The Blog for the Sports Gamer

1. Kotaku has been reporting today that the Evil Empire (EA) has taken over the college basketball franchise, meaning there will be no College Hoops 2K9. Click here for the details.

2. Speaking of EA crap, my review of the god-awful NFL Tour is now online at GameShark. Calling this game shit is derogatory to the word shit. Click here to read it.

3. Toshiba’s counterattack in the HD wars is to reduce the pricing of their HDDVD players by a ton, making the retail price of the basic player $149. As more and more people buy HDDVD players, one wonders if going to BluRay only was a wise chioce….just sayin…

4. Could it snow just a little more? Please? Seroiously, this 15″ really isn’t enough. But I’m still at work though. That’s what we do.

- Netflix is removing their streaming movie restrictions. How cool is that. I always thought the fact that they limited how many shows you watched was kind of silly. I can’t picture that there are a ton of people doing it anyway. This way it will allow me to catch up on a ton of TV shows and movies that I’ve been wanting to get around to.

- Game clearance season is upon us. Shopko, a primarily Midwest retailer, has had quite a few games from the last year or so drop down to $9.99. I was able to pick up Test Drive Unlimited for the 360 and Ridge Racer 7 for the PS3 at that price point. I think I’m all set on racing games for a while… unless Dan talks me into picking up Burnout Paradise.

Edit: I just found a post that Pro Yakyu Family Stadium is coming out for the Wii in March, in Japan.  I didn’t recognize the name right away, so I hit Wikipedia.  Here’s what I found.  Hadn’t heard anything about RBI Baseball coming back before this.

Usually Dan and I have time to get the show recorded over the weekend, but it didn’t pan out this time.  We’ll be recording the show tomorrow night, and I’ll be posting it tomorrow night as well.

It should be riveting.

Thank you very much New York Giants.  Thank you ever so much.  I now will be spending the better part of the next few days trying to find the best way to purchase tickets to the NFC Championship game.  I haven’t actually said, out loud, to my wife how much that I would be willing to spend… and I think it’s best that way.

My wife and I were flat broke in 1997 and ‘98, so there is no way that we could have afforded those tickets back then.. but this time around we could probably pull it off.

In past years, there have been 5-6,000 tickets that become available to the general public after a day or so… but I haven’t been able to find out anything about them yet.  I’m prepared for a ticket broker if need be, but I’m hoping to avoid that.

Also, I have a friend that will be coming back home from Michigan if I can score a ticket for him as well.

This could be a crazy, fun week…

Remember, the superstitious rule is that I turn off the game in the 4th Quarter (or earlier) only if the Patriots are losing. That didn’t happen tonight, so I was able to watch the whole thing.

That was a fun game to watch. Next week’s game will be much tougher, no matter who it is….

1. Did you see that 15 yd face mask by Seau? Neither did I, but I guess they can make up stuff so NE loses.

2. Did you see that horse collar tackle on Welker? I did too.

3. Tough to not call that first drive a TD, even with a challenge. Probably a good idea to keep it in your pants, even though it was 3rd down. I think whatever the call on the field was would stand.

4. Fun game to watch so far. Too bad I have to turn it off soon.

When you are down 14-0 in the first 5 minutes of a game and then go on to outscore the other team 42-6 over the remainder of the game… you’re a very good team.

After those two early turnovers, they scored touchdowns on their next 6 possessions.  That’s just impressive.

Oh, and seeing Brett Favre throwing snowballs during the game was just too damn entertaining.  I love how this team plays right now.  They’re incredibly young and seem like they have no idea that they shouldn’t be this good right now.  It’s a fun time to be a Packer fan.

Also, I don’t know how anyone wouldn’t want to see the Giants come up to Green Bay and play in another snow game like that one.  Go Giants!

I would have turned off the Packer game 4 minutes in and would have missed what has become a very entertaining 1st half of football.

I guess I’m just not in that same class of fan.

Game Informer has posted an article on the best and worst downloadable content on the Xbox 360 so far. Fun read, so check it out here. Make sure you pick up last year’s NCAA tournament bracket. LOL.

And in the beating a dead horse department, here’s a helpful tip from the Consumerist, repeating something I said in an earlier post. Unless you purchase a PS3, a Blu Ray player that you buy today will be obsolete. 

And don’t forget if you have a PS3, none of your universal remotes will work with it. But hey, this is was consumers want.

Keeping up our campaign to get Ben Brinkman to our podcast where we ask the tough questions rather than the Larry King-esque GameSpot (which by the way, had yet another full time paid staffer leave, claiming that C|Net is bowing to advertiser pressure on reviews), we wanted to let you know that Ben does a run of the mill interview over at GameSpot, by the hard hitting “staff,” which I believe is a euphamism for “people sent questions via email and then made to look like it was one interview.” Wow, that question about steroids was really hard hitting.

 Hey I have one for Ben: “Why bother making such a turd like MLB with hard hitting topics like “TRUSwing (TM) For PlayStation 3(R)” when you could just regionalize Professional Baseball Spirits for the US market and pretty much everyone else would be happy?”

 Click here if you dare to support GameSpot. Thanks to Michael Sheridan for the link.

In what’s either a great deal for HDDVD adopters or a massive clearance sale by Amazon, they’ve reduced prices on all their Toshiba HDDVD players. The Toshiba HD-A3 is going for a mere $147.33 and free shipping. It’s 1080i (sorry) but hey, for my 50″ Samsung that only goes to 1080i, it works. Of course there’s the whole “have fun only buying Universal and Paramount HDDVDs” thing…unless HDDVD players sell so many that Warner starts going HDDVD again…hmmm…interesting…..anyway, if you want in, just use our handy Amazon search box over at the right for “Toshiba HD-A3″ and get shopping so Glen and I can eat, or raise enough money to buy a Blu-Ray player for my big TV. LOL.

I’m debating about buying another PS3 to make it my family room BD player — or I could go in another direction, sell my old HDDVD Stand alone player and then buy that LG or Samsung combo HDDVD/BD player….I can’t decide. Not that I have the money either, but I can dream.

 I spent an hour playing High Velocity Bowling last night. It’s a very good bowling game and if you have a PS3, you should definitely buy it. It’s definitely more fun with the DUALSHOCK 3 than the standard controller.

It’s so funny that since Tuesday, I think my home phone has rung like once, compared to the Primary hell. It’s really weird that things are so quiet.

- Getting older sucks.  If it’s not hair growing on places like your shoulder it’s the fact that you can hurt yourself while your sleeping.

I went to sleep on Sunday night after playing hockey feeling totally fine.  2 hours later I woke up and have an unbelievable pain in my left shoulder.  It feels like there is a tendon being torn whenever I rip my arm.  Annoying as hell.  I’m sure it’s not anything serious, but still getting older sucks.

- Dan let me know that the Humongous games have appeared back on Gametap.  If you don’t have kids under the age of 5, this probably doesn’t matter to you… but seeing the Putt Putt titles back out there is a huge thing for our family.  My 3 year old is now really getting into computers, so I’m very glad that those titles are back out there again.  Now I just need to get a PC set up for her to use.

- I guess that the Brewers haven’t had enough issues with players that have been involved in some sort of steroid or HGH scandal.  First they sign Gagne to a one year deal, now they’re reportedly interested in Mike Cameron, who will begin the season with a 25 game suspension.  Terrific.

I just got an email from 2K Sports in regards to Top Spin 3. It’s going to be released for the PS3, 360, DS, and wait for it… the Wii. I’m totally geeked about an actual Tennis title for the Wii. If they’re able to replicate Wii Sports tennis and have you play tournaments and such, I’m all over it. I can’t wait to hear more from 2K about it. Here are a few quick screenshots from the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions.  Click on them if you want to see larger versions of the screens.

We’re working on getting an interview with the Top Spin 3 guys to talk about the game on the podcast. So stay tuned for more info.