The Recycle Bin

There’s a new beta (or “unofficial”) patch available for Baseball Mogul 2007 that addresses many of the initial game killing bugs folks have found since it was released.

A PSP version of Championship Manager 2006 will be released on April 7th, or at least overseas it will be.

For those that missed it, it seems that Markus has stepped into the void left by “mad as hell” Marc Duffy. He posted some very nice screenshots of the new league history that will come standard with OOTP 2006. One the one hand, I’m very happy that the old almanac is gone and a real statistical database will be included. On the other hand, what am I supposed to do with the 13 season history that I maintain for my league?

So many questions….

I only filled out one bracket, and I had Duke winning it all, so I am done. Too bad, because prior to tonight I had my final eight intact. Yet another reason for me to not bet on sports.

Seems Marc Duffy is mad as hell and he’s not going to take it any more! I’ve read the Sports Interactive forums for a long time and the OOTP boards are much tamer on even their worst day. It just seems odd that he would up and stop posting like that. What’s that you ask? Yes, my spider senses are tingling.

Seems you should avoid Baseball Mogul until it is finally ready to be released. Or I should say until the released version actually works.

Sports Mogul, Inc wins the earliest text-baseball release for the new season contest. Baseball Mogul 2007 is available for download for a reasonable $19.95. I might even try it for that amount, a price point the folks at Grey Dog Software need to be introduced to. New features include a pitch-by-pitch mode, a minor league simulation engine, and many more things that move the franchise from its 2004 roots into a more modern simulation.

The web site claims to be the only exclusive licensee of the Sean Lahman Baseball Database. I’m not sure what that means since many other products make the database useable with their game engines.

But when you see “New Lefty-Righty stats!” in a baseball game developed in 2006, you have to scratch your head and wonder. I am intrigued by the “animated play-by-play”, but am put off that I can’t find any screenshots of the game anywhere on the site. No demo + no screenshots = no purchase. A fairly simple equation.

I guess I’m in the minority, but I simply do not understand all of the hoopla over Oblivion. I don’t know how good or bad the game will be, but that’s not the point. I can’t understand how people can go from an online RPG back to a computer AI-only game. I don’t care how good the programming is, nothing can replace the interaction that occurs between human beings in these online environments. I’m a big fan of the RPG genre, but my days playing against only the computer started to end when I subscribed to City of Heroes and officially ended with World of Warcraft.

There’s no going back.

I feel the same way about baseball games. I can’t play Out of the Park Baseball against the computer anymore. No fun in it for me. Dealing with other human beings makes OOTP come alive in ways that computer programming simply can’t model.

And who in their right mind is playing Oblivion on a Xbox 360? Just go and visit all of the Morrowind mod sites to see how silly a notion that is.

This is fairly off topic, but today I was cleaning out another box of junk. Forget that this should have been done before we moved, not now, but I digress. Among the Good Will goodies were Borland software aplenty – Turbo C++, ObjectVision, and Turbo Pascal. Not sure why I hung onto this stuff for so long. It is not like I have a working 5 1/4″ FDD; actually I did, but I put this into the Good Will pile as well. Seriously, when I ever try to hook up that sort of relic again?

I also parted with the original Sim City. I burned countless hours on that game my freshman year in college. I also found Sim Ant; never did much with it despite actually liking ants. That is a story for another day; remind me sometime and I will share.

I also uncovered Master of Magic and the Official Strategy Guide along with Sim City 2000. I kept both of those. Not sure if I will play them again anytime soon (Windows XP will never allow it to happen), but MoM is only of my all time favorite games.

Figured someone could appreciate the clutter and the old time gaming classics.

I’ll be back to posting on a more regular basis over the next few months. I was in seven OOTP leagues and cut back to three. I’ll probably stay in two leagues and that will be it for a long while. I want to pay more attention to my own OOTP league and found the other leagues a bit distracting. I’ll always participate in at least two leagues because I like testing myself against competition where I am not the Commissioner.

In other news, it seems everyone with a computer is writing blogs and even PureSim developer Shaun Sullivan has joined the mix. With the first post in November, gulp, 2004, and second in March 2006, Shaun’s making the Recylce Bin look like a real time news service. Let’s hope for more info in the future.

For those of you curious about the new match engine in the Championship Manager series, a demo was released that is available for download.

There are very mixed reviews coming in about Matrix Games’ Maximum Football. Reading in-between the lines (I don’t own the game), seems Matrix Games followed the artists formally known as .400 Software Studios business model. You release a broken game, full paying customers become unpaid beta-testers, and then you finally get the product that should have been released in the first place.

Sorry, been there and done that.

The good news is that folks are generally hopefull that when it is finally fixed, Maximum Football will be purchase worthy. However, with no financial model, I can only see this being used as a college or highschool simulator at best.

I should be working in the yard. Or maybe catching up on some office work. I would have, but the weather is just too nice (79F right now, partly cloudy sky) to do anything of the sort. I could have gone for a run at the park, although I did go for a nice two mile walk with Tonya at the park this morning (should be worth some brownie points tonight).

Some days are just like that – I should have done something different, I would have done something different if I were not having so much fun being caught up in the moment, and I could have been more productive. Instead I find myself sitting on the deck, laptop in hand (typing this blog entry), drinking a Michelob Ultra Amber, watching the kids play in the yard, getting ready to fire up the grill and throw on some Nathan’s Famous hotdogs. Nice life this of mine; truly blessed.

For some reason I feel like writing today; hell I may even break out a video game tonight just to have something game related to write about tonight or tomorrow morning. Then again, there is a lot of Ultra Amber in the beer … so who knows what sort of path this will take us down.

Tonya has decided that it is high time to get some more blinds for the house. Problem is that the damn things are expensive – because of the age of the house, everything has to be custom made. What did the view out of my kitchen and dining room window provide this afternoon? None other than the nice young thing next door catching some sun, skimpy bikini and all. Not sure why I am even bothering to write this (other than the nice life and blessings and all, and some views are worth describing) because my wife would kick my ass in so many ways if she read the above. Damn blinds are expensive …

I am not much of a college basketball fan, but I will try to catch some of the action tonight. I am starting to get in the mood to catch F1 tomorrow morning (6:30AM EST I think). I guess that is something to get me past the dry season (i.e. no more football).

I do not normally read this sort of stuff, but I cannot wait to read “Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO, and the Steroids Scandal that Rocked Professional Sports” by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams. The book is due out March 27; I plan to preorder from Amazon later this weekend. I normally shy away from this sort of stuff, which is one of the main reasons I stopped subscribing to SI – I just do not care for all the negative print on athletes.

For some reason this book is actually different. I actually want to see how and why Bonds started juicing (assuming the authors are actually correct with their assertions). It is bad enough that the steroids era in baseball has messed up many a record, but Bonds was actually good before he started with the cream. Players like Fred McGriff (.284AVG, 493HR, 2490H), Dale Murphy (.265AVG, 398HR, 2111H), and Jim Rice (.298AVG, 382HR, 2452H) look damn impressive compared to todays artificial players. Being a huge fan of Murphy, I demand he start getting some serious Hall of Fame consideration because no way, no how, did Murphy ever juice.

The weekend got off to a good start, which a date night; my parents let the kids sleep over. This gave Tonya and me a chance to have drinks with some friends, and some much need time alone. It is always fun to have a lazy Saturday morning – breakfast at the ATL Bread Company (their vanilla nut coffee is to die for) while reading over the newspaper, followed by a shopping trip to the book store, and then a nice walk around the park. Needless to say, date night is highly recommended!

It seems like it has been book review central around here for me lately, and I do not see much of an end in site. I started perusing through the “Baseball Prospectus 2006,” and earlier this week, “The Book: Playing The Percentages In Baseball” (Tom M. Tango, Mitchel G. Lichtman, and Andrew E. Dolphin) arrived in the mail, and just this morning I picked up “Steal Away: Devotions for Baseball Fans” by Hugh Poland.

I am not sure what to make of the prospectus book – I have never even glanced at a register or prospectus type book on baseball. The section on the Braves was fairly interesting, especially the writer’s take on C. Jones and Smoltz ultimately setting back the team by restructuring contracts (Jones), and insisting on moving back into the starting rotation (Smoltz). The book also pretty much says Jones sucks as a fielder, but “The Fielding Bible” shows him as middle of the road among other 3B. It is always interesting to see different perspectives on the same players.

I have only glanced at “The Book” so nothing really to report at this point. There is a chapter on base running and how much a runner actually distracts a batter (as opposed to the pitcher); should make for interesting reading.

I have always read that baseball is a religious experience; “Steal Away” looks to be just that (on in a book). I normally struggle to finish devotional books (just not my thing I guess), but I figure I have a pretty good chance at making my way through a devotional book that makes all sorts of references to baseball stories, facts, players, and other sorts of nuggets of information. I have only read a few pages, but I think I can highly recommend this book to baseball fans that want some type of devotional book.

What else? Looks like the F1 season quietly got underway at Bahrain; I saw quietly only because I have not followed the off-season this year. The US advanced to the next round of the World Baseball Classic thing; would have been embarrassing if we did not push forward. March Madness is upon us …

All for now. Happy weekend!