The Recycle Bin

According to this recently released survey, seems you’ll have to blame heterosexual white males in their 30s for the current status of computer and video games.

Amazon is selling the pre-order version of Civilization IV for $49 and free shipping in the US. It was $44 earlier today, which was an even better deal!

EA Sports (of all places) has announced a new management focused game called NFL Head Coach. The press release describes it as “the first 3-D sports strategy game.” Hmmm, what about their own FIFA Manager 06 and the entire Total Club Manager series? Wasn’t F1 Manager (another EA Sports game) 3-D or am I remembering incorrectly? I guess EA Sports Europe doesn’t count.

The game is being developed by EA Tiburon (why don’t they call this EA Orlando?), the fine folks that program the wonderful franchise mode in Madden. Some day I will recount a conversation with a member of the Tiburon studio who had never heard of the (then) Championship Manager series of games.

I have zero enthusiasm for this product. Will take many, many positive reviews from people I trust before I’d think about purchasing a management sim from EA Sports.

All sorts of great college football this weekend. After I dried my tears over the Minnesota loss, I watched USC defeat Notre Dame in one of the finest football games I’ve watched on television. That 4th down pass was simply unbelievable. My previuos employers the University of Florida lost yet another heartbreaker to LSU. Florida State finally lost. They had to be the most overrated team in the USA. Michigan upset Penn State. The list goes on and on.

If I am a Texas Longhorn fan, I am very worried about Texas Tech. If any team can throw up some offense, Tech is that team.

I was greatly saddened last week to hear, while watching a pro football game, a Texas A&M grad say “University of Texas A&M” during lineup introductions. Sad, just plain sad.

It is so painful being a Minnesota Gopher’s fan. Just when the team toys with you, gets your hopes up, they find new ways to blow games. They had roughly 450 yards rushing today and lost to Wisconsin. Only Minnesota does that.

Arrrrrrgggggghhhhhh!!!!!!!

There are a lot of places in the United States listing WorldWide Soccer Manager 2006. Are these once again vaporware products, or will the game show up on shelves? Given SEGA’s US release record, I’m not holding my breath. For some reason, every Sports Interactive game is available via digital download except for Football Manager/WorldWide Soccer. Those of us in North America would probably not be moaning and groaning every year if we could simply download the game.

A new editor was released for FIFA Manager 06. Seems with all of the issues being reported in the EA Sports forum, an editor is needed.

The good folks at Diamond Mind Baseball are taking advanced orders for their 2005 Season Disk and for the 2006 Bill James Handbook.

Grey Dog Software has posted a new version 1.1 patch for TEW 2005. Fixes include:

* Referees could be reset when modifying a segment
* RTE13 in Media Schedule section for non-English users
* Advance bookings getting stuck in memory
* Gimmick changes could trigger in wrong places
* Low rated TV shows could slip into minus viewing figures
* RTE63 if user specifically asked for a draw when none was possible
* Moving angle segments around could cause card to miss out segments
* Development talent could be released in extreme circumstances
* Updated in-game editor to allow for live stat editing
* Team experience for new teams could fail if workers were wrong way around
* Trying to bring back old TV shows could be erroneously blocked
* Storyline history could become stuck in memory

If you’re like me and only know about hockey because your former local team won the Stanley Cup, then these excellent guides will help with NHL Eastside Hockey Manager. Something always gets lost in the transaltion bewtween North America and SIGames, so we need these tools to understand how these Football Manager-like games work. Or at least I do.

Seems that SEGA is once again slowly, and I mean slowly, leaking NHL Eastside Hockey to North American retailors. A quick search around the College Station, Texas area revealed no sight of this “released” game. Gamestop does list the product, so I guess it is an improvement over the Worldwide Soccer fiasco. But still no sign of it on any shelf around where I live.

Potential customers of Grey Dog Software’s Bowl Bound College Football are starting to post angry messages in the forums. At issue is the lack of information about the progress of the game and missed shipping deadlines. Grey Dog has released a grand total of six screenshots showing various game functions. My spider senses are tingling. It could very well be that Arlie Rahn is working hard and will ship a great product.

Or maybe not.

We can only hope that Mr. Rahn learned from some extremely poor performances with .400 Software Studious. So I am happy that Grey Dog isn’t releasing broken software and selling it at full price. We just don’t know when Bowl Bound will see the light of day.

I am pretty impressed with the progress made from the last PureSIm version I played. The game seemed to have potential, but I never stuck around to play a full season because there was so much missing from the game. There are still features that need to be added. However, PureSim offers some advantages for solo players that Out of the Park Baseball does not. Yes, OOTP has things like waivers, designate for assignment lists, and pick trading, but not all of it works as advertised. Pick trading is broken for those that try to trade picks post the June 1st draft (for example).

PureSim wins the on the field presentation battle. It is much more visually engaging and there are even some neat sound effects. Creating a stadium in PureSim is nicely done. The dimensions used in OOTP stadiums have no impact on the game results as far as I can tell. Not so in PureSim.

PureSim’s major weaknesses include lack of a waiver wire and some statistics that should be reported. Some statistics, like the WHIP, are calculated as part of the “PSPN” league news report. The problem is that these really should be reported for every player. RIght and left handed splits are only calculated and reported for average.

Multiplayer leagues are very easy to run. Missing is the ability to generate html reports for your league. This is a huge omission and seriously limits the ability of multiplayer leagues to run fancy PureSim based web sites.

I am convinced that Shaun Sullivan will respond to feedback. Great things are coming with PureSim and I highly encourage baseball career gaming fans to purchase a copy. It won’t replace OOTP on my hard drive, but I will play both.

The latest and greatest version of Total Extreme Wresting has been released. Now, I love text-based gaming, but even I sort of scratch my head at a WWF-style text game. Haven’t tried it myself, but there seems to be a loyal following. There’s a demo available for those of you, like Jonathan, who actually watch this “sport.”

I seem to remember Jonathan saying he watched pro-wrestling at some point, but if I remember incorrectly, please accept my humblest apology.

A great big OUCH.