The Blog for the Sports Gamer

I picked this up for my wife a few weeks back, and as I am trying to lose another 10 pounds, I thought I should give it a go.

Wow. I was not prepared for it to be a good bit of exercise when I started last night.

10 minutes in and I had a great sweat going.

If you’re looking for a good bit of supplemental exercise, this is a great way to go.

Bouncy Bill Abner has posted his Q&A with the Madden 10 guys. This one cuts through the BS and although we still here PROTAK too often, I found it quite an interesting read.

Check it out here.

- My Component inputs on my 4 1/2 year old Samsung DLP TV seem to be dying.  Both my Wii and HD-DVD player seem to be having issues with their initial connection to the inputs.  If I turn on the device before the TV is switched to the input, it seems to work ok… but it has an issue sometimes where it just shows the image, then flashes to ‘signal not detected’ and then back to the image again.

I can easily purchase an HDMI switch box via Monoprice for the HD-DVD player, but the Wii is a different story and I need to rely on the component inputs for that.

Any suggestions for what I can try before thinking about a major TV repair?  (My wife won’t let me entertain the notion of replacing the TV.  Sigh….)

- My apologies for the lack of posting over the last few days.  Work has been crazy and I decided to spend a bit of time with the family.

- Dan and I took part in the conference call for The Bigs 2 last Thursday.  I’ll post the link to that later today.  It sounds like they’ve added some depth to the game (as far as the career portion is concerned.)  Dan and I have been a broken record on this, but we loved the last game… so my hopes are rather high for this version.

- I played a lot of Tiger Woods 10 for the Wii this weekend.  Holy crap, if you want a challenge… try out online option to play in the tournament that the pros are playing.  No spin options, no putting meter, no putt preview.  I finished the first round with a 95.  It’s an incredible challenge, but I found that it did help me with the career that I’m working on as well.  (Which is quite challenging as well.)

The one thing that I was disappointed to see was the Amateur online tournament scores.  People were averaging -20 something for each round.  I hated crap like that with Links and other games.  I guess I can just avoid those tourneys.

- I should be getting my copy of Fight Night from Gamefly today.  From the demo I had some issues with the punch controls with the thumbsticks.  Some punches just didn’t seem to respond correctly from the motions that you were told to use.  I’ll see how that pans out with the retail version.

- Baseball Mogul 2010 is dropping it’s price for the next two days, taking the price down to $19.99.  For the sim players out there, it’s a nice deal.

Sorry about the lack of updates; between the loss of Michael Jackson and the Oxi-Clean guy, I just don’t know if I can go on living.

Seroiusly though, did you know that Blood Bowl is now available for download – at $49. I wish it were on Steam.

It’s not getting along well with Windows 7 RC – I’m trying to download the patch but it keeps breaking…so I’m playing the game in original retail release format.

It’s taking a very long time to load on a quad core PC – I wonder if it’s not optimized for Windows 7.

The game itself seems okay but I’m just not following the control well enough yet. I’m sure I’ll figure it out at some point.

Meanwhile I had to stop playing Fight Night because of my calloused thumb. I guess it’s more Detroit Rock City Rock Band since I watched Paul Blart Mall Cop.

I love Fight Night. I think I should have bought it for the PS3 becuase the RS on the Xbox gives my right thumb callouses. I should at least take a break when playing so it doesn’t hurt so much.

I’m in my career mode, and I’m having fun. I do love the controls.

The one thing I notice is that after every knockdown, there’s a replay feature…well many times this “replay” shows my boxer punching air and then there’s this “boom” noise as if the punch made enough impact to knockdown my opponent. It’s kinda funny to see him punching air and making the guy knock down.

During live action, this doesn’t look to be the case – I didn’t ghost punch him during the game, so it just happens during the replay.

The training hasn’t changed much, even though there’s a 50% hit, I just keep auto training – the load times are a little better than R3, but it’s annoying to load incessantly – even if you do install to the HD.

Overall, I still love it though!

Have you heard of the Entertainment Consumers Association? For $19.99, you get some great benefits like 10% off Amazon games. So if you were to buy a game for $56.99, you would get another $5.70 off, making it one of the cheapest places to get new releases.

Of course it is Amazon, so you’d have to wait probably 3 days after release with Amazon Prime, unless they have release day delivery available (which isn’t available on all games).

Still, it’s a great deal if you buy more than 3 games. Maybe we’ll sign up for their affiliate program, Glen……

Oh yeah, link here.

Well I’m off to the hospital for my sleep lab test. My last time I had 32 times I stopped breathing so I’m officially diagnosed with Apnea and now I will find a mask of my choosing and get fitted. Fun times!

I hope it helps with the snoring and the all day tired ness..I’ve heard good things but then I hear bad things about the mask.

I would love any feedback comments the group has….

- Happy belated Father’s Day to you all.  I had quite the eventful weekend.  Here’s a few of the highlights.

1.  Don’t stand up in a canoe. Lost my sunglasses and my hat.  Pisser

2.  Digital cameras don’t recover quickly from water damage.  2 days later and it finally started working again.

3.  Shaving your head really surprises your spouse.

- My question for this week is whether I want to try The Conduit on the Wii via Gamefly… or Fight Night.  The demo for Fight Night was entertaining, but the thought of a fun FPS on the Wii is something that sounds like a ton of fun.

- I tried out The Bigs 2 and NCAA Football demos and was pretty impressed by both.  The Bigs had plenty of goofy fun plays and looks to be a nice extension of the first game.

As for NCAA, Dan is right on.  It does play a lot like Madden.  I was getting ripped up by the Gators in the play through that I gave it yesterday… so it seems like I’m going to need some work before I start playing it again.

- I tried out Singstar Volume 2 for the PS3 and Lips yesterday as well.  Both were pretty entertaining, but I have to say that Singstar is just a better game.  The ability to be able to record video and audio of your performance and publish them online is just too entertaining.  I posted my version of Bobby Brown’s ‘My Prerogative’ yesterday.  I’ll be curious to see if I get any reviews… heh.

- Just when I thought I was really getting better at Tiger Woods on the Wii (-6 in the second tournament in my career with 9 holes to go,) and then I tripled one, doubled another and scrambled my way to a -1 finish for the two round tournament.

The game is just a ton of fun to play.  it’s a great exercise to learn a bit more about your golf swing and how you can use a bit of rotation in your hands to work the draw and fade when needed.  I’ll be playing this game for quite some time.

I’ve been playing the demo, here are my thoughts:

I’m surprised how much the game is like last year’s Madden..and I mean that in a good way. It seems like all of the player models look a lot better to me.

Another year, another control scheme change. I have to remember not to press L3 non stop to incite the crowd. It’s now on the RS up or down. Interesting.

This game gives you last year’s National Championship. The brief demo gives you just a taste but the improvements aren’t as in your face as they have been.

Jury is still out on the gameplay, I’m not seeing a lot different than last years, but I am still playing NCAA 09 anyway.

Of course I’ll pick it up, as it’s July and what other games are there to purchase? LOL. But that $40 Madden Tradein at GameStop is looking good right now.

Two very interesting demos have made it over to Xbox Live this week, here are my quick thoughts on one of them.

The game is a 3 inning AL All Stars vs NL Stars at this year’s venue, St Louis. You have to play as the Away team if you’re the AL, so no DH. Make sure you sub Ortiz for Youkilis at 1B. Big Papi has a ‘no doubt HR’ power up so hit turbo and swing and you’re in good shape.

I love how different players have different bonuses. Some of the pitcher power ups include not losing a specific pitch.

The game is fun and I like how it takes injuries into account. The only drawback with this game, as with seemingly every arcade-esque game is the catch up logic.

I went into extra innings tied up. I managed my “big swing” (like a gamebreaker automatic HR if you make contact) until I had 2 runners on. I piled on the runs and led 9-3 in the 4th.

Of course the computer then gets 6 runs no problem and then has just enough for the big swing, and you have to be perfect to avoid the big swing – I wasn’t so he homered and game over. It’s just a little too convenient that the computer is always doing this for me. Still I keep playing. Home run pinball is always fun as well.

I am looking forward to the full version of the game – the original was a sleeper hit and I think this will be pretty good as well (PS – please bring Power Pros back. Thanks).

Thanks to Joel Hulsey, we’ve been informed that there is a demo for NCAA 10 available on Xbox Live (and possibly on the PS Store later tonight.)

2 GB (according to the Microsoft site)… get crackin’.

- 2K Sports has announced a demo for The Bigs 2 that is available now.  Any game with Prince Fielder on the cover is worthy of my time. Too bad that the Wii version doesn’t support Wii Motion Plus though.

- Tonight is the night that I’m going to finish inFAMOUS and get going on Tiger Woods again.  I’ve probably got an hour or two left with the ‘good’ side of inFAMOUS, and now that my neck is feeling a bit better… I think I can get back into Tiger again.  That game is just filled with tons of goodness.

- I bought Final Fantasy VII for the PS3/PSP the other day as well.  I went and looked at my original copy and found that I’m missing disc 2.  Damnit!  I have no idea how that happened.  Has to be the kids…

- Gamestop is starting another Buy 2 Used games, get 1 free deal tonight.  I’m sure there are plenty of recent games to take advantage of that deal with.

- Someone tried to explain to me why Apple can charge $10 for an upgrade to the OS of the iPod Touch, but not the iPhone… but it didn’t make any sense for me.  I just bought the damn thing last week… shouldn’t I get some sort of discount for that?

I’ve been playing the game since last Friday thanks to my favorite import store that doesn’t seem to care about street dates (THANK YOU!).

It’s one of the best movie tie in games I’ve played, and yes that includes Disney’s BOLT! (LOL).

I’ve been playing a lot of Tiger Woods on the Wii and the PSP. I kinda like the PSP version…it’s a lot of portable fun and I like the swing mechanic. The PSP rarely gets love anymore but I’ve been playing it a lot since I got the game from Gamefly.

Grand Slam Tennis is a game I want to recommend, I want to love this game. But I can’t. I think the control flat out sucks. Once you get used to it posts are a lot of BS. You can’t get used to it. It just sucks. Did I mention it sucks? Constantly my player swings with just the lightest of movement in my hand. In real tennis, I prep the racquet for the way I want to hit the ball, and EA tells you to do this as well – except that as you prep the guy swings and then you lose the point.

This game could be good….that’s what makes it so damn frustrating.

Virtua Tennis is on it’s way for the Wii, so maybe Glen and I will play an online round if it’s supported.

- What a game for the Brewers last night.  Down by 5 runs, twice, and came back to win.  It’s not tough to say that the pitching staff is struggling, but it was a fun game to watch, especially when Prince hit his first career grand slam.  I enjoy watching the strategy employed by managers only to see it backfire.  For example, they brought in a lefty to pitch to Fielder, because managing 101 tells you that you bring in a lefty to face a lefty.   That would be a good move when the guy isn’t hitting over .300 and slugging over .600 against lefties.  Oh, well.  I’m not going to complain….

- Alex Ovechkin was named as the cover athelete for NHL 2K10 today.

Does anyone else really pay attention to the cover athelete stuff any more?  I know it’s a big deal for the guy on the cover, but I’d be just as happy if they gave us a website that let us pick the cover we wanted so we could print it ourselves.

- I’m nearly done with my ‘good’ run through inFAMOUS.  One thing that I was really impressed with last night is how the game integrates how you are a good guy.  Later on in the game, random AI characters will pick up rocks and chuck them at the bad guys to help you fight them.  Sure, they’re not making a major impact, but they stop them from being able to fire their weapons at you.. and it’s a nice thing to see.  I’m curious to see how they treat me when I’m a really bad guy….

I haven’t played a game since Eternal Darkness that I wanted to jump right back into after finishing it.  We’ll see how long that feeling lasts when I’m done.

- I really miss the Stanley Cup playoffs.  I was happy to see that the ratings for game 7 were higher than for any game in the last 30 some years.  That’s awesome news.  Hopefully the game can build off of that.