The Blog for the Sports Gamer

- Why is it that the only music game that I’m really interested in this year is DJ Hero?  Guitar Hero… I might just get because… but I have no real driving interest to pick up.  Beatles: Rock Band… I just cannot get excited about.  I cannot picture having 4 friends come over and want to play only Beatles songs for hours.  The game might be amazingly well produced and have awesome Beatles music, the fact remains that it would be playing only Beatles songs for hours…

Which brings me back to DJ Hero.  The soundtrack that I have seen thus far just sounds terrific.  I love the concept and execution of great mashups.  In fact, if any of the editions of the game would have come with a copy of the game soundtrack alone, you would be hard pressed to stop me buying it.   The way it is though, I’ll probably wait to see if there are any post-Black Friday deals on the game.  I just can’t picture it selling all that well at a price point of $120…. and that’s just more than I’d like to pay for it.

- Jonah is already upset with his roster in the Fantasy League.  Hell, I’d be happy to have Maurice Jones Drew on my team… so just letting you know that he might be looking to make some moves.

- After my fantasy draft on Saturday we sat down and played ‘Zombies!’  I have to say that was a great bit of fun.  The game took a hell of a lot longer than I would have imagined for a board game, but we did have a great time.

- I think I have the next interview set up for the podcast, as of this morning, I just need to clear the time with my day job to make it happen.

- Here’s an interesting game development article that I found today via Slashdot… EA spends 3 times more on marketing than on game development.   I would have to think that this is fairly common with most big name development houses, but it’s still very interesting.

- This is a very interesting development for the sports gaming industry, 2K says that they have developed dynamic voice-over system for commentary, beginning with NBA2K10.   One of the biggest complaints as sports gamers is the fact that the commentary repeats so much.  For example, if I hear Gary Thorne say ‘Be careful, he’s got to move that’ one more time… I’ll lose my poop.  Like every new feature… I’m “grain of salting” this one.

Quite the busy weekend…

Packer game Friday night, 2 fantasy drafts on Saturday, and then hockey (possibly my last hockey for a while, depending on MRI results) tonight.

- The SGB Fantasy draft went off without a hitch last night and completed incredibly quickly.  I was trying to keep up with the draft that I was attending in person along with what you guys were doing, but it looked like it went very well.  Hopefully everyone has fun with it.

- I have to try and measure my enthusiasm for the Packers, but damnit does their 1st string Offense and Defense look good.  Must remember it is pre-season though…

- If you’re looking for good mystery and suspense novels, take a look at Harlan Coben.  I know I’ve mentioned his work a few times, but my wife and I are just tearing through his books lately.  Great stuff.

- More tomorrow… need to get some sleep.

Greetings, all!

Here’s this weeks episode of Riding the Pines.  Dan and I had the opportunity to interview Jim Gindin of Solecismic software to see what he has been up to and what his future plans are for the Front Office Football series.   The show is available on ITunes, Feedburner, and via direct MP3.

I hope you all enjoy the episode!

For those of you interested, here is the conference call for NHL2K10 that I took part in on Friday.

It sounds like there are some nice improvements that have been added to this years game.  I’ve always felt that they were a bit behind the NHL series from EA, so we’ll see how their work has paid off shortly.

Enjoy.

So last night we held our Fantasy Draft – Jonah was too busy working on his logo to attend, so he ended up with 23 mediocore running backs. As mentioned before, I got the #1 pick and Adrian Peterson; which is probably like getting LT last year.

Some interesting choices from the actual draft attendees, of course within seconds of picking Matt Cassel as my backup, he gets injured. Looks like it will be one of those years.

Subject says it all  — use our handy Amazon search box and you’ll give us some money to help run the site and pay for all the bandwidth of the podcast…

Riding the Pines podcast guest, Patrick Hruby, has written a new article at ESPN.com where he discusses the most overrated players in sports gaming history.  The list covers players from Dell Curry in NBA Jam, to my own personal submission, Bob Nelson in Tecmo Super Bowl. 

Here’s a link to the article.  It’s an entertaining read on a Friday afternoon.

For those of you in the league, the fantasy site is all set up.  We have divisions lined up now, as well as having a completely set draft order for tomorrow nights draft. 

Dan has the 1st pick (jerk) and I’m picking 9th. 

Can’t wait to get it started and see how badly Dan can screw it up…. heh.

There’s a patch out for Madden 10 on the PS3. No idea what it does, but there is one there.

- Watching a 4th place baseball team in August is just agonizing sometimes, but I’m sure Dan knows all about that.  His team is usually in 4th place by… April 3rd.

- I spent a bit of time with the NBA Draft Combine title on Xbox Live the other night and here are my early thoughts.

For those of you that haven’t heard about this, you create a player and put him through the NBA draft combine.  In this game, you have a series of drills that you can do to improve your skills, play scrimmages, and then play a series of 5 games that improves your draft status.

The drills have certain things that you have to accomplish in order to get a Bronze, Silver, or Gold rating.  The rating that you get gives you a certain amount of points to put toward increasing your players abilities.

The scrimmages, basically, allow you to get used to playing NBA2K again.  The scrimmage consists of a game with 5 minute quarters, and is pretty straightforward.

The 5 draft combine games are a bit different though.  At the beginning of the game, you are given a series of goals that you need to accomplish.  One of my examples was that my shooting guard needed to finish the game shooting better than 42% from the field, the player I was defending needed to have a worse than 45% shooting percentage, and I needed a “team grade” of C+ or better.

Your grade improves as you get fast break baskets, make assists, box out properly on a rebound, etc.  One thing that I found frustrating was the fact that I kept being told by the game that my positioning is bad.  The issue with that was the fact that there  really isn’t any offensive structure that I found.  You don’t really know what to do other than to run and get open for a shot.  So, I would try to set a few picks and kick out to the wing.  Unfortunately, that wasn’t what the game wanted and I kept being told I was doing the wrong thing.  Maybe there is more to it, but there is no set offenses or anything like that for you to know where to be or where to get open.  Odd.

The game is a nice introduction back to the NBA2K game, but in my opinion, it should have either been a pre-order bonus or included in the game.  Almost every sports game has a “Be in the game” sort of mode now and it seems odd to make it an additional charge.

Just my thoughts there….

- So, I had my MRI this morning.  It’s nice that they let you bring in a CD to listen to.  I don’t think they had ever had a DJ Dangermouse CD in the MRI room before, so that was a nice way to start the day.

- Packer game tonight, and two fantasy drafts tomorrow.  It’ll be interesting to see if I’m football’d out by the end of the weekend.

If you want it you have to email me.

I had a long post all put together and clicked publish and it went away. Oh, well. I guess my nuggets of wisdom will have to wait for another day.

I’ll try to put it back together later today.

Since I purchased Wolfenstein through Amazon, they gave me a free claim code for Wolfenstein (The original PC game on XBL). I already have it , so who wants a code?

- What can I say? I’m weak. I picked up Batman yesterday (the $30 gift card from TRU was just too hard to pass up.) The game is terrific. It’s a nice balance of stealth and action. The voice work is sensational. Mark Hamill is terrific as the Joker.

I was stuck doing some work from home last night, but got to enjoy the first few segments of the game and really was starting to get into the action. The one thing I couldn’t figure out (and didn’t open the manual to check out) was how to figure out when I had hit a checkpoint. I could quit and it would put me back a bit… but I had no idea when I knew I had hit one. So, I quit last night and ended up losing a few minutes of gameplay that I had already completed (and had hit another checkpoint for.) Oh, well. Minor issues.

- Looks like I’m going to have an MRI on my knee on Friday monrning. It just doesn’t seem to be recovering and the doctor seems to think something is going on in there. I would tend to agree. When you feel crunching and cracking noises when you pull up your knee…that’s not a great sign. Hopefully it’s nothing too bad.

- It’s hard to believe that I stick with baseball like I do. The Brewers rally from being down 6-1 with 1 out in the 9th to tie it up (and lose the chance to win it when Ryan Braun tags up when he shouldn’t have on a flyout to shallow left,) and then go on to lose in the 13th. Ugh.

- People around here are seemingly WAY too excited about the Packers play in the first 2 preseason games. It’s great to see them play the way that they have when the starters are on the field… but I don’t think they’ve seen much from the other teams either. One thing is for sure.. BJ Raji is a stud. Man does he move people around.

- Well, Dan is out of town on vacation, so I guess it’s up to me to carry the weight of the blog.  It’s a monumental effort, but I’ll do what I can.

- I’m still making my own adjustments to Bill Harris’ sliders to make the game to my liking.  I personally feel that the pass rush is a bit too quick, meaning that I can’t ever really pull off a play action pass.  I do like how much better the running game works though.. that’s an awesome improvement on the game.

- I’m really tempted to pick up Batman: Arkham Asylum tomorrow.  The $30 gift card with the game at Toys R Us is a great deal.  I have a hard time believing I couldn’t sell the game for $30 at some point in the next month if I got tired of it.

- The Fantasy League is now all full.  I’ll be sending an email to all of the members very shortly with a few items for the league.  Should be fun.

- We don’t have enough interest for a 32 team Madden Online league, but I’m curious as to how many people would want to put together a smaller league.  Let me know if you’re interested.

- I guess it was a slower night than I thought.  Talk to you all tomorrow.