Oh yea, PC gaming is dead. Geoff suggested that I check out the Battlefield 2 demo last night and 546 MBs later, I am hooked. Yet another drain on my precious time. I will post more about BF2 after I’ve mastered it a bit. It’s a hardware hog, so good thing I just upgraded my PC.
Youth sports can be wonderful teachers for our children. There are many “life lessons” that can be taught through this vehicle, such as teamwork, how to handle success and failure, setting and achieving goals, self-worth and self-respect, sportsmanship, humility, unselfishness, and the list goes on and on. Youth sports is a wonderful teacher, until ass-clown-parents like Mark R. Downs get involved…
Allegedly, to field the most competitive team possible, Downs bribed another player on his T-BALL team with $25 to drill a development-disabled player in the head, so he wouldn’t have to play him his requisite 3 innings. First of all, why would any T-BALL coach be worried about competitiveness? Kids that age are so far removed from understanding the game of baseball and being able to use the skills required to play it competitively that even beginning to worry about the score and trying to win is inherently moot. Secondly, the purpose of recreational youth sports is to accomplish what I discussed in the first paragraph; not to bring glory to some has-been dad who wants to prove his worth through his T-BALL winning percentage. Ultimately, he got his wish, as the developmentally disabled child was indeed intentionally hit in the groin with a baseball, and was not able to play. I guess Downs had a better chance to win, at the cost of the self-image of an innocent child already with serious issues in life to conquer.
Mr. Downs deserves a Louisville Slugger to the testicles, and then one upside the cranium, for good measure. There are too many idiot-parents like this one in the world of youth sports today, and they’re stealing the rite of passage of many kids to participate in youth sports to help them grow into quality young men and women, all for their own “glory.” I only wish every child the opportunity to fondly remember their successes on the athletic field, no matter how big or small, and how those successes impacted their growth, and ultimately, their desire to provide the same experience for their children.
Not really, but it is another Friday night, and another drunken blog – hey I do what I can.
First, the number one spot this week is Aspen Edge. I know beerpals.com thinks it sucks, but it works well to chase a night of Harp and Shiraz. Besides beer flavored water rules.
What about recent music? I picked up New Order’s “International The Best of New Order” from iTunes. So I love me some 80s’ music; sue me, whatever. I am also in love with some Gwen Stefani pop; no apologies. I even downloaded some JoJo the other night, but I have to admit that I am a little ashamed to amid I paid for pop. I know Chris thinks it is pretty trite, but I am still enjoying the Killers – good stuff.
On the home front my pool room (AKA the garage apartment reconstruction project) is almost ready for me to do the refinish thing. Thankfully my wife is all about getting a pool table and a refrigerator full of beer to recoup some of the construction costs. I suck at pool, and never really played, but I am looking forward to building out the game room. Have to give a shout out to my wife; she actually suggested the refrigerator full of beer. Tonya is a great wife!
Renovating my grandmother’s house has been a heck of a learning experience. I am sure if she was still here my grandmother would be pissed about the wall we took out, but overall I would like to think she would be happy to have kids running and sliding on the floors again. I am pretty excited about moving into the house this fall!
Gaming has been non existent this week, but who needs gaming when the duckets are flying left and right for the pool room.
Hope everyone has a fantastic weekend of gaming!
I greeted this ExtremeTech article about Windows Vista and gaming the same way that the French dabbed watery eyes and blew kisses at the liberating allied forces during Word War II. “Long live PC Gaming!” Many of the old timers that I know have remained strong and resisted the call of the console box. “See how easy it is to play me.” “No configuring me for anything.” “Aren’t I just as expensive as a new video card?” Let me tell you, it’s been tough.
Hope is on the horizon! The resistance will win! Windows Vista will be a true PC gaming platform!
I’m not going to re-hash the many reasons why I don’t like console gaming. To each his or her own I say. But I was getting very tired of reading and hearing how the PC was dead as a gaming platform, despite the fact that I am playing many more hours on the PC right now than I ever was back when consoles were these jaggy silly primitive products.
There are simply better PC games these days. World of Warcraft and Out of the Park Baseball are really the only titles I play right now. OK, I just started Halo. I literally don’t have the time to play much else. But it’s all PC all the time. I stopped playing console games when I stopped reviewing them.
So get ready old timers! Start thinking up new excuses to tell your wives and significant others! Now we can blame a “mid-life crisis” on our hours in front of the monitor. And we can even afford to buy all of the games that we shouldn’t be playing!
Here we go again. I know the sex stuff buried in GTA:SA is old news, but the washingtonpost.com has a great article about the story.
“So — the justification for this use of our tax dollars is that Take Two misled the public by promising a game featuring enough violence to make Sam Peckinpah blush, but instead sprinkled it with near-hardcore pornography. (I use “near” as there isn’t any display of genitalia, at least as far as I could see. And it’s a cartoon graphic, not real people…)
Good heavens, citizens! What’s going on here? Oh yes, of course, we’re getting all bent out of shape over nothing again. I keep forgetting that this is a proud American tradition, on the same display shelf as the controversy over “Darling Nikki” and the fuss over video games in general from the early ’80s. I bet some of the folks who thought our children’s brains were turning to mush over too much “Centipede” aren’t looking at it this way today.”
My sentiments exactly! But it gets better, much, much better.
“Lauren Charbonneau didn’t worry about purchasing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for her son, Luke, in October when he was 11. Luke is ‘pretty mature,’ his mother says. She figured he could handle an M-rated video game. Then news broke last week that explicit interactive sex scenes were discovered hidden in the code of the game that touts intense violence, blood and gore. … Luke says he never accessed the hidden scenes, but the news of their existence upset his mother. ‘I’m shocked and angry,’ says Ms. Charbonneau, 47, of Plano. ‘They deceived the public.'”
Wow! The GTA series is an easy target, but why not go after parents such as Lauren Charbonneau for not actually following the ratings guide? Why not make parents responsible for actually supervising their children and (I know this is crazy talk) actually watching what their kids play?
I could go on and on with this one, but enough for now.
I feel like such a fool, spending $676 for my Dell 2001FP LCD monitor! Visit SlickDeals or Techbargains when you have cash to burn and want to maximize pennies spent. There are even iPod deals for Jonathan!
So says Elton John, and who cares if no one is really keeping track of Friday night (tonight)? Since I am already done, I figured now would be a good time to post – my best prose always comes after a few cold ones, and the Harp at the Tap is delicious.
Seriously, a weekend of gaming is in the works – all NCAA 2006, all weekend. Plus my mom is watching the kids Saturday night, so I think the weekend should be awesome. Hope everyone has a good one!
Sometimes developers outdo themselves. Just when you think you’ve seen all of the crappy ideas for games, a new one surfaces that is quite amazing. Here is what Sony planned on competing against Madden with according to Gamespot:
“Road to Sunday wasn’t just about football–it featured some elements that, while incredibly venturous, could alienate the hardcore football crowd. The storyline saw gamers take on the managerial position of a football team after the former owner, the protagonist’s father, mysteriously died in a yacht explosion. The gambling-addicted son owed a truckload of gambling debts to a Jamaican kingpin and saw the team as a way of recouping some of his lost cash and digging himself out of a financial hole.”
Grand Theft Auto: Meadowlands? Good grief. Fortunately somebody at Sony finally put down the pipe and canceled this abomination.
For the first time ever in the NCAA series, I just played a game where the CPU actually won the all important time of possession battle. Anyone that follows my exploits will know that this is damn near impossible! Not only do I tend to play games where I ground things out on the ground (3 yards and a cloud of dust and all that jazz), the CPU seems to always pick up a few quick scores on long TD strikes or some such broken play.
Last night, I managed to beat Troy 28-3. North Texas has two studs at HB (plus yours truly at QA) so I like to give those guys the ball as much as possible. Say what you will about North Texas and my style of offense, but Patrick Cobbs and Jamario Thomas have led the country in rushing the past two years, so it would be fairly ignorant of me to just start chucking the ball all over the field. Besides, I am a Heisman hopeful, and a scrambling QB to boot, so I have to keep the ball on the ground as much as possible.
I am getting completely off track here. At the start of the 4th quarter, despite being up 21-3, Troy still had me beat by 3 minutes in overall TOP. By the end of the game, Troy was up 9:30 to my 8:30. I find that simply shocking, but in a good sort of way.
I did fumble twice, including one time at the 1 yard line – I leaped into the endzone, but apparently I forgot to take the ball across the goalline. I also hit one of my TEs for a 71 yard TD strike (about 50 yards after the catch). I also held Tory in check with a fumble recovery, an INT, and I stopped one fake punt attempt.
I am still not sure how I managed not to win the TOP battle, but I am pleasantly surprised that NCAA 2006 is giving me something different. My pride has been wounded, which means I am going to try to beat the crap out of Arkansas State later tonight!
I wanted to interrupt my NCAA 2006 love-fest for a few minutes to write about the good guys of sports. I have been a subscriber to the Sporting News the past three years, and each year I have enjoyed reading the annual Good Guys (What’s right about sports) issue. This year the Falcons’ Warrick Dunn was singled out as the top good guy.
While it does not really matter how much these guys give, I always get a kick out of reading that such and such superstar gave $100K to a chosen charity. The jaded person in me immediately thinks that “so and so gets x million a year, but only gave $100K!” I admit that is the wrong direction, instead I try to focus on the fact that a professional athlete is actually giving something back to the community besides another illegitimate kid, another costly court case, another highly publicized run-in with the law, or even worse. The bad guys always get so much attention that it amazing that everyone in sports is not all that bad (I am being a little sarcastic, but I am sure you get my point).
It is funny that most of us never get our names in lights for giving money; it is just one of those things that Americans do. We are a generous people. So it is just another sign of the times that we actually care about what athletes give, but as I said, we (well, I do) expect so much focus on bad behavior that we are often surprised by the good stuff.
At any rate, be sure to check out the July 8, 2005 Sporting News to read about the good guys in sports for a happy-feel-good kind of day.
Another day, another NCAA 2006 update. While the game is not vastly different than previous versions (I am not even going to count NCAA 2005 as part of the official NCAA series canon), speed actually matters for the first time. Big plays happen when a player with breakaway speed gets a step on someone that cannot match stride-for-stride. In past versions of the game, I always felt like there was some degree of cheating going on because individual player speed attributes did not seem to count for much.
This year NCAA 2006 really feels like college football from all aspects of the game. Not only does the running game work, the CPU will actually allow running teams to run the ball. The passing game has been fixed; drops are not as common as NCAA 2005. Tweaking the speed attributes (or rather making speed matter) results in kick off and punt returns for TDs. Of course the atmosphere is awesome, which is the hallmark of the NCAA series. Needless to say, NCAA 2006 has rejuvenated my love for gaming (I am not going to digress, that is for another day).
Unless you absolutely hate the inherent Madden/NCAA/EA Sports style of football, I think I can safely recommend NCAA 2006 as one of the best games in the series. I am still playing on the default settings (I have increased penalties a notch across the board), so my opinion may change if I graduate to the All-American or Heisman settings, but so far so pleased.
As I said in a previous post, it has also been a huge help that I have not scoured messages looking for info/posts on the games. I am already a jaded bastard, so *not* reading about what is broken, money plays, and what sucks has tremendously improved my enjoyment factor. I will try to remember that before I go halfcocked on any gaming factors that I find debilitating; maybe with some sort of spoiler warning.
Maybe this whole casual gamer thing is not half bad! Are any readers in favor of a dynasty report (or two) so I can get out of the mainstream and into sports-gaming-freak mode?
I don’t beta test anymore, but there’s no reason why folks shouldn’t help Shaun Sullivan develop his latest PuerSim version. He’s released a public beta version of 9.0, so head over and start providing feedback.
I am still not sure what to make of the Race for the Heisman mode; I know I am going to be serious pissed if I win the Heisman and there are no extra bells or whistles. I will be equally disappointed if I import my player into Madden 06 (assuming I buy the latest, greatest Madden) and he (or rather I) am not worth a damn in the NFL. I will also be extremely disappointed if there are some limitations of rolling my Heisman mode into a Dynasty mode. I guess I will cross those bridges if they get in my way.
I played an awful game against Troy; while I did win 10-0, I totally sucked. Must have been the beer. Surprisingly there is still some Heisman buzz around my alter ego, but I have no idea why there was any buzz in the first place. When it comes to the NCAA series, I have always been more about running than passing, which is going to hinder my progress as a scrambling QA; sacks kill my rushing average.
In my next game vs. K-State I managed to win 27-17. OK, I admit that I padded the score by kicking a FG as time expired, but I toss it up to needing the practice. The big deal to me in this game was that I had two INTs with a LB; that almost never happed with previous versions of the game. Strangely enough the picks came on K-State’s first two possessions for the first half. The bigger news was that K-State actually mounted a 12 play, 82 yard TD drive that took almost 3 minutes. Everything about the drive was encouraging. I have been playing my Heisman mode games on 4 min quarters so I can get in plenty of games, so a 3 minute drive is a huge chunk of time. I cannot think of a single time with any of the previous games where the CPU actually mounted a 12 play drive.
I have not spent very much time looking around various message boards to see if the buzz around NCAA Football 2006 is positive or negative, but I can say that I am pretty pleased so far. I will probably stay away from most boards (as much as possible anyway) so I am not jaded by all the posts about various flaws that I have yet to uncover.
The New York Times has an interesting piece about the creation of the new Battlestar Galactica.
Lets continue the upgrade saga. One of the things I always try to do during any PC upgrade is maximize the free games I get with the hardware I purchase. Since I dont buy many games anyhow, theres usually a high probability that I wont own the free titles and will get some benefit from them.
The motherboard I chose was the ASUS A8N-E. I like the NForce motherboard bios, but dont need SLI (youll see why in a minute), so the A8N-E is a good choice. The question that should be apparent at this point is how did I get a free game out of this? Well, Mwave.com is giving free copies of Half Life 2 via Steam when a motherboard/CPU combo is purchased. Since I was just about to purchase Half Life 2 for $39 at Best Buy, this is a nice freebie.
First free game.
I wanted to upgrade the sound on my motherboard. I decided to get a Creative Audigy 2 ZS and was first looking at the Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Platinum. Was attractive because of the additional firewire ports that I currently dont have on my motherboard. As a bit of an afterthought, I looked at the cheaper Gamer Limited Edition version of the card. It had only one firewire port, but included five free copies of full version games. Halo (another game I was about to purchase), Rainbow Six 3, Splinter Cell, Jedi Knight Jedi Academy, and Tomb Raider the Angel of Darkness.
Now up to six free games.
I didnt need a SLI board because I decided to get an ATI XL800 card. At first I was simply going to purchase the ATI brand card, but I did a little more investigating. MSI Computing sells a RX800XL card that includes three free games Uru, XIII, and Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow. OK, Im not a big Myst fan so Uru is a complete waste, but its still a free game.
Final tally nine free games.
When will I have time to play all of these games? I dont know, but I can promise that at the very least, Halo and Half Life will get some serious attention. Then Rainbow Six 3, followed by the collection of Splinter Cell games. After that, who knows?