Month: August 2005

Life is sometimes funny. I will go for long stretches of time, not worrying about the “little things” in a game that used to bother me. Now that I am a borderline mass-market gamer, I just want to have fun with my gaming experiences. Then other times (such as last night) I revert back to my previous life of a jaded sports gaming bastard.

I think I have complained enough about QB sacks for the last 3-4 years that no one much cares about me complaining yet again – but that is what I do best! So here goes … I am sick and tired of getting my ass handed to me in the form of a sack when my QA is tackled (or hit) by a CPU defender mid-throw. It is so damn frustrating to watch my CPU tuck the ball back in and take a sack even if he has gone through three-fourths of his throwing motion. I could live with this (maybe) if the game was fair about it and also sacked the CPU QBs, but no, that would be too damn easy.

Last night this happened several times (North Texas vs. Florida Atlantic); one time the impact rated QA for Florida Atlantic completed some sort of crazy 180-degree behind the back, underarm pass. No kidding, I was in the process of sacking the CPU’s impact QB, who’s back happened to be facing away from the line of scrimmage; when all of a sudden, the QB flipped the ball 10-yards forward to a WR. Wow! That sort of stuff does not make my day. In fact, when I have not had any gaming time for about a week, it really sort of spoils the experience. I thought I had moved passed this already, but old habits die hard.

Another annoyance is that North Texas’s schedule is messed up. I finished up my schedule against Florida Atlantic on the road, but “in real life” North Texas’s last game of the year is in Denton hosting Arkansas State. I am not sure when it happened (maybe the schedule changed after the game was released), but the October 1 game with Troy was moved to Tuesday night – October 4 – on ESPN2, while the Arkansas state was moved to the end of the year Minor squabble, and to be fair, maybe not the fault of EA Sports. I was already jawed up, but I am happy to get to watch the Mean Green on TV!

At the end of my first season I was ranked 32nd in the country; a health 10-1 record, with the only blemish being a beating at the hands of LSU. My next game is the New Orleans bowl vs. the Zips from Akron (6-5). I am now ranked #20 in the country. I guess this mimics real life; sit back and do nothing for several weeks and watch your rankings climb! The whole Top 25 pole system in NCAA 2006 needs to be improved for next year.

I do still like the game, but sometimes the little things get me down. Hopefully I will have time to play and get over it tonight.

I should have seen this coming. No backups in a year or so, and now thanks to a nasty virus it is all gone. “It” of course is everything that I should have been backing up weekly/monthly – tax records, my wife’s legal documents, license keys to a few favorite software packages and games, and a crap load of email.

The bad thing is that I used to do backups fairly regularly, but I got lazy. I typically just backup data files from my C drive to my D drive, which under normal circumstances worked fine. But not this time; I paid dearly this weekend. The nasty virus attack that got by Norton cleaned my boot record and utterly destroyed my C and D drive partitions. Yes, these two drives are on the same physical HDD – I know, not very smart.

I think I slept a couple of hours this morning after trying, and trying, and trying some more to recover the data. The loss of the email is brutal � I have years of documents, contacts, and just all around important stuff. I especially feel bad for my wife because she just lost so much of her legal work.

So I guess I am just feeling a little sorry for myself, but I figured I would do the public service thing by reminding everyone of the importance of regular backups!

I decided to put Battlefield 2 on the backburner for now. The game looks fantastic and many friends are enjoying it, but there is a steep learning curve. That is, if you want to play the game correctly and not be one of the kool dudez that frequent such games. I�ve grown much less tolerant of the dudez as I get older.

My main gaming time (other than Out of the Park 6) is spent with my old friend World of Warcraft. A couple of things renewed my interest. First, my 6800GT runs liquid smooth with all of the graphics settings on high and at 1600×1200. Now, WoW isn�t exactly state of the art graphics, but they maximize what�s in the game. The fun part is that I can now see folks galloping down the trail far ahead of me, instead of having them appear as ghosts because my old graphics card only allowed shorter distances to be seen. I fly around and can see beasts and creators below me. Everything just looks better post-6800GT.

Secondly, big changes are coming to the hunter class in the next WoW patch. Version 1.7 tweaks the talent trees and adds all sorts of fun things for pets to learn. My level 50 Tauren hunter should benefit greatly from a re-do of his talent tree. I only play PVE (player versus environment) and not PVP (player versus player). I�ve soloed to this point in WoW, don�t belong to a guild, and am a little concerned that the closer I get to the level cap at 60, the fewer things there will be for the solo-player to do.

So I�ve started looking at Guild Wars to take up my time once I get toward level 60 in WoW. From all reports, it�s a more solo-friendly game in the sense that there are henchmen robots that can be fired to do quests with you. I just don�t have time to manage human relationships with WoW and play it. So one had to go. Guild Wars may be a nice compromise, and there is no monthly online fee.

I�ll keep you posted�

Greydog Software announced that Gary Gorski is developing a new text-based college basketball game called “Total College Basketball.” What’s interesting is that Arlie Rahn developed the bug filled and much patched Tournament Dreams College Baseketball for .400 Software Studios. Yes, that’s the same Arlie Rahn who is CEO of Greydog Software.

Gary Gorski’s Total Pro Basektball is a very good product from all reports, so text-sim basketball fans should not be disappointed. Scheduled for a Q4 release.

I think I am going to have to break down and buy a new PC, but I keep looking at the iMac solution. I think this would work for most of the things my family needs – but I would hate to give up Windows software (Word, Excel, Outlook, OOTP6.5, FM2005, and a few others). I am pretty much Mac ignorant; I know there is software to run/emulate Windows software on a Mac, but I have no idea what I should get, how well it works, etc.

Suggestions from the Mac faithful (if any)?

I just setup a public league at NFL.com. If anyone is interested in joining, please sign up in the next day or two; live draft is Aug 18 at 7:45PM EST.

I have played yahoo FF for several years, but my dad tells me that NFL.com is much better, so I figured I would give it a go. Look forward to seeing you there!

Not that I am a Bears fan or a Gators fan, but when are we going to say “the hell with preseason” and put a stop to the insanity? Grossman went down with a broken ankle against the St. Louis Rams earlier tonight.

Why not eliminate the preseason, and expand the rosters for several weeks? I say give the teams 10 extra roster spots for weeks 1-4, and 5 extra roster spots weeks 5-10. The practice squad could also be expanded by 5 positions for the first eight weeks of the season. This would give teams plenty of time to evaluate talent, and hold on to guys on the bubble well into the season to compensate for the lack of preseason games.

No one wants their team’s season to go in the ditch in preseason. Sure, it is not much better to have it happen in the first few games, but at least those injuries “count” while the preseason games do not matter for squat.

Take it from a Falcons fan, the NFL preseason sucks.

Well, it finally happened. I guess it was inevitable – my PC has been crippled by a nasty boot virus. I have been using Norton 2002 for 4+ years, and it has always been a trusty little friend. Alas, Norton let me down this week, despite faithfully renewing my support license year after year, in spite of running daily checks to pull down the latest virus definitions, even with scheduled full scans ever Sunday.

Yes, I am a beaten, bitter man. Hackers suck, and virus are just as bad. It is too bad that folks cannot put their creative juices into something more useful. Instead of enjoying the latest version of Madden (oh yes I will Chris), I have been trying to recover my machine, but my efforts have been fruitless.

I pulled down AVG Antivirus and gave it a spin. It did clean up a few things, but not enough. Ironically enough, my ISP is now offering CA’s suite (antivirus, spam, firewall protection, etc) for free, but it is several days too late for me.

Let me save you the time and effort of reading up about Madden 2006. Here’s the synopsis:

“Madden sucks!”

“Madden’s not that bad!”

“This [insert new stupid EA Sports gimmick]-mode is really silly.”

“We can tweak Madden!”

Two or three weeks of slider creating, testing, etc.

“Can I get a copy of Bill [insert Harris or Abner]’s sliders?”

“Man, I hope they fix [insert running game, passing game, or franchise mode] next year!”

That’s it. Repeat and wash for Madden 2007. You can also insert just about any EA Sports game or formally SEGA sports game for “Madden” in the above.

Congratulations to Tony Stewart on an awesome 2005 Brickyard 400 win! I only got to watch the last third of the race, but what I saw was very entertaining. It was great to see the emotion pour from Stewart – he really appreciated what he did today, and appreciated all that has come before him at the historic track.

My PSP has not gotten much play of late, but that is mostly due to not playing much of anything lately besides NCAA Football 2006. This fall I plan to beef up my PSP library via the UK PSP launch – TOCA Race Drive 2, F1 Grand Prix, Colin McRae Rally 2005 Plus, and World Rally Championship look delicious. Of course I also need some football, and well, that is the point for this post.

I know that a preview from GameSpot via EBGames is not actually a lot to get excited about, but the quote works for me:

“The good news is that the PSP version isn’t simply a console port with all the cool features missing. One of the best inclusions in the game is the ability to transfer files between the PSP and PS2 versions of the game. If you own both the PS2 and handheld versions of the game, you can share a number of different file types between the two games, including rosters, profiles, and spawned games. Rosters and profiles are well and good, but sharing spawned games may be the best reason for the PSP version of Madden to exist. In a nutshell, transferring data between the two versions of the game will let you take your franchise mobile, play your franchise games on your PSP, and then resync your games with your PS2 once you get home.”

The game sounds like more of what Madden fans need, but now we have to play the waiting game to see if the development team can work out the frame rate issues.

This time last year I wrote about Atlanta’s Matt Schaub being a starter in the making. After watching Schaub play in today’s preseason match up vs. Indy, you have to wonder if Atlanta just gave too much money to Vick.

Sure, sure, sure – I still love me some Vick; he is exciting, he has a massive arm, and I think Vick may turn out to be a heck of a QB before he hangs up he helmet. But – have to get in one of those – Schaub will be the man somewhere, someday soon. Today Schaub went 11-13, good for 115 yards and 2 TDs. I know it is just preseason, but man on man does Schaub look like he could be a hell of a QB.

Well, the hardware portion of my upgrade is complete. The final system configuration is:

ASUS A8N-E
AMD Athlon 64 4000+ (San Diego)
1 MB PC 3200 RAM (from my old system)
NEC 3520A DVD Writer
Leadtek Winfast PX6800 GT
Western Digital 320MB SATA Drive
Maxtor 200 GB EIDE Drive (from my old machine)
Antec Truepower 2.0 550W power supply
Thermaltake Armor Black Tower

It took literally one hour for me to put this together. There were 15 minutes of panic because after I assembled everything, turned on the machine and it wouldn’t “post” (no video, no sound) and wouldn’t turn off when I pushed the off button. At first I thought it was my memory, but it’s good to have backup access to google while performing an upgrade. A quick search and I discovered there are actually two power connections to this motherboard and I missed the 12V four pin connector. Thanks goodness I’m not the only one who doesn’t read the setup instructions!

Loading the software is extremely painful – in fact a day later and I am still loading software. We’re not even talking about games, since I haven’t started the torture that is installing World of Warcraft. Loading Windows XP took a while, the updates took a while, the video driver and audio software took a while, etc. I’ve got a brand new copy of Battlefield 2 to load, but I’ve spent most of the day updating Nero 6 Ultra Edition through it’s incredibly slow FTP server.

The big decision during the upgrade was to return to NVidia’s warm embrace. My patience with ATI drivers and their updating process came to an end with the Catalyst Control Center piece of junk. The problem with moving to NVidia dealt with price points. When I started my upgrade, the 6800GT was in the upper $300, $400 range. The 6800 Ultra was in the upper $400/$500 area and the 7800GTX were all mid to upper $500. The 7800 GTX looked like the best bargain when it dropped to $499 (these are all retail prices) and the 6800 Ultra wasn’t moving. Then the 6800 GT started to drop, and the final tally was the Leadtek 6800 GT at $299, $200 cheaper than the 7800 GTX.

I’m a fan of FPS, but not enough to drop an extra $200 on it.

So another two years until the next upgrade. I may get another MB RAM at some point, but that will be long after all of this software is installed.

There’s a nice video card comparison at ExtremeTech that does a good job discussing the relative performance of all the available products except the 7800GTX. The prices are a little dated, but the information is still valid. Currently, I’d say that the best value can be found at the NVidia 6800GT level. I recently jumped off of the ATI bandwagon (more about that in a later upgrade article), but the X850 XT seems to be price sensitive at the moment.

The price of the PCIe Leadtech WinFast PX6800GT dropped $40 in less than seven days. There are even better deals for AGP video cards.