The Blog for the Sports Gamer

- I’m curious as to what some of you think about the leaked MLB financial docs that have appeared over on Deadspin.

There is no appearance of anything “wrong” with what is being done, but the concept of amortizing salaries seems just a bit shady, even if it is an ok practice.  I mean, is every player losing value, like a printer or a computer?

Hopefully some of you are more well versed in accounting practices than people like me are.

- For no good reason, here’s an old You Tube chestnut with Bert and Ernie rapping.

- Anyone try out NHL2K11 on the iPhone or iPod touch?

I’ve been doing my best to try out sports games on the iPhone when they come out, but I just have such a hard time with the controls.  Certain games seem to work so well, but the virtual joysticks that they use just seem so wonky to me.

Thoughts?

- As a football fan, I was bummed to see Sidney Rice go down for at least 8 weeks with his hip surgery.   As a Packer fan, it was nice to see the Vikings have one less weapon on offense.

I do have to say that the signing of Javon Walker is an odd one.  He was completely out of football last year due to a surgery… that he couldn’t even have done in the United States or Canada (that links him to Dr. Galea, who sent him to Jerusalem to have the procedure done.)  Javon does have a history of big games with Brett (the game after Favre’s father passed away, being the biggest one,) so there is some connection between the two there.

Still, the Vikings are in a tough place as far as their receiving core goes.

- Reports today have the DJ Hero bundle for $19.99 at Toys R Us for the next two days.

Personally, I loved the game and got well more than 20 dollars worth of gameplay out of it.   Opinions may vary there, but I thought it was well worth that kind of price.

There was a shirt that I saw that I should have bought. It said “I may be a lefty, but I’m always right.”

So for Craig and all the other nonbelievers, the Consumerist is confirming that you can sign up for Sunday Ticket without proving you can’t get DTV.

You’re welcome.

- So, seeing as how we have Dan, Craig, and myself here.  All long time, old timers of the world of sports gaming on the internet, I decided to take a look at archive.org to see some of the old sites that I used to visit, read, and work for.  Sadly, I can see now that ga-sports.com has been blocked by their domain owner from showing the history of that domain.

It seems a bit sad to me that a new domain holders are blocking some of the old content from the past for a domain name.   I can understand how they might want to block it if it was something unsavory, but in the case of ga-sports.com… ok… some of the past there was unsavory.

Still, it is fun to go back and look at some of our collected pasts on the internet.  For example… how about some of Craig’s old work on Operation Sports?  I’d say that you should look up some of Dan’s old work, but all I could find was posts from people stating how annoying he was.  (Oh, how times have changed.)

- I did manage to take back one more record in my ongoing Geometry Wars 2 battle with “Breadmanben.”  I got within 10,000 points on the ‘King’ mode and then quit for the night.  It’s just too frustrating sometimes to get so close to getting the score you want, then dying.  I just didn’t have it in me for another attempt.

- Lastly, I took a bike ride last night (my first since my injury) and found that I am still not completely recovered.  It took me a good 2 or 3 hours before my abdominal muscles to stop hurting after a short 9 mile ride.   I’ll probably give it a go again in a week or so, but it’s so annoying to not be able to get on my bike and ride when I want.  Getting older sucks.

I preordered back in April and it showed up today.  My CableCard will not be here until next Monday however.  What am I talking about?  My Ceton InfiniTV4 of course.  If you are not familiar with this device it is a PCIe card that holds a CabelCard from your cable provider and lets you record 4 shows in HD at the same time on your Windows 7 Media Center PC.  (endgadget review) That’s right, 4 shows at once, some or all in HD and all recorded to the same location where you pick how much hard drive space you want to have.  No more hard drive limits set by your cable provider or Tivo.  And yes, since the PC is connected to the home network I can watch the shows on any PC that has a Media Center extender, such as an Xbox 360, connected to it.  You can actually have 5 extenders connected at the same time, so I could have 4 shows being recorded and watch yet a 5th show that has already been recorded.  This is the flexibility I’ve been looking for for years now.  Only 1 week of waiting left.  Of course, since I’ve said that, I better cross my fingers and hope everything goes according to plan.

According to the NY Daily News (just a little bit more reputable than say, a forum post LOL), DirectTV is going to make NFL Sunday Ticket available over broadband to non-DirecTV subscribers for the low, low price of $350, which is about $240 more than MLB.TV costs and about 146 less games of one team. Still not as expensive as actually going to the game and a godsend to those not in the area of their favorite team but ouch….Do I buy a new Xbox, or do I get Sunday Ticket?

Full details here: http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/2010/07/31/2010-07-31_the_score_calling_it_like_we_see_it_with_sny_producer_gregg_picker.html?page=2

My first thought about this game is that people will miss out by not trying it.   Part of the problem with sports games on the Wii, in my opinion, is that most of the Wii owners aren’t much more than casual sports fans.  Or if they are really into sports, they just don’t think of the Wii as their sports gaming system.

As a result of that, I think that the biggest problem that 2K will run into with the title has to do with the fact that they’re selling it for the $49.99 price point.  If they would release this for $19.99 or even $29.99, you could find a lot more of the casual Wii fans picking up this game to try out the season, franchise, or mini-game aspects.  As it is though, I think you will see people passing on a sports title for the Wii and picking up the High Definition title by EA for only $10 more.

Here’s what I’ve found in regards to the game…

Graphically, the game is greatly improved over last year.  Players faces look a good deal more like their actual counterparts, but the models for the players still look a bit blocky.  Each players shoulders look “too square” and just look wrong.  Obviously, it’s not a terrible thing, but it does just look out of place and takes away some of the realism.

As far as other gameplay changes go, 2K states that they have improved the AI for the game, and it is noticeable.  I have noticed quite a few situation where my opponent has really taken advantage of defensive mistakes that I have made and created odd-man opportunities out of them.  As a result, I’ve had to adjust how I typically play, and play a bit smarter as a result.

Just like last year, the control component of the gameplay does require a few adjustments for you to get used to it, but it does not take too long to get the feel of it.   After you take the time with learning the controls, I feel that the Wii Motion Plus addon does give you a much control scheme for playing a hockey game.  Hold down the B button, then swing your remote like you’re pulling back for a slapshot and you see, nearly, 1 to 1 movement on the player that you’re controlling.  Swing it back down and you complete your shot.   A wristshot is pulled off by just flicking the remote upward, but as you can see, both shots are very simple to pull off and… more importantly, are fun to execute.

It just goes without saying that when you score a goal by doing something that emulates a slapshot, that it is a good deal more fulfilling than a button press.  Maybe that’s just me that feels that way though.

One thing that I would love to see, if the franchise continues, is to see them adapt this for the Playstation Move.   Add HD graphics to the same control scheme and I think you would have a sensational hockey game for the PS3.

As far as the goals that I have scored, all of them have looked realistic.   I’ve already scored on a slap shot high on the blocker side, on a wrist shot through the 5-hole, and have hammered home a rebound when the goalie was down.   I’ve seen the CPU make a deke and get my goalie to commit, then pull the puck back and lift it just over his leg.  Even when I’ve had goals scored against me, I can see that goals are being scored on quality opportunities, and that’s a great thing.

Besides the standard Franchise, Season, and Quickplay modes, you have a new party game called ‘Road to the Cup’ where you (and up to 3 others) play through mini-games, trivia competitions, and skills contests in a Mario Party style competition.   Some of the mini-games fall short, but here are two of the ones that stood out to me.

1.  You and 4 other skaters try to skate over moving numbers (1 through 4) on a sheet of ice.  The bigger the point value, the smaller the circle is.  Each time you skate over a number, it turns to your color, but once someone else skates over it, they claim it.

It’s a silly little game, but I can picture that friends would have a good time going back and forth on the ice trying to take back points from each other.

2.  The other memorable game was called ‘Hot Streak.’  Each of the 4 skaters on the ice has a trail that is following behind them.  If you skate over one of your opponents trail, then you fall down.  The game is over when 3 of the skaters fall down 3 times.   What I found to be fun about this mode was that even after you have been eliminated, you can still mess with all of the other skaters.  So, rather than having you sit out after screwing up, you get to mess with your friends.

The process for starting up an online game is pretty straightforward, as you can just play a game against another person via the Quick Game portion, or create a league or tournament to play with others.

The only problem is that I have not been able to get into an online game at this point, as I just haven’t seen any people online playing the game, but that probably has more to do with the fact that the game has not been released yet.

2K’s decision to abandon their NHL franchise on the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 was an interesting one, but I think it could work well for them if people can get their hands on this game.   It’s a game that is deep enough for the average hockey fan, but is still fun for a casual gamer.

If you’re on the fence for this title and have Gamefly, you really need to put this in your queue, just to try it out.  I think you’ll find that you’ll like as much as I do.

- All it took was an email to me stating “I drink your milkshake,” to know that I had to dive back into Geometry Wars 2.

Loyal reader (and Madden football league participant) Steve ‘I’m not Marc’ has taken up the challenge of attempting to knock off all of my high scores in this game.   I’m not saying that I’m exceptionally good at this game, but in my 5th attempt at ‘Deadline’ last night, I managed to double his high score.

The rest of the records should fall back into my possession later this evening.

The gauntlet, my friends, has been thrown down.  And I have picked up and lobbed it in a very weak and feeble toss back at his feet.  I don’t want to hurt anyone, after all.

- A new sports game comes out tomorrow and I’ll got an early release copy on Friday.  I’ll be talking about that in my next post…

- As far as preseason football goes here are my thoughts on the Packers (and to a lesser extent, the Vikings games.)

1.  The Packers offense looks to be very impressive thus far.  4 long TD drives led by Rodgers has people buzzing around here.

Also, Jermichael Finley looks to be a mismatch for any and everyone.   He’ll be an awesome weapon in their system all year long.

Ryan Grant and Brandon Jackson look to be a step quicker this year.  They were hitting holes at full speed in the game against Seattle and that should bode well for the regular season.

2.  Defensively it is so hard to get a read on this team as they’re not blitzing and they were missing both of their starting cornerbacks (Woodson and Harris,) and all 4 of their starting linebackers.

People around here are swearing up and down that it’s going to be the Arizona playoff game all over again.

Personally, I’d like to see them all on the field before we make that kind of judgement.   Still, having that many guys hurt at this point in the preseason isn’t a very good thing.

3.  As far as the Vikings go.  Don’t you think that most teams are going to try and emulate what the Saints did against Favre?  When you’re seeing San Fran send big blitzes against Minnesota in a preseason game, I think the writing is on the wall.  ”Try to hurt the old man,” seems to be the way to get to the Vikings this year.   After seeing the pictures of his knees and ankles after that NFC championship game, I find it hard to believe that he won’t be beat up quite a few times this year.  He’ll probably beat the blitzes a few times, but at 40, it’s going to get harder and harder to avoid them all.

I sent out the invites earlier today, but if you’re interested in either, drop me an email and I’ll get you the invites that you need.

We already have 5 teams claimed, so if there is a specific team that you’re interested in, now is the time to jump on it.

Yes, I am not dead. I was still recovering from the “our game is so realistic, all bugs are accurate” post from EA. It’s stuff like that which is silly. Kickoffs are as bad as Glen showed in his video. This needs to be fixed. The gaming community accepts betas as their sports games at this point, so stop bragging about it and just fix the problem, already.
Let’s hope they do. In the meantime, have you tried Madden HD for the iPad? It looks gorgeous and will amuse passersby like crazy. The game is a little wonky and the touch screen controls are as much fun as…a game with touch screen controls (kinda borrowed that joke from the Hasselhoff roast about Jerry Springer (writing a check to a prostitute is as bad as …writing a check to a prostitute) but it works here.

Oh well. Kicking on a touch screen is pretty good though, I’ll give them that. They didn’t do a half bad job given that I wasn’t expecting much anyway!

Ok, let’s see how this all works.

Edit: Ok… so it appears to work.  We’ll see how well it works in the long run though.

Enjoy the new features.

It appears that we were having some issues with the registration emails for people signing up for the site.

Those issues should all be resolved now.

Please let me know if you have any problems registering.

So, I have added a new forum to the site.  I’ve called it… wait for it… The Forum for the Sports Gamer.

I know… I know.  It just exudes creativity.

Right now we have basic integration between the two.  All user names from here are integrated into the forums.  So, if you register here, you can post there.  Much better than the last time we tried out a forum here.

My next hope would be to have “real integration” between the two where a post here would become a topic there and the comments would be replies there, but that’s something that’s going to have to wait for a bit as they’re still developing that portion.

Lastly, I’ve added a little widget to the front page that lets you know the most recent posts that have been made on the forums, so you can track what’s going on there.

Anywho… give it a try and see what you think.

Operation Sports recently sat in on a conference call regarding Madden and here is what Ian Cummings had to say about the kickoffs in the game.

OS: Yeah, a lot of people are complaining there are no wedges set up. So those are things you are looking at also?

Ian: There’s no wedges in real life, too [laughs]. It’s funny, a lot of us on the team were actually complaining in the final weeks of the game that kick returns were too hard. So we all sat down and did 100 in a row — each of us. And our average was about three yards above the NFL average on kick returns. So I think what’s happening is obviously people [are] not liking it — having the same reaction that we did. But to be honest, the actual numbers are pretty close to realistic stats. It’s just that you are used to playing Madden and getting to the 25-yard line when you start five yards deep in the end zone. Everyone is used to doing that so now it feels like it’s broken when it’s actually a little more accurate. Regardless, I don’t ever want to use that as kind of a cop-out. If people don’t like it, then we want to try and fix it.

To put it bluntly, he’s selling a load of bull there.   (Although, he does throw in that they want to fix it…to be nice.)

If the computer can’t return kicks on it’s own, there is a problem with how you’ve coded your kickoff engine.  There are no wedges, there is no blocking.  What you have is a mode that lost all of it’s blocking A.I. and you’re now saying that people have to get better to make it playable.  That’s just wrong.   The videos that I’ve recorded show the same thing over and over again.  The kickoff A.I. is broken.

What I would love to hear from him is how many of their multiple 100′s of returns resulted in more than 40 yard returns.  I highly doubt even with massive playthroughs that the stats would even remotely approach the NFL averages.

A person might be able to overcome bad A.I. but the computer cannot.  So, every time that you kick off to the computer you’re pretty much locked into them starting around the 20 yard line.

That, my friends, stinks.

Sorry for not being around much over the last day or so.  I’ve been dealing with a sick kid.

I was happy for the thought of getting back to work after dealing with a moody and sick 3 year old for the last 3 days.

- Roger Clemens indicted?  Wow.  Even with all of the evidence that seemed to be piling up against him, I never thought he would actually be indicted.  I guess lying in front of Congress is a bad thing, huh?  I only wish politicians would be held up to the same standard… they’re making up things all the time, right?  (Yes, I know being under oath is different…)

- I’ll be sending out the Madden league invites in the next day or so, but we still have some room if you’d like to join in.

It’s a very casual league (we’re all grown-ups here) and it moves along at a decent pace.  Drop an email if you’d like to give it a go.

- I honestly don’t know what to say about the Favre stuff.  I’m just glad that it’s done for another year, but if you believe that he really thinks this will be his last year… well… I can’t help you much there.

I just wish I had a job where three of my co-workers would fly halfway across the country to get me to come to work 3 weeks after they started their jobs.  It would be nice to be that good, and wanted, at something.

- Out of Gamescom news, I do have to say that Gran Turismo 5 looks to be pretty amazing.

Kart Racing, Course designing, a racing RPG type game…

Oh, and 1,000+ cars, 70 courses, damage modeling, Nascar racing, Super GT racing.

That’s a hell of a lot of features for a racing title.

I remember how amazing it felt to complete 100% of the first Gran Turismo.  Hell, now I’d be happy to get 15% through the content of most games.

- Speaking of getting part of the way through games, I got back into StarCraft II over the past few days and have been tearing through the missions at a decent clip.  One thing that I love about the game is that each of the missions seems to be a bit different to this point.  One minute I’m destroying Zerg/Protoss hybrids in a stealth mission and on my next mission I’m releasing prisoners from a “jail planet.”

One of the failings of the old RPG formula was the fact that you built a base, amassed a force and ran over the AI opponent, with each mission after that asking you to build a larger base and a larger army.  It’s nice to see Blizzard changing things up for this game.  It’s certainly made it a good deal more enjoyable, in my opinion.

I’ve been fairly concerned about how NHL11 would turn out considering the fact that EA no longer has any competition on the Xbox 360 or PS3, but I have to say my initial worries have been put aside with the demo that was released yesterday.

The demo contains 3 modes that we can discuss here.

1.  The tutorial – A nice way to get used to the controls for the game.  The most important addition is the new faceoff control system that uses the right stick for the draw.  Pull to the left or right for a forehand or backhand and then pull down when the puck is dropped to win the puck back to one of your defensemen.   If you push the stick forward at the right time you can pull off a shot right off the faceoff as well.  Also, if you hold the stick forward you can attempt to lift the opponents stick while your teammates go to grab the puck.

It’s an interesting change to the faceoff system, but I did find that my win percentages were pretty high after a few games.  Hopefully there will be some adjustments there.

2.  Battle for the Cup – A one period matchup between the Blackhawks and Flyers to decide Game 7 of the Stanley Cup.   This is your quickest way to dive into the game and see how the new physics engine is handled.   I can say that I’ve seen some pretty amazing plays that have been pulled off and all of them looked very realistic.  One of the most memorable moments from last night occurred when I was on a breakaway and a defender dived on to the ice and poked the puck off my stick from behind me.  It looked great and felt like something that would actually happen in an NHL game.

One item of concern is the commentary.  I love Gary Thorne and Bill Clement in the booth, but some of their commentary has been recycled for what seems like the last decade.  If I hear Gary say, “Be careful he’s got to move that” one more time….

Please EA, bring them back to the studio and record some new commentary and play-by-play.

3.  Hockey Ultimate Team – This mode is becoming an EA staple as they give you a deck of cards that consist of your players and some cards that you can use to enhance your players.

My opinion of the mode is that it’s just an excuse for micro-transactions.  It can be fun in spurts and you can earn new cards just by playing the game, but to get the best cards and addon cards, you need to spend money on them and I just can’t sign up for that.

If you do play the mode in the demo, you do unlock a special pack of cards for yourself in the game.  So, if you do enjoy these modes, there is that.

Overall, the demo is very solid.  It’s nice to see broken sticks on the ice and having to watch players skate back to the bench to get a new one.  Now, what I want to see over time is that if a defenseman loses a stick on the penalty kill, that one of the forwards will give him his.  The last thing I want to see is players skating off the ice every time they need a stick. That would be horrible on a PK.

One thing that is a certainty in regards to any NHL video game.  I get more excited when I score in an NHL game than in any other.  A sweat deke move that leads to a top shelf goal, when it really matters, is an awesome feeling and gets me more excited than any touchdown that I’ve ever scored in an NFL game.  Maybe that’s just me though.

I’ll spend some more time with it in the next few days and see if I see any other interesting or troubling additions.