Sports game mentality and a review of NCAA 09

I can’t help but get a feeling of déjà vu when I’m playing NCAA 09. No, not just because I’ve played the demo that was released on Xbox Live ahead of the game’s launch; it’s because there’s so much the same as last year’s version, and the year before that’s version, and on and on.


NCAA 09: different covers for each version. Xbox 360 gamers get former Arkansas running back and Heisman Trophy finalist Darren McFadden.

Sports gamers are really good at buying and playing the same game over and over. However, this becomes problematic when applied too liberally to the process of creating a sports video game. Tweak a few things, add some new features that can be slapped on the back box (or, gratingly, add back features that were taken away a year or two ago), update the rosters and uniforms and boom! Quicker than John Madden on a turducken, you’ve got yourself a yearly sports update.

Take, for instance, the home-field advantage system being advertised in NCAA 09. This was originally introduced in NCAA 06, and in the Xbox version of the game you could cause some serious havoc in multiplayer by jamming on the white button (I think it was L1 for the PS2). Controllers vibrate, stadiums shake, all well and good. After a two-year hiatus it’s back for 09 – and causes just as many problems. However, it’s being advertised as another new addition to the series for 09, when in reality it’s adding in a feature that was cut for the first two next-gen versions.

Further proof that more and more insidious people are working in PR, I suppose.

A sort of perfectionist streak regarding gameplay makes sense – sports are all about perfecting technique of a set game. Unlike going from the ice level to the forest level to the cave level in a platformer or RPG, the game stays the same in sports. It’s just the nature of the beast; therefore, an inherent part of sports gaming is the pursuit of perfection, of getting better, upping the difficulty, adapting, and growing.

But, unfortunately, that doesn’t necessarily sell units on a yearly basis.

If the sports game market were to go the way some consumers and fans suggest – offer yearly roster updates for a small cost (as that’s really about 50% of the reason to buy a new yearly sports game) and patch in some extra features – companies like EA Sports would go bankrupt in a heartbeat. You’d buy a product once and it’d last the life-cycle of a system; that doesn’t pay the bills.


Who is #30 for Oregon? It can change from year to year, and that is a high priority to sports gamers.

However, the current system of roster updates, graphic spit-shine, a few new features and a new package for $60 is really a horrible thing for consumers. Yet, if you look at your Xbox Live friends list or on a thread on a forum where a bunch of your sports-fan friends are buying the latest and greatest, what are you gong to do? Stick to the older copy that nobody plays? Buy last year’s version for all of $15 from EB or GameStop as opposed to the new one for four times the price?

And this isn’t just limited to NCAA Football, either; since EA Sports bought the NFL license exclusively a few years ago, Madden NFL has fallen under harsh criticism, and despite competition, many sports games – including soccer, basketball, hockey, baseball, and golf – make minor updates to the existing game in their yearly iterations. Besides obligatory graphics updates and new rosters, there isn’t too much happening in many of these games – sometimes there’s a meaningful update, but it’s rare. Maybe two games last year – NHL 08 and FIFA 08 – made real strides to advance, improve upon and make revolutionary steps in their gameplay.

Why is it that sports gamers accept this? I have my theories on this. One, sports gamers are very often sports fans first, hardcore gamers second. I’ve got a whole other post’s worth of thoughts on why this separation exists, but that’s for another time. Two, because of this difference, the value systems of what is looked for in a new version of a game are completely different. Fans of all genres of games love “more of the same, but improved,” and that runs the gamut from Metal Gear to Halo to everything else. However, what falls under that “improved” tag for sports games is usually led by rosters.

Rosters are a huge matter to sports fans, because it affects so much of the game – balance, accuracy, etc. If your team in NCAA Football is missing it’s stud recruit, then you’re missing out on a player who’ll make an impact for four years. When I fire up my old copy of Winning Eleven 9 and see the default rosters for Arsenal, now four seasons out-of-date, I see very few players who are on the current team – and none of the ones who are still there are at an “accurate” place in their careers right now.

Without going into too much of a tangent, that’s why having roster updates mid-season is such a big deal for sports games – take Madden for instance. Last year, the Cleveland Browns and their starting quarterback, Derek Anderson, became one of the hottest teams in the league. Based on pre-season ratings, in Madden they sucked, especially Anderson, a journeyman backup quarterback who played college ball at Oregon State. Anderson got a huge bump in ratings, as did other Browns, and it reflected real life.

If NCAA had roster updates last year, the Ducks would have gone from average in the pre-season to an absolutely monstrous team – Dennis Dixon had one hand on the Heisman Trophy until he blew out his knee against Arizona State and was gone for good in the Arizona game. But, in the ‘basic’ roster, he’s rated only an 85 or 88 – far from the best player in the Pacific-10 Conference, let alone the country.

Maybe I’m thinking too hard about this whole issue, but from one point of view I see “horses for courses” – different types of gamers expect different things from their games – whereas, on the other hand, I see a line of sports-crazy sheep buying the product for minimal improvement and simply feeding the machine. But one thing’s for certain: until there’s a major change in the sports games business, companies like EA Sports and 2K Sports are going to keep riding the cash cow until the money runs out.

Ow

Sweet christ my fingers hurt. It kinda hurts to type. I started trying to work on playing "Green Grass and High Tides Forever" in Rock Band on my Expert Guitar tour again tonight, the last song between myself and some sweet, sweet gamer points - not to mention being able to hold my arms high in victory over this goddamned game.

This is why I can never get through that damned Pile of Shame.



I am getting better, I am finding it easier to get through the first 70% of the song, but clearly I need to go back to practice the trills at the 72% mark some more again. That's Solo 2F for those keeping score at home. And when I've gotten through there, I get held up at Solo 2H's scaling zig-zags. I can't do it with my left hand on the regular buttons, and I keep fucking up every time I switch to the solo buttons down the neck.

I will conquer this damned thing, and soon. It will happen. But I'll have to put another two or three hours into it, easily. Easily.

For now, though, I'll sleep on it and wake up in the morning. If the fingers still burn, then that'll be a good reminder of what I have left to do.

Justifying losing money; or, how GameStop is printing its own profits

Very rarely can you feel good about giving things up and getting much less for your money value than you should, but I honestly feel like that right now after a trip to GameStop to return some games for store credit. I traded in three games I'm not playing much right now - NBA 2K8, NCAA Football 08, and FIFA 08 - in exchange for $43 worth of in-store credit, which I turned into a brand new copy of Major League Baseball 2k8 and a scant $3 worth of a card.

In theory, selling games back to retailers makes sense. I had three sports games I didn't play much (and, in the case of NCAA 08, a game that was about to see its trade-in value nose-dive - its replacement NCAA 09 is due in a week, two max), the store gets to buy them back and re-sell them at a lower price then new, and it's a profit margin for the store. Makes sense, right?

The problem is the profit margins GameStop makes. They're obviously a very big company with many stores, but they're keeping themselves out of the recession, according to Forbes, by being in the second-hand market and making so much. In fact, from an article on Kotaku.com, GameStop is making 50 cents of pure profit on the dollar on their used sales. GameStop is raking in $650 million per year on used games.

I added to the 2008 totals tonight, even though my friend Nick and I got there just before the store was supposed to be closed - and even though the manager and the other goober clearly wanted to leave, badly.

So how is this $650 million made? Simple: mark up the price on hot used games, and quite seriously low-ball gamers on their sales. Like, "here's some lube, you'll need it" low-ball on the amount of money you get back (oh, and if you want it in cash, that's a certain percentage less that you get. It's a fucking racket).

Let's take my turn-ins for the night as an example. I received $43 for my efforts. I don't know the specific breakdown of how much money each was worth, but I do know that FIFA 08 was probably the most out of the three I got. I also got an extra $10 for turning in three "next-gen" (re: PS3, 360 or Wii) games, which is clearly another indication that three is the magic number. So, without bringing the De La Soul-style bonus, I got $33.

How much do these games retail for used from EB? According to EBGames.com (same parent company as GameStop), the PS3 version of NCAA 08 is $19.99 (no 360 version and the prices are usually the same), the 360 version of NBA 2k8 is $26.99, and the 360 version of FIFA 08 is $44.99.

GameStop paid me $43, including a $10 bonus, for games they will turn around and sell for a grand total of $91.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how $650 million of profit is made. Somehow, I can still justify it - I mean, those games were just lying around, right? Might as well get something new - but I still feel horrible knowing that I am nothing but $.50 profit on the dollar to GameStop.

sports are cruel

Money makes the world go 'round.

Despite making no legitimate effort to find a solution in Seattle, Clay Bennett has weaseled a way out of the Key Arena lease for his ownership group and the Seattle SuperSonics will be no more starting next season.

Even though I'm a diehard Trail Blazers fan, I just can't be happy about this at all. Seattle has won a championship, the Sonics are the city's oldest sports franchise, and, oh yeah, there's stacks of evidence that Bennett's ownership group never attempted to reconcile their arena "problem." Never mind that Key Arena is less than 15 years old in its current incarnation (which is just older than Portland's Rose Garden, for what it's worth), and that it wouldn't take much to improve the arena to "current NBA standards," whatever those are.

I care, but it's frustrating. Sports are a business, and a rather expensive one at that. People want to make money from this. I get it. But after seeing the way Portland has turned around its franchise - namely, rebuilding ties to the community and not letting burned bridges stand in disrepair - and seeing Bennett and his set of flyover state carpetbaggers gleefully holding torches while they exit stage east, I can't help but get a bit frustrated by it all.

Oh well. I can rest assured knowing that, at the NBA owner's meeting vote back a couple months ago to let Bennett take the franchise to Oklahoma City, Portland owner Paul Allen was one of just two dissenting voices. The other? Mark Cuban. I guess my respect for the Mavericks' owner has gone up as well.

Goodbye, Sonics; I hope to see you again some day. And fuck you to whatever this franchise will be called from here on out. I hope they get a shitty nickname, it'll make them easier to hate.

Sony quoting Henry V? wtf?

Sony just took something really cool and bastardized it. The current PS3 ad (featuring Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, MGS4, and Little Big Planet, and placed above via YouTube) has a voiceover of the famous speech from Shakespeare's Henry V in the background.

I...I don't quite know what to make of it. It's an awesome speech - I loved it when I was in a performance of that play in high school - and I don't quite know whether to appreciate the reference, or feel ashamed that Sony's taken something I know well and bastardized it.

More tomorrow on the Pile of Shame. There's some headway, but not a lot, sadly.

The Finals are here

The Finals are here.


The Celtics have had NBA Finals expectations on their shoulders all year, and are now a game away from the title.

The NBA got its wish - not just the two best teams in the regular season, the No. 1 seeds in the Eastern and Western Conferences meeting in the finals, but the league's two most storied franchises - the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics - meeting for the first time since 1987. Not since Bird, McHale and Parrish faced Magic, Worthy and the rest of the Showtime Lakers in the Boston Garden and the Forum in L.A. have these two met, and you always knew if they met up this season it would be wash of white-noise and hype leading to the games.

Two things are keeping this series from being great right now: One, the Lakers self-detonating when it counts the most (aside from their Game Three win back home in L.A., which they even almost choked away in the fourth quarter) and two, disgraced former referee Tim Donaghy has raised his ugly head and the NBA is now fighting a PR nightmare.

It's almost only fitting that as the NBA gets its dream finals, accusations are coming in that there might be somebody behind the scenes pulling strings. Donaghy has apparently accused the NBA of influencing the referees, who in turn are supposed to influence the outcomes of playoff series - to try and improve ratings, it would seem. The crux of some of this is around the Kings-Lakers Western Conference Finals in 2002, in which the Lakers won game six to take it to a seventh game, which they won en route to the title.

NBA fans have been cynical about referees in the past, and many have conspiracy theories regarding the NBA front office that should earn them honorary tinfoil hats. Frozen envelopes, make-up calls after non-calls in games, doctored playoff series, refs in on it...all of it sounds too familiar, and where there's smoke there's eventually fire.

I just hope this doesn't completely cripple the league. That would be a shame.

-------


The world's best player, Man United's Cristiano Ronaldo, tries to lead his Portuguese national side to glory

The Finals are here. After a year and a half of qualifying matches, the European Championships - aka Euro 2008 - are upon us. A week gone, three teams have qualified after winning their first two matches, the first few uninspiring matches have given way to some scintillating soccer, and pre-tournament conceptions on the favorites have already been changed.

The Dutch are flying high and Portugal is strong, whereas the Germans have slipped up and Italy - current defending world champions - are in danger of going out at the first hurdle.

I've been watching the matches every morning, and I'm actually enjoying ESPN's coverage - shocking, I know. They're putting a real effort into improving their coverage, going as far as to hire Scottish commentator Andy Gray onto their team, as well as showing three games a day (one is repeated) and doing a studio show every night. They didn't even put this much effort into their World Cup coverage two years ago.

So far, for me, the Dutch have been the story of the tournament. With no in-camp squabbles, it looks like the Oranje are finally united. Their defense isn't outstanding, but with one of the best keepers in the world - Edwin van der Sar - marshaling the back line, they're organized, and they're incredibly dangerous on the break. They've scored 7 goals in two games - against the World Cup winners (3-0 over Italy) and runners up (4-1 over France).

Watching both these finals is an exercise in drama. I wish the NBA Finals didn't have two days between games, and I wish the Germans can get through their group to the knockout rounds of the Euros. I wish I was there, too - maybe I could pretend I'm Dutch for a few days.

Of frustration and fake plastic instruments

Sometimes you just have to accept your failures and move on with life.

For as much as I've played, become good at, had fun with and all-around enjoyed the "Instrument Protagonist" genre of video games - Guitar Hero 1 and 2 and Rock Band - I've never actually finished one of them on Expert. And, despite having just one song left right now in Rock Band on expert guitar, I'm no closer than I have been before.

Let's see. In Guitar Hero 1, I couldn't get past "Cowboys from Hell" or "Bark at the Moon." Guitar Hero 2, hit the brick wall at "Psychobilly Freakout" and just got stuck. And in Rock Band? The 9-minute-plus Southern rock epic "Green Grass and High Tides Forever."

Dammit.

I threw myself, fitfully, against "Bark at the Moon" for at least two hours before giving up - in one stint, mind you, I've tried it other times as well of course - and I'm doing much the same with GGaHT. The painfully frustrating thing with BatM was that I got to as far as 97% or 98% before failing. Nothing but frustration there.

I'm stuck at 72% or so on GGaHT, which is acknowledged as a sticking point in the song. There's another one at 84% and one in the 90s, I believe. Great. I have that to look forward to.

That's why it's on the Pile of Shame. I'm still working on upping my drumming skill, too - I just bought rubber silencing pads for my drums today, they work great. I'm working on high-level hard songs and starting up expert, but it's the expert guitar play-through that has me frustrated as hell.

At least Rock Band is insanely fun. At least it isn't unfairly frustrating, or the victim of bad game design - that's not the problem. I must stare into the abyss and see if it blinks back.

Sights through sounds

Death Cab For Cutie, The Roots, Atmosphere, Blue Scholars, the Rolling Stones, Nine Inch Nails, Daft Punk, Justice...what do all these bands have in common? New additions to my library recently. My taste in music is nothing if not eclectic, though it usually falls squarely along an indie rock/hip-hop binary, with a skew toward my native Pacific Northwest. I like to think that what all this stuff has in common is being good music; trying to understand any more behind it would be stupid.

Death Cab's new disc is rather good. I certainly like it, at least, making it a worthwhile purchase. My reaction, after listening through it five or six times, is that it starts out really well (so long as you're not overly creeped out by "I will possess your heart," the lead single off the disc that weighs in with a four-minute plus intro on the album), hits a real high note with "Cath..", falls off a bit, but recovers by the end of the disc. For some reason I like "Grapevine Fires." On the way to the Death Cab/Decemberists show in Bend last weekend, Nick thought it was an interesting song about wildfires (it sounds so happy, contrasting with the content), but that just immediately made me think of Bad Religion's "Los Angeles is Burning," a good song about SoCal in flames. It'd be good in Rock Band.

I don't think you could get more diametrically opposed to Death Cab as you could with The Roots. Their new disc is really good, and brings an immediate, brutal sound, but I think I'll get used to it. I'd forgotten how in-your-face Game Theory was until listening to it again with my dad on a road trip a few weeks ago; the first few listens to Rising Down are just like that. Then again, I would love it, because I'm a backpacking fanboy in the biggest way.

I'm swinging back into hip-hop, though. Right now Blue Scholars' new album is halfway through its first play, and I really, really like it; good soulful loops, much, MUCH improved rhyming by Geologic. I loved their disc from a couple years ago (fanboy moment: got my copy at Sasquatch two years ago, and they signed it for me, eep!) and this is spectacular on first listen. I have to love hip-hop like this from the Northwest, it's just a shame Seattle has a much bigger scene than Portland.

Atmosphere and the Rhymesayers artists are also in the queue to listen to more. I've listened to "Simply Leakage" far too much recently; time to find the proper albums. I'm working on that right now, actually.

Trent Reznor deserves some fucking love right now, but I'll save that for another post at another time. Needless to say, I need to listen to The Slip more because it's a free album from Trent that isn't five years after his previous recording. All of those things together are astounding to NIN fans like me, that much is certain.

Gaming thoughts tomorrow, and as a prelude, I think I'm going to work on that post while grinding through an RPG. I'm thinking of playing two right now that are on my Pile or should-play-again pile, but I'm just trying to decide which it should be...

A brilliant way to have your plans jump straight off the tracks

I started out the Pile of Shame project with such good intentions. I wanted to play through games I already had, make good with my back-log, enjoy some good karma, discover some gems I haven't spent nearly enough time on...

Then something happened: I bought Grand Theft Auto IV.

Game, as we say, over.



I haven't finished Grand Theft Auto IV yet, but I've put more than 50 hours into this absolutely amazing game. As much as I hate to let a game off the hook so easily, I think it would be asinine to break apart GTA IV or complain about it's faults; sure, it has horrible pop-in in places, but few games allow you to drive for so far in such different areas without loading. The shooting is tricky, but with some learning and some p-a-t-i-e-n-c-e you can avoid death. Some of the minigames, including the dating and friendships, are kind of shallow, but what game has even ever tried this before?

Let's not forget the story, the scripting, the writing and acting. The story included in this game could easily be made into a couple season's worth of 30-minute TV dramas; the story arcs are incredibly well thought-out. The writing is amazing, the characters are all believable - okay, one flamboyantly gay character might be a bit over-the-top, but everyone else is very real. The player's anti-hero Niko Bellic is no saint, but he's trying; Niko's cousin Roman is a good man with bad gambling issues; other characters later in the game have such human writing that even picking them up to hang out is as enjoyable as the minigame of billiards or the quick comedy show.


Fuck. Yes.

I don't think you can blame me for losing track of the Pile of Shame given GTA IV. It's been quite the bombshell over the whole industry, taking over free time from everyone in sight (at least, everyone bar the Wii Fit demographic...).

That said, the Pile grows – just like a Katamari, it keeps rolling on and gaining steam. The two newest additions are courtesy of Nick: Burnout Paradise for the 360 and Psychonauts for the original Xbox (backwards compatible on the 360, luckily, unlike Beyond Good and Evil...) Burnout is just going to be played for fun, but I need to get through Psychonauts in order to keep hold of my Hardcore Gamer card, in all honesty.

On a small sports note: the Blazers are up to something tonight, apparently. I'm guessing it's the official announcement that Rudy Fernandez will join the team, but it could also be a trade or something just completely left-field and inconsequential. Also, I can't help but feel a touch smug about the Oregon State Beavers baseball team not making the NCAA Tournament this year. They're the first winner to not get invited back since 1991 - so there's a precedent! - plus they dropped the games they shouldn't have. Oregon's gotten screwed in years past (snubbed by the BCS and for the National Championship game in a couple of different one-loss seasons, the women's soccer team not getting an NCAA Tournament invite in 2006 after finishing second in the conference) so the Beavers getting screwed just seems so sweet.

The schadenfreude runs deep and smooth, yes it does.

the hard drive blues

iTunes can be a weird program.

Those little exclamation marks means it can't find the file. This is because of one of two things: 1. it tried to play the file earlier this morning/last night while I was asleep and my old external hard drive, though it was plugged in AND turned on, somehow ejected itself; or 2. it was sweeping to see if it could read files while I was listening to the new Death Cab album (which is a purchase that went straight to my MacBook's *internal* hard drive and music folder) without my hard drive plugged in.

Hrm. All I really know what this means is, besides figuring out how to mass-re-import music into iTunes without clicking every single file in my library (10,000+, fyi), I'm going to be watching the Fry's ads a little closer this week. Time to invest in a new hard drive, I think.

Later that night.... What did I learn today?

-iTunes is a finicky program that loads its library on start-up, so that means if you've got the majority of your library disconnected...it won't find them. D'oh.

-MacBook superdrives that burn DVDs don't like DVD+Rs very much. At least that spindle was only $8 wasted.