The Blog for the Sports Gamer Three guys who love Sports Gaming rant and rave about various stuff.

Monday notes

- Ever sit down to play a game with a friend but know before you start playing that you have absolutely no interest in doing so?  That's pretty much what happened on Saturday night when I played Madden for the Wii with Dan.  I had a rental of the game that I had been sitting on for probably 4 weeks now and I just wanted to get rid of it.  Dan had been asking to play a game of it online, and I had a bit of time to waste on Saturday night, so I figured 'What the hell.'

The game isn't awful, but I just wasn't interested in trying to figure out how to play while we were in the middle of our game. I started calling plays, trying to annoy Dan halfway through... because I was just trying to get through the game as quickly as I could, so I could get back to watching Iron Man on Blu-Ray. (Which was a great action film.  Seriously, if you haven't seen it yet... great stuff.)

So, I was very unfair to Dan on Saturday, and I apologize for that.

On a side note though... the kicking interface in the game stinks.  It was a problem 2 years ago and it still is.  Dan and I had at least 4 shanked kicks between the two of us in the game.  I remember having the same issue with the original game.  They should really have that issue fixed by now.

- I'm home this afternoon with a sick kid and as a result we had to stop at Target on the way back from daycare.  I was able to pick up GRID for the 360 for $15 while we were there.  Not a bad deal.  They had Skate for the 360 for $15 as well, but since I grabbed the PS3 version of that for $10 last week, I had no need to grab another copy.

- My bad string of hockey luck continued last night as I got cracked in the face mask with a slap shot again... and then had someone slash my thumb with their stick.  I couldn't have worse luck on the ice.  I'm hoping that my thumb isn't broken, but I still finished the game.  That's what hockey players do, right?

- I spent another few hours with the Killzone 2 beta last night.  Each time I play it, I have more and more fun.  Last night I started to mess around with some of the other weapons available and found that I love the shotgun.  I have always had issues with games that make you 'focus' to use the machine gun accurately, but the shotgun makes that point moot.  If you see someone and they're in front of you, BLAM.  That is like 6 different kinds of awesome after you've had a bad week.

- Wow.  Big week on the Wii Virtual Console.  World of Goo has gotten great press to this point and you can't go wrong with a Square RPG.

- Sony's upcoming firmware for the PS3 will finally allow the controllers to be shut off after periods of inactivity.  As Dan said to me, "Welcome to the 360 features of 2005."

Of course if you look at what Microsoft is doing with avatars and such it's like they're trying to be Nintendo of 2006.

Everyone wants to do what the other consoles are doing better...

- Did anyone really feel bad that the Patriots got whumped last night? Yeah, didn't think so.

- Of course, this comes from a person who watched the Badgers get absolutely destroyed on Saturday night.  The last time they had a loss that bad at home it was the Don Morton-era.  Don f'n Morton.  He ran the Veer, for Christs sake.

You remember the Veer offense, right?  Veer to the left, veer to the right, veer up the middle, punt.

- One last thing, does Dan get to talk about college hockey?  heh.