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

Monday notes

- Not sure how many of you are as silly superstitious the rest of you are about sports, but from Friday to Sunday, I wore a Brewers t-shirt (a different one every day...just in case you were wondering) and they won each game by a single run.

Today they get a chance to go for a 4 game sweep of the Marlins, who are a pretty good team as well.  Even if they don't win today's game, they have a 4-2 road trip at this point, which is remarkable considering they were 8-17 on the road before this last trip.

Next weekend is the big test though as the Cardinals come to town.  They just got done taking a series from the Cubs and won 2 games on walk off homers from Pujols.  Should be a fun series.

- Well, we have E3 starting up today with EA, Microsoft and Sony's big press conferences.  Apparently Microsoft's list of titles that they will be showing has leaked and, at least to me, it's not all that impressive of a list.  And now their own site is listing Halo 4 and a remake of Halo: Combat Evolved. Maybe I'm jumping to a conclusion there, but there really isn't anything on that list that's really grabbing me.   We'll see more in a few hours, I guess.

I'll post my thoughts on all three of the conferences later today, along with anything else that might be worth covering.

One thing that will almost certainly be a theme this year?  Remakes... lots and lots of HD remakes.

- Back in the early 90's, I got into collecting comics due to the fact that I acquired a job working for a distributor called Westfield Comics.  It was just simple data entry stuff, but eventually I got a job working at one of their retail locations in town and I started reading a ton of stuff.  In fact, I have 4 long boxes filled with comics from that time... that I know don't have any value.  Such is life.

Over the last few years, I've heard a ton of great things about a series called Y: The Last Man and so I went to the library and grabbed a few of the graphic novels to see what the hype was about.

I have to say that I was amazed about the book.  For those of you that don't know what happens, there is some sort of plague that impacts the world and kills off every mammal with a y chromosome.  No men, and no male animals to continue breeding their species.

The one man that survives is an amateur escape artist named Yorick Brown and the series follows him and the people trying to help him uncover what happened and how they might be able to save the human race.

It's really been an incredible read thus far and I just can't wait to see what happens to Yorick, Hero, 355, and Dr. Mann.   Great stuff, I highly recommend it.

If you have any other suggestions of books to take a look into once I'm done with it, pass them along.

- While I was sitting in my rehab chair yesterday, I made myself watch the 4th quarter of game 3 of the NBA finals.   Here's what I came away with.

* Sloppy passing is due to "great defense."  At least 2 or 3 times in critical situations you'd see players make horrible passes for no real reason.  Some real ugly stuff.

* Jason Kidd is a TERRIBLE defender.  He was on Dwayne Wade for the entire 4th quarter and only once raised his arms to try and get a hand in Wade's face.  Nearly every shot Wade took was uncontested.  How that guy was guarding one of the best players in the game is beyond me.

* The last 10 minutes of the game took 35 minutes.  One stretch of 3 minutes took almost 15.  Painfully slow to watch.

After all that, I just came to the conclusion, yet again, that the NHL Finals is a much better product for sheer excitement at the end of a game when the outcome is in doubt.... but you knew I would say that already.

- Lastly... I had a chance to try out the Duke Nukem Forever demo and I was disappointed to see that it was the same one that I had heard that journalists have been playing for the better part of the last year.

Graphically, the game is not all that impressive, even with the settings set to the max, and the gameplay.. from the early segments didn't really do anything to stand out either.

Still, the Duke vibe is there.  I'll be curious to try out the full version of the game, but it seems clear that the main reason that it was being held back... even after all these years... was because of the fact that it isn't as good as some of the other games out there in that genre.  A games personality can take you part of the way... but can't cover up all of the flaws.