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

Friday notes

- 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.