Though Pleasant Surpises are nice...

Chuckle chuckle.

In my Two Minute Drill post I thank a few of you who recommended games that I would not have otherwise checked out, hence the 'Low' expectation titles.

I wasn't thanking you for giving me those low expectations, though it's nice to be surprised like that every once in a while.
:)

Hmm..and looking at those three games I see Fishing, NASCAR, and Demolition Derby...

[cue 'Dueling Banjoes']

What are you people doing to me?!?!
;)

Fall Games two minute drill.

I both love and hate this time of year for videogaming. At the start of the holiday shopping period, big game after big game is released, all trying to grab that 'gift-buying' cash just starting to peep out from wallets and purses.

Since I spend nowhere near what I used to on these things, Gamefly has been an absolute godsend in helping me keep up with the rush. It's montly rental service that sends games via the mail, and you can keep them as long as you want. Even with the $20-$30 montly charge, I save much, much more than I would by buying the games or renting them from local chains.

Since I've been using the service so much, I figured I'd throw out a quick list of games I've played recently along with a quick rating, to help other gamers navagate the onslaught!

Here goes:

ESPN NHL 2K5

Time Put In: Some
Expectations: Moderate
Reality: Met
+ Fixed super goalies, better CPU offense, decent ‘out-of-the-box’
- Money Goals L, clueless teammates at times, players bounce off of each other too often
Meaningless Letter Grade: B
Quick Comments: ESPN was my least favorite hockey game last year, favorite this year. Very happy with the improvement!

Sly 2: Band of Thieves

Time Put In: Some
Expectations: High
Reality: Met
+ Great Saturday morning cartoony graphics, interesting characters, unique stealth-platformer with a variety of gameplay types
- controls not completely customizable
Meaningless Letter Grade: A
Quick Comments: The original was a modest success, but unlike any other platformer out there. The second adds length and gameplay, while keeping the charm and style. Get both!

Fable:

Time Put In: Some
Expectations: Moderate
Reality: Met (Barely)
+ Fun battle system, Impressive storybook graphics, Great Music
- Can’t live up to massive hype/aspirations, short, good-vs-evil really just a gimmick
Meaningless Letter Grade: C+
Quick Comments: Expectations were lowered after initial reviews, and still only found it to be okay. Pretty much a simplistic action game in a slice of a world that you can just tell was supposed to be so much more.


Def Jam Fight for NY

Time Put In: Just a little
Expectations: Moderate
Reality: Met
+ Best ‘wrestling’ game currently out, good story, fighting fast and fun
- Some camera problems, very poor manual!
Meaningless Letter Grade: B
Quick Comments: IMO, the best ‘wrestling’ game currently out. The Exaggerated high-flying violence is a trip.

Test Drive: Eve of Destruction

Time Put In: Some
Expectations: Low (None, even Thanks Scoop!)
Reality: Exceeded
+ Old school destruction derby fun, decently challenging
- Old school graphics, lack of speed, repetitive
Meaningless Letter Grade: C+
Quick Comments: Not a great game, but fun, and revived a genre for me that I thought was dead.

Nascar Chase For the Cup 2005

Time Put In: Some
Expectations: Low (Thanks PK!)
Reality: Exceeded
+ Great, Great AI racing, Involving Career mode, personally liked the sim/arcade balance
- Mediocre Graphics and framerate problems leave a very bad first impression, Drafting/intimidation overdone
Meaningless Letter Grade: B
Quick Comments: I’m not a Nascar fan, but I will be putting time into a nascar game for the first time ever.

Burnout 3, Takedown

Time Put In: Lots
Expectations: Moderate
Reality: Exceeded
+ Insanely fast speeds and framerate, variety of modes, sweet Live Play, lots to do
- Loading times are annoying, especially in crash mode, EA Live issues
Meaningless Letter Grade: A
Quick Comments: I liked the first two games in the series, love the third. Starts, perhaps, a little slow, but gets better the more you play. Fantastically addictive in the ‘Just one more race’ kind of way.

Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy

Time Put In: Lots
Expectations: Moderate
Reality: Met
+ Psi Powers are new and innovative mechanic, great physics, good controls,
- Short, could have had more interesting environments
Meaningless Letter Grade: B
Quick Comments: Innovation does happen, occasionally! The psi powers add so much to the genre. Seems like so much work was done there and on the physics, though, that the game world was cut short. Sequel should be amazing.


Powerdrome

Time Put In: Lots
Expectations: Moderate
Reality: Exceeded
+ Fast, challenging arcade racer, very cinematic gameplay, nice replays
- Early tracks are boring, Live problems, no one else is playing
Meaningless Letter Grade: B
Quick Comments: The best game no one is playing.

Pro Fishing Challenge

Time Put In: Some
Expectations: Low (thanks Granato!)
Reality: Exceeded
+ Great relaxing yet competitive Live play, lots of options, fight with the fish well done
- Below average graphics, very comprehensive inventory of lures, line, etc. with no instructions how to use each
Meaningless Letter Grade: B
Quick Comments: Not a fisherman, but still finding this to be a ton of fun

Star Wars Battlefront

Time Put In: Just a little
Expectations: Low
Reality: Exceeded
+ Captures chaos of battle, most ambitious Live game in terms of players, bots, etc, chill inducing moments for Star Wars fans
- Dumb Bot AI, lack of game modes, lag problems
Meaningless Letter Grade: B
Quick Comments: Must Have for a star wars fan, good game to pop in and blast away!

(Also posted on the DSP forums, where you can get more good info on mainly sports, but often other, games.)

ArrRARRrrRARgh!

I'm in the playoffs in a head to head yahoo fantasy league, this is the penultimate week. This was my infield mere days ago:

David Ortiz, 1B
Alfonso Soriano, 2B
Khalil Greene, SS
Scott Rolen, 3B

Now Rolen is out for two weeks (basically the rest of the fantasy season) Rookie of the Year candidate Greene is done for the year and Soriano blew out his leg yesterday.

Oh, and Soriano and Rolen are on the 'Can't Drop' list because they were high picks, so they're hogging roster spots.

&^!$#&^*&%#!@*&%$&*!$@!

Good news....Bad News

So, my son thinks I'm Derek Jeter.

Fantastic!

Coming from a Die-Hard Yankees family, that's a huge compliment. I mean, Jeter's a great role model: Hard Working, Responsible, Talented, a Good Teammate, A Good Leader...

Wow! What a nice thing for my little buddy to say....

...Until I saw how he made the association. We have these little Jeter nesting dolls in the house. He points to this one and says "Da-da!"



Umm..?

I take some consolation that it doesn't look much like Jeter, either.

Raring to Stop

So some guy started showing up in my front yard this week. I noticed his appearance almost immediately, as I have become suddenly and acutely sensitive to itinerant neighbors walking the sidewalk alongside of our yard. Since moving in I have seen far too much of a woman dog-walker who has assuredly seen too much of me in the mornings as I pull off my nighty-time boxers and head for the shower. (The wife likes to leave every shade in the house open, in her eternal -and apparently hopeless unless we tear off the roof- search for ‘good lighting.’) Coming from what could accurately be described as a ‘country condo,’ I’m not yet used to the idea of joggers, dog-walkers, bikers and such passing by outdoors, so each of these intruders show up as large, menacing blips on my radar.

Don’t get me wrong, for the most part we love this; it was one of the appeals of the neighborhood that attracted us when we were looking for a house. These folks here in town are uniformly friendly, ready to greet you with a smile and a nod. Unfortunately, everyone that crosses my path in the pre 9AM morning before I have the chance to recalibrate my internal IFF system at Dunkin Donuts is universally classified as a hostile. I can’t blame by body; it’s a survival mechanism. I sure as hell can’t make any accurate determinations of my own in those ungodly hours.

Anyway, it was exactly this time that this new bogey showed up. I watched him exit his vehicle from behind my curtain. He strode the sidewalk towards the intersection, a resolute set to his brow. Once there, however, he turned around. A guards pace! He wasn’t going anywhere; he was where he wanted to be! Right in front of my house.

Now, the ground that he patrolled also serves as the base for a neighborhood mailbox, so the thought crossed my mind that perhaps he was guarding the mail. An absurd thought, you think? Well maybe, but only until you consider that my local mail-hub is kinda (in)famous. Maybe the guy was actually a homeland security plant.

Could be too, that he was just waiting for friends. He was an older guy, and my weeks of living at the new joint have enabled me to make the observation that only older people use mailboxes nowadays. The younger generation is apparently all ‘e’-ed’ up…emails, online banking and bill paying, etc. There’s no doubt in my mind that 90%+ of the folks using this mailbox comprise CBS’s target audience, (Murder, She Mailed, anyone?) so maybe this guy was just hanging out at the local hotspot, looking to get a hot tip on the next fiery Canasta gathering going down.

I dressed, keeping a vigilant eye on the guy. Sometime between shirt and socks he must have withdrawn an item from his car, because he was flipping something in his hands as he gazed again across the intersection, a gunfighter staring down a storm. Its haft was cool, polished metal; I could see it glint from my dining room window. A child approached from across the way, and the man sprung into action, drawing his weapon, and stepping out into the street.

Time stopped, and so did traffic, as the stranger held his stop sign aloft.

Holy crow!

“Hey hon!” I called. “We have a crossing guard!” I hadn’t had a close encounter with a crossing guard since like the sixth grade, when one of my friends became a junior CG. He got a badge and everything, and around the pizza pies on weekends he’d shock us with the stories of what words actually came out of the mouths of kindergarteners when they were told to stop.

Ah, the good old days!

This new guy in the front yard didn’t seem to be an ass, though, as my friend assuredly was, drunk off the power of a sixth grade traffic lord. I watched him for a while until it was time for me to go, and it occurred to me that this guy -pacing, prepared, resolute- probably enjoyed his daily duty far more than I. On a good day for me, I can help eke some cash away from monolithic pharmaceutical companies. On a good day for him, he could keep little kids from getting run over by trucks.

The IFF then, even pre-coffee, kicked in, and identified the sashed gentleman as a friend.

Now I only need to work out a deal with him to delay that dog walker for a moment or two…

Xbox Asplode!

It’d be easy enough, I suppose, to blame the tears that blurred my eyes on the abrasive smoke cloud teeming down the front of my entertainment center and across my shoulders as I stood doubled over, staring at the Xbox in horror. Or, I could assuredly find the piquant, carcinogenic wallop of refried circuitry that I tasted at the back of my ears at fault. Human biology had given me a couple of acceptable outs, should I choose to employ them.

But that, dear readers, would be lying.

No, long after the smoke had drifted out through the hastily thrown open windows into the post-midnight air, and once the DNA damage had been inflicted, I still stood there, sniveling, my yanked-out power cord wilting flaccid in my hand.

The Xbox was dead. I had lost a friend.

The signs of imminent demise had been there for a while, though only now could I accept them for what they were. The Ivory application of denial leaves life’s little tragedies 99.44 percent pure, and it’s easy to ignore the filthy tub when you are deliberately focusing on the spectacle of the floating soap. But who was I kidding? The Xbox had been sounding and stinking like a flatulent dog for a while. It’d sometimes take two or three tries to get the thing going at all, and there was no guarantee that it then wouldn’t crap out in the middle of things. But I ignored the popping and the wheezing; the burning and the sparking; and told myself everything was going to be alright. It had to be. I was a good person.

I had made it through the ‘Thompson Dirty Disk Debacle’ with the Xbox already; that was hard enough to take. Microsoft’s company ethos really revealed itself on that one, though, didn’t it? Let’s design a product with an inherent flaw in the dvd-drive, and then, when it starts to fail, display a message that blames everything on the user:

'It’s your fault, you there staring at the screen. You are dirty. Dirty! '

This problem, though, hit me on a more visceral level. How could it not, when you are treated to a suddenly violent pyrotechnic display performed on wooden furniture when your wife and child sleep soundly upstairs? Yow! The Xbox had been mentioned in many violent news stories of late; headline writers cleverly insinuating that the demonic green box inspired friends to bludgeon friends with baseball bats and such. Had I been wrong in assuming such insinuations to be tripe?

XBOX torches house, three dead!

I could see the headline now. I felt sick.

If the thing was indeed retributively sentient, I guess some people would say I’d have it coming, forcing the laser’s attention on hours and hours of playing All-Star Baseball and State of Emergency. A jury probably wouldn’t even convict if word of that treatment got out.

Still, evil intentions aside, I wanted the thing back. I promised the machine I’d be good to it, playing only EGM gold games, and keeping the wife’s rentals of things like ‘13 going on 30’ far, far away. Do you want new components? I’ll buy you new components!

And actually, that was all that it needed.

I can’t give proper credit because I don’t know where I first read this, but it seems that early versions of the Xbox, in addition to having the dirty disk problem, also had a shoddy power supply unit. The psu’s in many boxes are supported only by solder. Any moderate plugging and unplugging of the system from the back is likely to cause the joints to crack and spark, ultimately causing the supply, and thus the system, to fail. I had been guilty of the ole 'in-and-out', as I routinely bring the machine upstairs and then down, taking it to my exercise room to use as I bike, then back to the living room where I do my late night gaming. Sure enough, that was my problem, and eventually the power supply consumed itself it a blaze of glory.

Luckily, because this story was not completely unknown, I found a few people saying that the problem could be easily resolved by buying a replacement PSU, and doing a simple component swap. I found this guy on eBay, and I figured for $20 (Watch the $10 shipping) it was worth a shot. The part came within a week.

An excellent site showed me how to crack open the Xbox, and in no time, I removed the obviously crisp old power unit, replacing it with the new. If you are comfortable enough with doing things like adding a new hard disk or memory to your pc, then this will be a piece of cake. In less than ten minutes, I had the new PSU installed, and the Xbox hooked back up to the TV.

I powered it up, and it worked like a charm, not a single saved game lost.

Happily, I pedaled my way through an hour and a half of All-Star Baseball, blithely ignoring promises made during a darker, more desperate hour.

Half the promises, anyway. The other half still comes in handy:

“Sorry dear, we just can’t watch 'Win a Date with Tad Hamilton'. We’ll die horribly in our sleep.”