04/25/24
August 21, 2003
Whoah, waitaminute... there's an ESPN Gamer site?: When the hell did that happen? Oh. An entire site devoted to the unholy menage a trois of Sports, Gaming, and Marketing? Aside from not even knowing it exists from the ESPN front page, have video games become a solid supplement of fandom... or is it close to being more important than the real thing? Between video games and fantasy leagues, it seems to me fewer and fewer are concerned about the actual thing. I should know, I could give a flip less about who wins the championship as long as I have a good Fantasy/Video Gaming season.
Instead you can discuss this completely insane article discussing the finer points of statistics for video game gridiron players. Writing for this site has to be the best job in the world. "I had a good game of Madden today, I'll write an entire article about it."
posted by Stan Chin at 07:45 PM on August 21, 2003
Just so you're not alone here, thanks for the post.
posted by yerfatma at 11:53 AM on August 22, 2003
If I had found this site 5 years ago, I'd be all over it like a rash. (ewww) But I'm not as big on sports games as I used to be. Probably because I soured on the $59 (Cdn) yearly upgrades they called the EA NHL franchise. As well, my computer can never seem to be fast enough to run the game with all the doodads turned on. And I've never owned a console since my Sega Genesis, mainly because my computer became my gaming machine. That said, the sports game world reached it's peak with NHL '96 on the Sega Genesis. The perfect blend of fun, stats and violence. Make'em bleed!
posted by grum@work at 02:35 PM on August 22, 2003
the sports game world reached it's peak with NHL '96 on the Sega Genesis So now you're trolling for a fight, huh? NHL '94 still holds the record for most hours of life consumed, closely followed by NHL '95. It all got weird after that, where the processors became powerful enough to try to actually simulate the real game rather than make a hockey video game. Of course, graduating from college (in spite of EA's best efforts) and losing the readily available opponents probably lowered my opinion of later games. I had fun with NHL 2001 on PS2, but the EA games have been all one-timers since '97. I'm hoping (and my girlfriend is probably dreading) that online play will return a hockey video game (EA or otherwise-- Sega has been making some good games the past few years) to its rightful place in my life. Then all I need is a suspicious house collapse during a (Jeremy) Jacobs clan reunion (I assume they don't consider themselves a "family"-- that's a collection of related humans) and I can love hockey again.
posted by yerfatma at 03:16 PM on August 22, 2003
Fatty, I agree with every single word of that last comment.
posted by Samsonov14 at 03:39 PM on August 22, 2003
Even the part about having sex with animals every time I get to Tijuana that I wrote in white text hoping for suckers like you?
posted by yerfatma at 04:04 PM on August 22, 2003
Tijuana? I'm not humping Mexican animals.
posted by Samsonov14 at 05:07 PM on August 22, 2003
My bad. I meant to type NHL '94 not '96. It's the same game they play in this movie. Trent: Yeah but you know what, Mike? You can make their heads bleed in this one. Mike: Make somebody's head bleed. Sue (a guy): No man, were in the playoffs.
posted by grum@work at 06:37 PM on August 22, 2003
An entire site devoted to the unholy menage a trois of Sports, Gaming, and Marketing? From my eyes, it would be Marketing, Gaming, and then Sports. While it does seem to cover all aspects of Sports games, I can't help but shake the feeling that it's just a front for hyping and promoting their upcoming ESPN licensed games. That I don't like. The ESPN games, however... for ages, the ESPN licensed sports games have been rather abismal. This time, however, they're really good games originally (SEGA sports), but now they are adding (well, expanding) the ESPN license on top of that for added promotion and acceptance. Many devotees would say that the SEGA Sports games are far better than EA's equivalents. I can't vouch for this, as I mostly dislike sports games in general.
posted by mkn at 06:47 PM on August 22, 2003
The last ESPN game I played was one of their attempts at baseball on the original Playstation. It sucked big time. Everytime someone struck out, I got to listen to the announcer say the EXACT same thing: "The whiff..." Every single time. To this day, my friend and I break out laughing if one of us says it when we're watching baseball on TV. As well, there must have been some sort of bug/scratch on the cd because the game just started saying player names for no particular reason. Not just players in the game, but anyone on ANY of the rosters. "Randy Johnson. Eddie Murray. Mark McGwire. Steve Finley." and then it hit one name and really started to go haywire: "Jaaaaaaaaaay Buuuuuuuuuuuuuh....nerrrrrrrrr". We just shut the game off at that point. Oh, as for the game play: on easy, the pitchers were hitting home runs off the computer. On normal, I couldn't buy a hit. On expert, I couldn't get a hit AND I couldn't get anyone out unless they popped it up.
posted by grum@work at 09:33 PM on August 22, 2003
Yeah, but like mkn said, the games with ESPN licensing now are the Sega 2Kx series re-branded. And they've definitely been giving EA a run for their money. Unfortunately, no one has noticed yet.
posted by yerfatma at 10:02 PM on August 22, 2003
"Michael-- is he clean? . . . Tell him to take his shoes off."
posted by yerfatma at 10:02 PM on August 22, 2003
"I'll make Gretzky's head bleed for super fan number '99 over here."
posted by lilnemo at 04:52 PM on August 25, 2003
... and I completely missed that post from a week ago about video gaming. Fuck it.