Author: jcalvert

It looks like Amazon has delivered on their “Release-Date Delivery” option. Madden shipped last night from their Louisville, KY distribution center, and is currently in Albany, GA UPS facility, which is about 90 minutes from my house. Amazon used the “Next Day Saver” option, but that should still be good for delivery late this afternoon.

So the good news is that I will use Amazon for all my future purchases, if they are going to continue to offer Prime users release-date service. The bad news is that I bet I get stuck at work, and do not get to partake in Madden right away.

I am really enjoying Eden; it is like three games in one. First, is the whole, complete all the levels while exploring concept. Second, is the high score and race against the clock old school gaming concept. Third, is the trophy reward system, which is well, a rewarding gaming concept.

I am not very far into the game. First two gardens are complete, and I have earned two trophies for clearing (rather growing) all seeds on said levels. The game is fun and highly addicting. It is really easy to get in a zone, and just keep plugging along. Good stuff and well worth $9.99.

While the Falcons took one on the chin last night, 17-20 at Jacksonville, there was encouragement. Matt Ryan was 9/15, for 113 yards, and 1 TD. He started off shaky, and at times his throws were a little off, Ryan managed to direct the offense fairly well.

Redman started, and did not look so hot, going 3/6 for 13 yards. Then Ryan entered, and while he did not knock everyone’s socks off, there is reason to believe (or at least hope) that he will be able to manage a game. Yes, this was a preseason game, but Ryan did get to go up against most of the Jaguars defensive starters.

The Falcons brass may decide to bring Ryan along slowly, but based on last night’s game, I expect that Ryan is going to get a lot of time in the next three games. After all, playing is the only way to learn. Cannot wait for next Saturday against the Colts. Should be fun!

Matt Ryan – looking good baby!

Other players of note, Turner had 22 yards on 5 attempts. I thought Snelling looked great – 32 yards on 4 attempts, and a nice 47 yard pickup on a screen. I hope Thomas Brown makes the team, but he looked so-so on kick returns. On defense, second round pick Curtis Lofton was all over the field.

It’s preseason, and I know the Falcons are not going to be all that good this year, but I am excited to get closer to the start of some football.

Go Falcons!

I have not really been too inspired to watch must of this year’s Olympics.  I have seen a few random sports here and there – men’s swimming, a few minutes of men’s gymnastics, women’s field hockey, and woman’s handball.  I had no idea the last two were even sports.  Lacrosse is one thing, but field hockey?  I guess these are just not Southern traditions.

I also have seen some soccer here and there, including today’s US National men’s near miss (dare I say debacle) against the Netherlands.  Down 1-0, the US had two nice goals to pull ahead 2-1, but gave up a stupid penalty in extra time resulting in a disappointing 2-2 finish.  Oh well, so close, but so far away.

Now we have the first big test for the US men’s basketball team (vs. China).  First quarter has been very entertaining; I think much more so than a typical NBA game.

Not sure what else will catch my fancy, but NBC is throwing up enough coverage on multiple channels at all hours of the day to find something interesting.  The 12 hour time difference sucks, but NBC seems to be doing a decent job juggling the schedule to bring some quality events live in the early morning hours.

I just downloaded Qore Episode 3, and was not left feeling very satisfied. For starters, it was a pain in the ass to download this episode. I thought part of the deal with a Qore subscription was that new episodes would automatically be detected and downloaded. Not so much. I could not find an option to download the newest Qore installment, and in frustration, I finally went into download history section of the PlayStation Store and clicked on Qore Annual Subscription. That did the trick; the August edition (or Episode 3) started downloading.

Why am I dissatisfied, dare I say disappointed, with Qore? Too little content, very few demos, and nothing really exclusive worth writing home about.

• DC Universe Online – two videos and an art gallery.
• Lego Batman – two videos and an art gallery.
• Baja: Edge of Control – two videos and an art gallary
• NBA 09 (The Inside; The Life or some such subtitle) – two videos and a free throw mini-game.
• “What’s Hot” – video for Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway and a box art gallery of 5-6 upcoming games.
• Download Center – Qore Theme, Resistance 2 beta, and Calling All Cars (full game for Qore subscribers only).

The Resistance 2 beta will be open in late September, but I am not keeping my fingers crossed or anything because I never saw the SOCOM beta open up.

The August edition of Qore contained about 45 minutes of viewable content. That is it. I am disappointed that more content and demos were not included. The interviews are interesting, but way too brief, and leave you feeling all empty inside.  At this point, Qore has been an utter waste of money. Looking forward to seeing if things change with Qore Episode 4.

So where the heck is the NCAA Football 09 patch for the PS3? It is already out for the 360 … no news on when it will be available for the PS3, but perhaps any day. One of the developers posted the following yesterday at OS:

“The patch is back with Sony now. We are hoping to get approval by the end of the day (~7PM Pacific) at which point I will push the patch over to the retail servers.

Again, this is what we are hoping for, no guarantees. I’ll keep you all updated as I find out more.”

The real gold is Patch #2, but we cannot get there from here until Patch #1 is released. Too bad Sony is so f’ing slow to make the patch available.

Not really, but it seems that way. Look week of “real world” stuff, so no gaming updates until tomorrow.

So how about those Jets? Makes EA’s decision to put Favre on the cover looks sort of silly. Last night I heard some talk about Favre being the face of the Jets and helping to usher in a new stadium in 2009. What happens when Favre wants to be retrospective on retiring again? Sequels are never as good as the originals.

My Falcons ticket arrived over the weekend. I know Atlanta is not going to be very good, but I am excited about getting season tickets.

Can I get some beer up here?

I will get to watch games from Section 331. Not the best view, but for $225 per seat (for 10 games), it is certainly not a bad view.

All the regular season games have 1PM kick off times, so that is not going to be good on the tailgate front, but sometimes you just have to start passing around the cold ones early.

This year’s schedule is not top shelf, but there are some interesting teams visiting the Dome. The Falcons’ second and third preseason games are at home against the Colts and Titans. Not sure if Manning will be ready to play, but watching a few minutes of Young should be fun. I think it is much better to get the two middle games because we should get to see some open competition. The last game always sucks because everyone wants to protect the starters; just get out of there without any injuries.

Regular season games feature the Lions, Chiefs, Bears, Saints, Broncos, Panthers, Buccaneers, and Rams.

I don’t think we will see a sackfull of wins, but it should be a fun season.

Over the weekend I gave PSP to PS3 Remote Play another go. This time I followed a reader’s (Morrelli) suggestion to leave the PS3 in Remote Play mode. This actually works; I connected to my PS3 over the internet (outside of my home network) without any connectivity problems. Lag was an issue, but I think that can be attributed to the wireless networks I was using.

If the PS3 is already on, in Remote Play mode, everything is gravy, but to me this kind of defeats the purpose because I want to leave the PS3 off and connect as needed.

For the first time ever, UGA has been selected as a preseason #1.

Georgia was widely considered the hottest team in college football at the end of the 2007 season.

A panel of Division I-A coaches remembered, voting the Bulldogs the preseason No. 1 in the USA Today Top 25 coaches’ poll, released Friday.

Funny thing is that #3 Ohio St. is positioned for yet another SEC beat down if they can get by #2 USC September 13. Even if UGA cannot survive a brutal schedule, #5 Florida and #6 LSU will also be very strong contenders for the mythical National Championship. SEC Champion vs. Ohio St./USC winner?

Is UGA really #1? Just last week at SEC Media Days, the media voted Florida to win the SEC East, while Auburn was picked to win the SEC West. The Florida pick is very realistic, but Auburn is going to have to resolve their QB issues if they want to make a serious run.

I am going to write more about the Dawgs changes in the coming weeks. For now, while I will hold out hope that the Dawgs can run the gauntlet, I think realistically Georgia faces two losses. Killer schedule, but doable if everything goes in their favor.

Go Dawgs!

It has been a while since I last played a 1942 game. I am not really what you would call a fan of the series, but many moons ago, I did enjoy previous versions of game in the 194x series. Picking up the latest version from the PlayStation Store a few weeks ago for $9.99 was really an impulse purchase.

The graphics are 2D on top of a 3D backdrop, fairly standard stuff for a 2D shooter pushed forward into this current generation of high powered graphics.

Too old to duck and dodge all this crap …

I will get straight point. I am too old for this sort of frantic, pattern based shooter. More precisely, I just do not have the skills to progress very far in the game, even on the easiest level. I think my speed is more along the lines of the bosses in Super Stardust HD is about my pace.

I am not going to say that the game is bad; it’s probably very good for fans of the series (metacritic score of 68). Purchasing a so-so game (from my perspective) exposes one of the things I do not like about digital distribution. I have no opportunity to recoup a few dollars of my $9.99 purchase.

There is an interesting slider discussion going on at OS, and while some think there is much doom and gloom with the lack of CPU sliders, can it really be all that terrible? I mean down right PlayStation Madden 96 bad? Enough to cancel the game?

I think I am going to wait with baited breath to see how things pan out with this year’s Madden. While I am not a slider whore, I do like to fiddle with sliders to adjust things to my liking. I am not sure what inspired the developers to drop slider adjustments, but obviously sliders are not considered important to the overall success of the game. Look no further than the broken slider crap we are currently enduring with NCAA Football 09.

These days I am not looking for the perfect game, but something that is enjoyable and heavily slanted towards a simulation experience. Blitz style over the top sports games are not my cup of team. I do not like seeing 75% (or higher) pass completion percentages game after game; that is just not realistic. There is a fine line between fun and realistic, and this line, or perception, is different for every gamer. I think sliders can help balance out things, but sliders will not help with a faulty AI, poor play calling, or a broken game engine.

The Madden 09 demo gives me a sense of things to come, and right now I am sitting on the fence. The experience is different than NCAA Football 09, which is a positive, but will Madden 09 offer more enjoyment for my football time?

I want a solid NFL game; my expectations are not lofty. The problem is that Madden 09 is the only game in town. Thanks to exclusive licenses, we are stuck with a take or leave situation. I long for the days of GameDay, where Sony caught EA Sports with their pants down, which resulted in the cancellation of Madden 96 for the PlayStation. Give me some GameBreaker vs. NCAA Football, GameDay vs. Madden, or 2K vs. Madden competition. Sometimes the good ‘ol days really were better.

It looks like EA Sports is about to do the needful and patch NCAA Football 09. We can look at this two ways.

WTF was EA thinking releasing a game with this many issues? Or we can be grateful that EA Sports is addressing the many issues with the game. At this point the horse is out of the barn, so I am going to wait and see what if the gameplay improves. If it does, we may have a wonderful game on our hands, but will anyone notice as Madden 09 is due in 10 days?

Patch info at OS, via digitalsportspage (Page 15). The follow could really improve my gameplay experience

Dynasty
– Faster simming between weeks

Gameplay
– Improved coverage on kicks

Bug Fixes
– AI sliders for will now work correctly
– An issue with missing stats after simming has been fixed
– Ball carrier will no longer run out of bounds when changing hands and heading towards the sidelines

Am I upset that purchasing this game day one basically made me a “beta” tester? Yes, I am. Should EA have delayed the game until it fixed some of these issues? Yes, absolutely. Should EA Sports get a “pat on the back” for doing the right thing? Maybe, but this may also encourage the behavior of “release it now, patch it later” games. Still, happy horse shit aside, I am looking forward to an improved game when the patches are available.

I just had a total “oh shit” moment with the Madden 09 demo for the PlayStation 3. After calling a play, the players walked to the line and got ready for Eli to call for the ball. For some inexplicable reason, #69 (G, Rich Seubert) decided to walk away from the line of scrimmage. I figured that I must have pressed L1 one too many times, resulting in a false start, but the flag never came.

Instead, #69 just turned around and slowly started walking away from the line of scrimmage (towards the bottom left-hard corner of the screen), leaving a nice hole just left of the center, and between the tackle. I was helpless to use my one time out or snap the ball.

WTF was happening? I repeatedly tried to call a time out, but could not. I figured some bug had to be at work here, and when the play clock ran down to zero I would be called with a delay of game penalty (or false start).

Nope.

After the play clock hit zero I called an audible. Thankfully #69 got his head out of his ass and ran back to the line of scrimmage. I ran a play without any consequence (no delay of game or false start).

Un-f’ing real. I have never seen something so damn strange in a video game. Well maybe I have, but words fail to express how strange it was to see this cowboy decide to walk away from the line of scrimmage. I tried the replay option, but it did not show him leaving the line. If it did I would have taken a picture of something to upload.

Strange stuffs at work in this demo.