The Blog for the Sports Gamer

1. Dan’s right. Laser tag is fun with any amount of people… more so when you’re an adult.

2. Blades of Steel on the VC = mine when I get back home.

3. I’m still winning my fantasy league by 4 points at the half… the tension is killing me….DAMNIT.  Down by .2 points.

I’m not doing a download column this week, but I weanted to let you know that Blades of Steel, Rolling Thunder 2 and Donkey Kong Country 3 are available on the Wii Virtual Console this week.

And I need to finish three reviews…

But first, it’s time to blog…

1. Craig, Laser Tag isn’t any fun with one person. The place I went was 2 floors of Laser Tag excitement.

2. aws6000, I’m confused, the 360 HDDVD player looks like it gives me 3 options — digital stereo, DD 5.1 and DD with WMA Pro. Which should I pick?

3. It takes a lot for me to change email clients. Previously I was using the MSN Mail client because it was the only way to get hotmail. Now I see MS has a Windows Live client which handles all my email accounts (gmail, hotmail, work) and is an RSS reader. I likey!

4. Gamefly is having a year end sale with huge discounts on games, including MLB 2k7 for $8.99, All Pro Football for $8.99, and more. Check it out.

5. Amazon’s Deal of the Day is Crackdown for $14.99. Glen didn’t give me our advertiser code, so do us a favor and just search for “crackdown” in our little Amazon box on the right. We’ll get like 20 cents if you buy it through that link. And Glen can eat.

6. Thanks for all the kind comments about the podcast. Regretfully Ben Brinkman hasn’t accepted our offer on our podcast to talk about baseball games yet, so it’ll just be me and Glen this week.

5 .

- It’s just killing me.  I’m up by 4.5 points in my fantasy Super Bowl… and the other player has 1 player left.  That player hasn’t scored less than 6 points in any game this year.  Ugh.  That’s going to be a painful Christmas Eve.

Oh, and if I do win… I’m going to send the Miami Dolphins organization a gift as they shut out Tom Brady in the second half which is the only reason that I’m in the game to begin with.

- Here’s a company in the running for Asshats of the Year.

- If you have a PSP, Killzone: Liberation is a very challenging, and frustrating, but fun game.

If I don’t get a chance to post again before Christmas day, Happy Holidays to everyone.

1. Sensible World of Soccer is as good as I imagined. I love how it’s frozen in 1996 with MLS teams and fake names. I do forget that the New England Revolution was very crappy back then.

2. I finally received my 360 HDDVD player today. The shipment was supopsed to get here Thursday. Thanks Fedex! The HDDVD player combined with my new Pioneer 5.1 audio for the 360 makes for a very good system.

3. While my daughter went to Hannah Montana, I took my son to Chuck E Cheese. It’s pretty impressive. I got to play this SEGA jungle game that was pretty immersive. And the Deal or No Deal game where you can win tickets….I don’t know who had more fun — me or my son.

4. We also played laser tag. That was fun.

Yesterday we packed up the family and headed up to my wife’s parents place for the holidays, so I’ll be trying to do a bit of blogging from up here.

Thankfully, I have a slingbox set up at home, so I’ll be able to watch the Packers vs. Bears tomorrow. It’s really hard to detach yourself from your team when they’re playing really well. I won’t pull a Dan, so I’ll watch the entire game no matter the outcome.

- I know that Dan spoke about Super Swing Golf: Season 2 on the second episode of the podcast, but I have a copy of the game on the way… so I’ll be posting about that some time next week.

- The European and Australian VC’s for the Wii have gotten Blades of Steel. I know I was able to hold off on purchasing Double Dribble… but I have a special place in my heart for Blades of Steel. That will be a tough one to resist.

- Speaking of the Wii, You have to check out some of the videos that Johnny Lee has been able to make using the Wii Remote. He created a single person Virtual Reality type display using the Wii Remote and some modified safety glasses. This guy has come up with some brilliant uses for the Wii Remote. The videos are just great to watch.

Codemasters just gave me the official word that Sensible World Of Soccer has been re-released on Xbox Live Arcade. I’m not near my 360 so I can’t confirm this. Please post in the comments if you can confirm. Thanks!

Well, without any further adieu… we bring you Episode 3 of Riding the Pines.

In this episode, Dan and I are joined by Tara Clover of Grey Dog Software, who gives us the skinny on their newest release, World of Mixed Martial Arts.

Also, we were joined by William Thomas, former NFL All Pro Linebacker for the Philadelphia Eagles and Oakland Raiders. How f’n cool is that?

We hope you enjoy the episode as much as we did when we were recording it.

Feel free to post your comments here, or in the forums.

Enjoy!

I’m really proud of the show that we’ve put together for this week.  I’ll be posting it first thing tomorrow morning, but I think it’s a great show.  It covers all of the things that Dan speaks of in his post… plus… Dan gets really put on the spot… and you can just hear him squirm… it’s great.

I’ll have more info for everyone tomorrow.

Very shortly we’ll be posting our Christmas episode…where you’ll see the common link between these things:

Front Page Football
An NFL Pro Bowl Linebacker
The Tuck Rule
Martial Arts
World of Warcraft
Blossom
Women who like Sports Gaming Bloggers

Stay tuned…I have to say, this is a great show…..it will make you moist.

Amazon is running a few nice gaming deals right now.

Worldwide Soccer Manager for the PC for $24.99

Fire Pro Wrestling for the PS2 for $4.99 (Already ordered.)  Edit: Down to $4.99.  You really should buy this.

Crackdown for the Xbox 360 for $19.99 (You should all own this.)

You probably won’t get them by Christmas, but consider them holiday gifts from the Sportsgamerblog guys… that you are buying for yourself.

Major updated his Twitter account to say that there’s still no news, and they are working on it.

not so much.

Take a look at the new rules that sports writers need to follow if they want to blog an NCAA event.

It’s not that often that I follow live blogs during sports events, as I usually watch them, but I can’t think of a single reason why this is a problem.

NCAA=Asshats

Major Nelson posted at 12:30 PM Eastern that he doesn’t have anything new to report but should have a status update in a couple of hours. Fingers crossed.

Glen already posted the wheel information. I haven’t used the wheel since I received my replacement. I guess MS could say this is a new SKU — the “non recall version” Heh.

Let’s talk politics. The 18th largest earmarks in house bills comes from the guy (D-NH) who said he would stop the earmarks and start being accountable. Just goes to show you that you really can’t trust anyone in Congress. Just like this whole AMT thing. Democrats are complaining about how Congress passed the AMT bill to keep the exemption in place but there’s no way to ‘pay’ for it. This makes no sense to me, as it’s not like Congress had the money to begin with — there’s no lost funds here..it’s just an extension of what’s been going on for years! Maybe they should get some accountants up Capital Hill.

The more I hear about Ron Paul the more I like him. Which of course means he doesn’t have a chance. I’m not even a registered Republican, so it’s either write in his name or pick someone else. These political ads are insane. I love how all candiates will end this or do that, Rudy will ‘build a wall’ to stop immigration and make everyone applying for citizenship speak and write English. Sounds great, but what about the French couple that gives birth in the USA, making the child an automatic US Citizen who only speaks French. Sorry Rudy, but your plans are terrible. Mitt Romney sucks, Rudy Sucks, John McCain I had respect for until he sucked up to W for god knows what reason in 2004 — they all suck on that side, except for Ron Paul. On the other side, I really don’t know. Hillary has a lot of the same “I’m going to solve all the world’s problems” ads which you just can’t do as President without Congress approving them. Obama can be very uplifting with his speeches, but his record in the IL senate voting “PRES” rather than YES or NO on many occassions make me wonder why he can’t stick to an opinion. Bill Richardson seems to be in line with many of my thoguhts, but I’m afraid he’s another one who can’t win.  So if you had to vote in the first in the nation primary, who would you vote for and why?

I just received a press release stating that the Microsoft Wireless wheel for the Xbox 360 has dropped to $99.99.

Dan seems to love the wheel, so I’m sure he’s got words to describe this press release.

Even though I’m terrible at racing games, there is a part of me that wants to buy this… I have no idea why.