I just played a little of the Madden 09 demo. The main part of the demo is the Madden Test, which is basically a way for the game to assess your skill as a player, and in doing so it then tailors the games AI to match up with your skill. Which is a great idea on a ton of levels, the problem is that the test doesn’t really test you. Well it test you, but how it doesn’t isn’t neceassirly the best way to be doing it.

For example the rush offense test is basically a test of can you hit the button above your tacklers head, if so you get by. The fact that I can do that has nothing to do with my ability to run the ball offensively in a game situation. They do a little better with passing offense since they introduce almost a full defensive back field for you to deal with, but in the end I found it arbritarily easy compared to how passing actually is in the game.

The defense I guess is probably the only one that is right-ish. It’s still weird in how it doesn’t really translate, but I think its a little fairer in actually testing your skill as compared to the offensive ones.

I should mention that I got All-Madden (hardest difficulty) in both rush and pass offense. Considering I never played above the medium-ish difficulty in Madden and NCAA football, I find that ridiculous. Which is better demonstrated in my defensive test scores that were both rookie.

So EA, its a great idea, but it needs work. Maybe have players play a test game instead of something like this. That seems like it would be a lot better way to gauge the players ability.

For about 2 decades the brick and mortar video game stores like GameStop/Electronic Boutique, and even Funcoland, (in the beginning,) have always been great places for gamers. In that they allowed you to pre-order the games you wanted, and they let you trade in your used games to money which you could then use to buy more games. As a kid growing up that was great, since you generally don’t have any sort of steady income, so being able to trade in a few games was always helpful when you wanted a new one, but this practice has always been a sore spot for the game publishers and developers.

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I was planning to write kind of a long-ish post about what happened at Otakon, but I’m just not really up to it. Plus it wouldn’t be too interesting. Watched the Halolz/Staccato table, met the guy that runs WoW stuff for MLG, met DJ Pretzel, met a bunch of the Front Row Crew, and got Hawk (above) and Aido to draw on my MacBook.

I think that generally covers everything… oh and I bought a few things but you don’t care about that. You can check out my Flickr for pictures I took at the con. Didn’t have too many that were good enough to post, since I was experiementing a lot with my camera’s settings.

Got back from Connecticon a few hours ago. It was a lot of fun, as usual. Mostly spent my time at the Staccato/Halolz booth helping Shawn, and occasionally watching the VG Cats’ booth so that Scott could get away from the table for a break. I did pick up a lot of stuff: volumes 2-5 of Hayate the Combat Butler, the Atomic Robo vol 1 trade (post on this soon,) two of the original art pages of Atomic Robo comic (issue 1 page 21, and issue 2 page 10,) Buffy season 8 trades 1 & 2, the Dr. McNinja vol 1 trade, a few figures (because I am somehow unable to not buy at least one,) and Hawk’s Sketchbook book.

The best part of the weekend was Saturday night when I went out to dinner with Shawn, Scott and his fiancee Karian, Hawk, Dave and Jamal (Chugworth Academy,) Jen (Mystic Revolution,) and Brion (Flipside.) It was good times.

I took a bunch of pictures, and put the good ones up on my Flickr. Hopefully I can take a lot of pictures at Otakon too (I’m trying to get into photography more.) Also it seems like just as you are starting to take advantage of what Flickr can do they make you pay. I guess $25 a year isn’t too unreasonable.

Just wanted to plug that one of my favorite animes, Baccano!, has just been liscenced by Funimation for the US. Now that isn’t news I would normally say anything about here except that Funimation has posted on their Baccano! site the first full episode with English subtitles, for free. So I recommend people check it out. The password you need to watch it is Flying Pussyfoot.

I’ve been looking to get a new laptop, and after much research I finlly ended up getting a Apple Macbook which arrived yesterday. I had been set on getting one of those new Dell Studio laptops, but then I remembered that Apple sells refurbished units. So I ended up with a more powerful laptop then what I was going to get in the Studio, for less then the Dell would have cost me.

So far I’m finding it to be pretty neat, I’m certianly happy with the choice so far. Although I needed to hook up a mouse to it, and I am definitely not used to the Apple shortcuts and keyboard yet. I don’t think its going to convince me to switch over completely to Apple, but its nice to have some variety.

I’m sure I’ll have more to talk about it after I’ve had more time to play with it. I also want to do something about that Apple logo on the back, it kind of bugs me. So I want to do/put something cool on the back.

Since it’s summer, and there aren’t many new game releases, I’ve decided that I’m going to try and get some off my pile of shame. It started with Beyond Good and Evil towards the end of May, but in the past few weeks I’ve gotten through two more games from my pile, and just started a third. The two games off the pile are Call of Duty 4, and Shadow of the Colossus. Continue reading this post…

I think that after this I am done talking about Rock Band, and it beating Guitar Hero after this, because I don’t think there is anything else they could to further destroy GH. Well at least that’s worth mentioning.

Basically Harmonix announced with Rock Band 2 that all past and future DLC will work with both Rock Band 1 and 2. And now I’ve read today that all the Rock Band 1 music that is on the disc will be available for free as DLC for Rock Band 2 (I imagine it’s free for those who have the RB1.)

Harmonix is basically continuing to prove what I’ve been saying for a while, which is that Rock Band is a platform. Which is how it needs to be. All they need to do now is establish a central music store for all rhythem/music games. Which would be nice… or at least give me an MP3 too or something.

I have a number of things I could talk about right now since I’m now running Windows Vista, and I just finished Call of Duty 4 (I know I’m a little behind on that one,) but I really wanted to talk about Wall*E which I saw over the weekend.

Well I wanted to, but then I read my friend Jamie’s post about it on his blog and he basically covers everything I was going to say and then some. So go read that instead, but sufice to say the movie is amazing. I think it should be nominated for best picture.

I finished Metal Gear Solid 4 last night, and I would review it but I don’t think I could correctly. I think I’m just too much of a Kojima/MGS fanboy to do a proper review, it’d be a bit too biased I think. Plus right now I’m still sort of digesting the whole thing, it’s pretty epic. On the other hand I think that I can write about it more critically, deconstructing it and what not, which is what I’m going to do a little here.

[possible spoilers ahead]

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