire Pro series for the Gameboy Advance and those were great. It’s nice to see that there is going to be a new Fire Pro game released on the Playstation 2 later this year and at a budget price as well.

- Disney is doing a buy 1 get 1 free promotion for all of their Blu-Ray titles this week (probably to combat Transformers being released today.) From what I’ve seen Amazon has the best pricing on them this week and I was able to pick up Chicken Little for my daughter as well as a movie for myself for less than $25. Not bad for High Def pricing.

Also, people have had a lot of luck picking up HD DVD’s at Circuit City, getting buy 1 get 1 pricing on those as well. If you’re looking to build up your HD movie collection, it’s looking like a decent week to do just that.

Edit: Picked up Transformers and V for Vendetta in HD for $27.50. That’s a great deal.

- Has there ever been a team as hot as the Colorado Rockies in the MLB playoffs? They’ve lost 1 game in their last 22… that’s just plain crazy.

Well, for me, anyway. It started right before I left to go see Todd and his family for the weekend and it has built into full on frustration.

Todd and I encountered a serious scoring bug when we played at his house. I just wanted to whow him the game because he doesn’t have it yet and we ran a Celtics/Pistons exhibition with 5-min quaters in default Pro settings, which means we rarely missed, but that was fine. It was default Pro. The game went back and forth and I was up 3 with :10 seconds to play and Billups pulled up a deep 3 and I fouled him. Ack!

He sank the first…sank the second..and then I got the ball.

Whoops.

The announcer even said “He’ll get to shoot three!” He shot two. I won by a point. This is one of those bugs that may rarely pop up but when it DOES it has the potential to completely ruin a game. Game ruining bugs simply CANNOT make it into a final build. And when they do you better get your coding hat back on and release a patch. Talk about a shitty way to finish a close game.

Problem number two isn’t a bug but more of a gameplay issue. In short, Keven Garnett cannot be stopped. I know this because I play with Boston. He is killing people for 40 a game, shooting 75% from the field on the highest lvl of difficulty (Hall of Fame).  He gets the ball, backs down whoever is guarding him, and either shoots a little baby hook or delivers a nasty dunk. I’ve messed with sliders and it doesn’t change the fact that KG (or any other tough big man) is a dominator…to the point of absurdity.

The AI simply doesn’t deny him the ball and is too easily backed down from the high post. I dunno what this is like online yet but the AI cannot stop him. I feel like I’m cheesballing the game whern I use Garnett to score and it shouldn’t be that way.

- I just finished up playing Portal.  It’s a very solid 4 to 5 hour game, but I have to say that it has the most entertaining end credits that I’ve ever seen.  I won’t spoil it for you, but don’t walk away from your PC when you’re done.

- Ok, so how exactly are the Patriots ’sticking it to the NFL’ by running up the score in every single game.  Maybe the punishment was harsh for what they were doing, but no one can deny that they weren’t breaking the rules they were told not to break.  A nice meaningless touchdown against the Cowboys is going to piss off the Goodell?  I can’t wrap my mind around that one.  Maybe Belichick is running up the score to make sure that the over is hit… who knows?

- OSU and USF are the number 1 and 2 teams in the inital BCS rankings… if someone said that OSU would get a rematch against a Florida team in the National Championship game, I can’t think for a second that anyone would have thought that South Florida would be that team.  Lots of time left in the season to mess with those rankings though.

- I think I can write the final line for Dan’s MLB Power Pros review.  “If you like baseball games, you’ll love my review of this baseball game.”

Well Dallas did play tough, right up until the Patriots destroyed them. Heh. Glen was remarking to me how classless the last minute touchdown was, but I think that Bill Simmons set it up right when he said that after cheatgate the Patriots are just giving a big middle finger to the rest of the league. While I certainly see that some people would hate it, I have to say I wanted to see Brady get another passing TD. I want a big middle finger going out to Manning, considering not a Sunday goes by without his 23 commercials. He could be a great guy, but I’m sick of him. He’s right up there with Elway in my book of asshats.

 In other news, I should be submitting my MLB Power Pros review shortly. I bet you can already guess what I think of the game. :).

 I see that Best Buy is running a pretty good deal on a Gateway combo. It’s $1500 less than the Velocity Micro I priced out, but only has a 19″ LCD instead of a 22″…but it does have 3GB of memory and 1 TB of HD space….the graphics card is better than most but still a little underwhelming a Geforce 8600. I guess I’ll just suffer for now. For the $1200 price, it doesn’t seem like a bad deal. And now Bill can assign me PC games, so there’s that. Honestly I hadn’t seen the need to get a PC until World in Conflict chugged awful, and I want to play Quake Wars and get the CoD 4 demo. And I need more HD space.

 So I did the whole buy online at Best Buy and wait 3 days to get the pick up email (honestly I did get the email today, but I wasn’t leaving in the middle of the Pats/Cowboys), so I hope to get it tomorrow.

I don’t think there was a single thing that the Wisconsin football team did right all day. For a defensive head coach, you’d think he’d understand how to teach his team to play defense… but you’d be wrong. It’s going to be a long Big Ten season.

- Thankfully the Badger hockey team beat Notre Dame last night 4-1, and although they’re trailing OSU 3-2 at the start of the second period, I’m already impressed with their offensive abilities. Can’t wait to see them in person next weekend.

- Oh, and LSU lost… there is a chance that you’ll see South Florida in the National Championship game… how about that?

As you know I’ve been a big fan of Friday Night Lights. After last week’s WTF episode, I’m still going to watch but I am wondering if the shark has been jumped. The whole thing was completely out of character for both of them. I have no problem with Landry offing this guy, but he seems like the type that would notify authorities. I hope this line gets dropped quick so we can get back to the good stuff.

I’m still taping it tonight, fingers are crossed that it will be better…..

- College Hockey season starts today…. or at least it does for Wisconsin as they take on Notre Dame at 4:00 CST.   Can’t wait for the season to get going.

Speaking of Wisconsin, tomorrow’s game against Penn State should be an interesting one.  It’s the first time this year the Badgers play against a more traditional offense (meaning a team that probably isn’t going to exploit them with the option all day long… I hope.)   At this point, knowing what we do about the Badgers, I can only hope that they start improving on Defense.  On Offense, they’re down to Beckham and two freshman at WR, having lost their top two wideouts to injury, so it could be a rough finish to the year.

- I know Dan has like 8 new games this week, but I’ll be focusing on Power Pros, Bio Shock, and Metroid Prime 3…. with MLB taking up the majority of my time.   I really dig the Success mode… so much so that I haven’t even bothered with the GM portion yet.  Crazy.

- The Ratchet and Clank demo on the PS3 is a must download.  It’s a big download (1.6GB), but it’s a terrific demo.  I absolutely love the Disco Ball weapon.  Easily one of the most entertaining weapons that I’ve used in a game in a very long time.

- Installed The Orange Box on my PC last night, but haven’t played any of the games.  I’ll be happy to take $10 bucks for Half Life 2 and Ep. 1, if anyone wants the gift code for them.

- That’ll do it for today… DROP THE PUCK!

the first email was a pile of shit…

The man knows his stuff.

“Ignore that pile of shit I sent previously and look at this instead”

Seriously, how can you not want to read both of the emails that person sent when that’s the subject.

If I went into Borders and saw a book titled, “Ignore this pile of shit,” I’d buy it before even reading the dust jacket.  Anyone that confident in their content just has material that demands that it be read post haste.

Of course, I still haven’t read the emails…

- I went to take back my copy of Halo 3 to Blockbuster(of course I left the disc in the 360 at home… oops) and saw that they had 3 copies of MLB Power Pros for the Wii. This is more copies than they had of Forza, PGR3, and any of the NHL or NBA games. I only hope that they bought them through our links on the site. Seriously though, it was very cool to see that many copies of the game for rent. People need to see how great this game really is.

- Ratchet and Clank demo on the PS3 tonight, along with Conan, and NHL2K8. Everyday shooter also comes out today and people have just been raving about that, so I’ll probably have to give it a look. Although the developer seems a but nutty.

- I saw this link in the Gametap blog, but I have to know how other people see this image. Clockwise or Counter-clockwise?

- Ok.  This is hillarious.  Gilbert Arenas is cheating at Halo 3.

I am one of the very lucky few who have never had a problem with their Xbox 360. No red rings, no crashes, nothing. Well, I dunno if this is a system problem per say but I do hear from a lot of gamers about the dreaded dirty disc error. I haven’t seen much of this either but I simply cannot play NBA 2K8 without it crashing in the 3rd quarter. The sound cuts out (actually just the play by play) and then I get the dirty disc error after about 3 mins w/o sound.

For those that have seen this — what’s the alternative? Clean the disc? Get a new disc?

For the record, I am CRAZY in love with this game — NBA 2K8 is seriously, seriously good, but this disc shit is irksome to say the least.