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Its beginning to look a lot like winter here in Pittsburgh, and I gotta tell you – I love it. I’m a cold-weather guy, and my idea of hell is heat, humidity, and Florida. This is football weather here in the northeast. This is my favorite time of year. My wife also gets "snow paranoid", and we stay in alot..which means...she watches mind-numbing girl movies on the Lifetime channel, and I play more video games.
Anyway, just wanted to post and get some quick-hitter topics out there for discussion that have been on my mind lately. ***I can’t express how much fun I’ve been having in our Consolesports.net APF 2K8 draft league… and not just because I’m currently 7-2 and beat the tar out of the ever-mouthy CrimsonVoodoo. What a great playing online game. Someone please tell the other sports game developer out there that online seasons with stat tracking, playoffs, web interface, and flex schedules….are very nice and people want them in sports games. And you can take that to the bank. There’s no bigger “No-Brainer” in the sports game industry right now. However, I would really hope that if 2K makes a follow up to All Pro Football, that they also work to seriously flesh-out offline modes of play and features. ***EA is to be commended for their huge improvements to their NBA Live franchise. Its now fun to play. I’m also looking forward to March Madness 08 coming out next week. Craig and I have been told by an inside source that there’s even more to like that got put into March Madness simply because they had several months longer to make it. Great…so now I’ll have two games where I start my virtual Bobby Knight career. ***Speaking of college hoops, I do enjoy 2K Sports’ College Hoops 2K8, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t admit…
…just how much I stink at the game. My shooting percentage is abysmal!
*** I am really glad to see what all was fixed by the Madden 08 360 patch. Franchise folks finally can dive-in without the year two “crash”. However, the three and a half months it took to correct such a serious issue did little to help EA’s “release something and worry about fixing it next year” perception that many have. Last year it took a month and a half to correct the “no-fatigue” issue with a patch. This year it took almost 4 months to fix a broken franchise mode. I think EA would be wise to invest in a “residual crew” of technicians/devs to work on each title after release so it at least works as advertised. And that includes the Wii version too, which has some disgraceful problems that should have never gotten past playtesting either.
*** Regarding the big Activision + Vivendi = Blizzard Activision merger… might we have a “white knight” who would like to compete against EA in the sports game market? Rumor has it that there’s a well-known sports developer out there who’s current publisher does little to market its games and is in financial trouble due to some in-game content scandals that caused some seriously angry stockholders. Perhaps that sports game developer and Blizzard Activision might like to talk to have lunch together and shoot the breeze sometime soon? *** Remember the past two Christmases...with the "slow to get AAA titles" dynamic for the XBOX 360? It looks like those days are dead and gone... thankfully.
*** Lastly, the Jeff Gerstmann firing at Gamespot- allegedly for angering publisher Eidos for a bad “6” review score of Kane & Lynch… it seems to be getting more press than Gamespot would like. Check out this from news source TheStreet.com Until next time…
Scott Hemphill
“Quietcool72”
Co-Founder
Consolesports.net
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