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Archives for 2005

The Carnival of Gamers approaches

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August is State Fair time in our beautiful state of Ohio. That means two things — the butter cow and fair food. If there is anything better than greasy fair food (served by greasy carnies) I don’t know what it is. Just behold the fried twinkie!

August also brings us the Carnival of Gamers #5! If you have a blog and you want to join, don’t hesistate! All your Carnival questions can be answered at the Carnival HQ. We’ve switched to the monthly format, which I think is more conducive to the submission of well written and witty blog posts. Hmmm, I guess that excludes me.

Oh well, I submitting something anyway.

Football X’s and O’s

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While the NCAA 2006 criticisms are piling up, The Blog for the Sports Gamer points to a forum discussion about a game-stopping flaw in Madden 2006. If you don’t have (or feel like making) an account on Operation Sports, here’s the pertinent information:

20 yard dropback shouldnt be an issue this year. whats going to be an issue is what we talked about on the radio show tonight, which is that animation where the CPU does a jetpack animation for you. Its tough to stop. we labbed with it online earlier tonight. You could send 3 guys in zone on that one WR and it couldnt be stopped a lot of the time.

ok this “jet pack” animation is definitely there and its damn easy to do. You just throw the ball high and the CPU will do the animation for you. Marcus from MM and I tested it. I’d tell him, what WR i was going to. He’d try dime, nickel quater, shading inside, and manually took his safety or DB. It worked, rarely. Most of the time the WR caught it. He could be surrounded by 3 guys andn they couldnt stop it. Even when he was there manually for some reason the ball would just go above him and the wr would catch. Its pretty lethal on curls because the wr jumps. I havent figured out a way to stop it consistently.

BTW, it doesnt really matter how good your WR was. I was doing it with Mushin Muhammed, and he got injured and Justin Gage was just as effective. I could do it to the other side of the field as well and Bobby Wade, who sucks, would make the catch all the time.

The jury is still out on NCAA 2006 for me (I’ve only played a handful of games so far) and I swore off Madden after 2003, but this is still disheartening news nonetheless. It’s a good thing EA has the NCAA and NFL licenses wrapped up for the next two generations of console systems! Now we can expect more of the same, year after year. Wonderful.

It was interesting that when the EA exclusive licensing deals were announced most “gamers” were pissed off (to put it lightly) and some swore of EA all-together (except for something called Battlefield 2). The casual sports gamer, however, was either unaware or shrugged it off with a, “I play Madden anyway, who cares?” Well, if they get release after release of broken, flawed gameplay with the promise of “next year,” they won’t be shrugging it off much longer. They’ll care.

And then what?

Is it Fate? Or my destiny?

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I downloaded Fate a while ago, mostly because Bill at Dubious Quality was so high on it. I finally got around to installing it last night and I gave it about two hours of my time. If you haven’t heard of Fate, the long and short of it is that it plays like your average point-and-click slash ’em up. After my two hours of playing last night I thought to myself, “Meh, I’ve played this before. It didn’t offer me anything too groundbreaking or new.” Sure, I had a pet, I could fish, basically stuff I’d done in a dozen other games. I didn’t see myself playing it much more.

Then today, as I was eating lunch I realized I felt compelled to play some more Fate. I had some incomplete quests to fufill. There were townspeople counting on “McGee the Unknown” (Fate has a fame attribute that gives you titles as your fame increases). I had to go back. I thought about all the magic items for me to find, the fish to catch and the titles to earn and I wanted to play it. That’s a first. I haven’t felt this compelled to play a game since I first started playing Resident Evil 4. In fact, I think I’m going to return to Fate once I hit “Publish”. I will definitely be buying the full-version of this game. Check it out!

Faces of WoW

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Where nerds, geeks and MMORPG freaks stop hiding behind their toons.

There’s more at RPG Faces.

Not really sure if that’s a good thing or not. A thousand jokes are swirling in my brain but I’m just too tired to throw any out there. Feel free to throw out your own.

NCAA 2006 Impressions

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I’ve had some time now with EA’s latest NCAA offering. Here are a few impressions I have. They’re first impressions and not all of them are good:

  • The “Impact Player” is a godsend. A lot of people are saying they make a good player unstoppable, but for a young dynasty, they are saviors in shoulder pads.
  • Home Field Advantage should not make such a pronounced difference when I’m playing Brown
  • I haven’t noticed the same “dropped passes” problem a lot of other people are talking about. So far so good for me.
  • The computer can finally run on a good defense. The “juke stick” makes running a blast. Something is now forcing me to take my finger off the turbo-boost. I know it was there in ESPN 2k games before this but it’s making the running game a lot of fun.
  • In-season recruiting hasn’t paid off any divendends but it’s cool in theory.
  • The discipline system is borked. It sucks and I wish it would go away.
  • Can we please get a mid-game save? I would love that more than any other enhancement of all time
  • Can we please hire someone to make a realistic crowd? It’s like they’re not even trying.
  • My Dynasty is modeled after my High School. We are the North Royalton Bears. We are not the Bearcats. The announcer seems to have numerous brain-farts during a game. First it’s, “The Bears are lined up…” and then we get “The Bearcats take the lead!” Is it that frickin’ hard to fix this? It’s been going on since 2004!
  • And while we’re fixing the announcer, someone hire an English major to fix the grammar. If I hear, “The Bears is ready to kick off” one more time I may lose it.
  • The graphics have received another minor upgrade. They are due for an extreme makeover

That’s my first pass. I’ll elaborate on some of these after I’ve played a little more. I’m only a third of the way through my second Dynasty season as the North Royalton Bears. It isn’t easy being an Academic school in the MAC. We’re getting our butts handed to us each and every Saturday.

The internet is funny!

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This may rank as my favorite link ever – If World War II Was an RTS. (thanks to AFK Gamer for the million laughs). Abso-fricking-lutely hilarious. I haven’t laughed this hard in years. I’m still wiping the tears of joy and laughter away. Prepare to laugh:

Hitler[AoE]: wtf
Hitler[AoE]: america hax, u had depression and now u got a huge fockin army
Hitler[AoE]: thats bullsh1t u hacker

and

Stalin: church help me
Churchill: like u helped me before? sure ill just sit here
Stalin: dont be an arss
Churchill: dont be a commie. oops too late
Eisenhower: LOL

Your enjoyment of this humor will be directly proportional to:

  • How many times you’ve played Age of Empires/Kings online
  • your online gaming experiences with noobs and h4ck3rZ
  • your ability to laugh without hurting yourself
  • Your knowledge of World War 2

(My current favorite link: Midgets vs. a Lion. Unfortunately it has been proven to be a fake)

Now for a change of pace

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Just like the rest of the gaming world, I’m growing tired of the whole GTA/Rockstar/Jack Thompson/Hillary Clinton fiasco. I will endeavor to avoid future beatings of that dead horse. There’s only so many times you can whip a rotting carcass.

So switching gears, I wanted to remind everyone about the Carnival of Gaming #5 over at Unfettered Blather. You’ve got more than a week to get your submissions into Botswana, so don’t delay! There’s been enough controversy streaming through the gamingsphere so there’s no excuse not to submit something. But I’ve got an inkling Carnival #5 is going to be the Carnival that C.J. (and J.T. + H.C.) carjacked.

I forgot to link to Cathode Tan’s excellent second interview, this time with Jeff Freeman, a favorite blogger of mine. Another great interview from Josh. (who still has not received an answer to his Carnival Quiz. Search me.)

Also, Corvus did a sweet buttonmashing sketch for me. I hope to use it in future buttonmashing.com items. Thanks again, Corvus!

So enough with the GTA buzzkill already. Gosh!

It gets worse

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You think and hope, in your heart of hearts, that things can’t get any worse. But it appears they do (via Slashdot). From the Gamespot piece (is it just me or is Gamespot kicking the pants off IGN/Gamespy?):

It’s not just the adults that are liberated from their wardrobes. Sims kids can also be nudified, “much to the delight, one can be sure, of pedophiles around the globe who can rehearse, in virtual reality, for their abuse.”

I am so stunned by this guys audacity and stupidity that it makes my stomach hurt. How can this guy believe the drivel that comes out of his mouth? Is he hearing what he is saying? Can any rational human being come to the conclusions this guy comes to? It goes beyond boggling the mind.

I feel ill.

V-chip for the Xbox

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So there’s going to be parental control on the Xbox 360. I think is a good feature to add, in case little Johnny finds daddy’s pile of AO-rated GTAs when daddy’s not home. There are, however, two problems I see immediately. One, most parents are too technically ignorant to figure it out, their kids will be smarter than they are and will turn it off. Two, just because it’s there doesn’t guarantee parents will use it. We’ve already seen how little parenting is going on with this generation of young gamers.

But, in the end, it will probably be a moot point that the feature exists. Why? I’ll just quote the article:

Working out how to bypass the feature will probably the first thing every young European hackers’ to-do list.