Sunday, October 23, 2005
Update
I should really update this thing more often.
Recent developments:
1. Softball season ended in a double-header a couple of Saturdays back, both games of which we dropped to the one team we'd managed to beat during the regular season. That team is in the state tourney now, and are still playing. In late October. As one of the softball coaches remarked to me last night at the football game, "It just shows you how good we could have been." Sometimes, all the pieces are there, but things just don't click.
2. High point of those last two softball games was that I got to watch them in the company of a friend I hadn't seen in a while, a student who has posted comments here occasionally, and the upshot is that things seem to be going well for her and the girls from last year's eighth grade team. Several of them expect to play varsity ball this year. Open gym and conditioning have been going on for some time now, and try-outs are October 24... this coming Monday.
3. Speaking of last night's football game: I consider football an inferior sport to both baseball/softball and the king of sports, BASKETBALL, but even someone (like me) generally indifferent to a game that consists mainly of guys running into each other and falling down could find something to be thrilled about in last night's matchup between the MCHS Indians and the NWHS Bruins. Both teams had exactly the same record going into the game, and there was a playoff spot on the line. Our boys fumbled away their first three possessions, which the Bruins converted to 14 points within the first few minutes of the first quarter, and were up 21-6 at the end of the first.
You can imagine the game for yourself when I tell you that even after that soul-crushing first quarter, the score at the half was 25-21, MCHS. And you can probably imagine the euphoria in the visitors' bleachers, which was packed, SRO... there were at least seven or eight hundred people, maybe a thousand, from Murray County in attendance. And every one of them -- yours truly included -- was very much into the game. I went to bed last night hoarse and with hearing loss.
Second half was a shootout. Now, as little as I know about football -- which is still quite a bit more than I really care to -- I do know that I don't like offensive shootouts. I can appreciate the beauty of a truly defensive game. Last night's didn't fit that bill. NWHS scored within the first couple of minutes of the half to go up 28-25. Then we scored. Then they scored. Etc. etc., ad nauseam. I doubt there were more than four drives all night that didn't end in a touchdown. But what the game lacked in defensive intensity, it made up for in offensive razzle-dazzle, and of course emotional intensity... we wanted to win. Badly.
It came down to the last two minutes, as these things often do. Having been down 34-31 at the end of the third, we scored a TD early in the fourth, and even though a penalty set our line back five yards, we managed a two-point conversion to go up 39-34. A Bruins field goal knocked out lead down to two (39-37) with a bit less than two minutes to go. We scored on our final possession, running out as much clock as possible (the Bruins had burned all their time-outs) and finally scoring with 20-odd seconds left to go up 46-37. (I write this for those even more clueless than I about football: this was a reasonably safe score. The best -- the absolute best -- the opponent could have done was tie, with a TD and a conversion, to force OT. And this they would had to have done while maintaining enough focus and discipline to play the clock by passing and/or running out of bounds. A tall order for a professional team, much less a bunch of 17 year-olds, even those who'd been playing since age 5.)
It was a barn-burner. Aesthetic objections to offense-heavy games aside, it was a true thriller. I'm glad a co-worker persuaded me to go, when all I'd really planned to do last night was play NBA Live 06.
4. Speaking of NBA Live 06: I like it. Its new graphics, physics, and gameplay elements are very nice. I have only two objections:
First, the "superstar" moves so heavily touted by EA, while fun enough to pull off, amount to game-imbalancing superpowers for the players with stats high enough to possess them. Superstar moves are nearly unbeatable; the game requires significant tweaking of realism sliders to bring it somewhere near alignment with reality. Out of the box, it's just too easy to dominate with superstars.
Second, there's an unbeatable move that the CPU has, which consists of a player first running back and forth under the basket for a while, and then tossing the ball up in a sort of reverse-layup that never misses. Ever. And is unblockable. Believe me. As a huge fan of shot-blocking, I have my shooting-guard avatar's block rating set at 99 percent, and the shot-block ability slider set at 100 percent, and I can block any shot in the lane, except for the Reverse Layup of Doom. The Reverse Layup of Doom is not listed among the superstar moves, and the CPU does not require a superstar to pull it off. Anyone -- anyone -- from D-Wade to AI to Dirk Nowitski to Brevin Knight -- can do it. If the game included cutscenes of the refs goofing around between quarters, I'm sure you'd see them scooping it in there, too, without looking.
(If this were an EA forum board, at this point there would be a number of huffy responses along the lines of "Dude, their called sliders" and "dog u must suck on d try learning to play defens b4 u post ur sory-a$$ beyotching." To forestall such penetrating insights, let me assure you that I've set every applicable CPU shot slider -- layup percentage, adjusted shot percentage, poor-release percentage, short-range scoring percentage, etc. -- to zero in an effort to stop the no-look RLD. No joy, just a lot of lopsided victories for me -- despite the CPU's continued ability to put the ball through the hoop whilst not even looking at it and going the wrong way. And I love playing defense. Love it. Live for it. Believe me: this is the only shot the CPU can get on me down low. Anything else, if my posts don't get it, my two-guard will. Except the RLD.)
I'm going to study the RLD, and as soon as I can divine its secret, I will teach it to our real-life players. They'll be unstoppable.
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Recent developments:
1. Softball season ended in a double-header a couple of Saturdays back, both games of which we dropped to the one team we'd managed to beat during the regular season. That team is in the state tourney now, and are still playing. In late October. As one of the softball coaches remarked to me last night at the football game, "It just shows you how good we could have been." Sometimes, all the pieces are there, but things just don't click.
2. High point of those last two softball games was that I got to watch them in the company of a friend I hadn't seen in a while, a student who has posted comments here occasionally, and the upshot is that things seem to be going well for her and the girls from last year's eighth grade team. Several of them expect to play varsity ball this year. Open gym and conditioning have been going on for some time now, and try-outs are October 24... this coming Monday.
3. Speaking of last night's football game: I consider football an inferior sport to both baseball/softball and the king of sports, BASKETBALL, but even someone (like me) generally indifferent to a game that consists mainly of guys running into each other and falling down could find something to be thrilled about in last night's matchup between the MCHS Indians and the NWHS Bruins. Both teams had exactly the same record going into the game, and there was a playoff spot on the line. Our boys fumbled away their first three possessions, which the Bruins converted to 14 points within the first few minutes of the first quarter, and were up 21-6 at the end of the first.
You can imagine the game for yourself when I tell you that even after that soul-crushing first quarter, the score at the half was 25-21, MCHS. And you can probably imagine the euphoria in the visitors' bleachers, which was packed, SRO... there were at least seven or eight hundred people, maybe a thousand, from Murray County in attendance. And every one of them -- yours truly included -- was very much into the game. I went to bed last night hoarse and with hearing loss.
Second half was a shootout. Now, as little as I know about football -- which is still quite a bit more than I really care to -- I do know that I don't like offensive shootouts. I can appreciate the beauty of a truly defensive game. Last night's didn't fit that bill. NWHS scored within the first couple of minutes of the half to go up 28-25. Then we scored. Then they scored. Etc. etc., ad nauseam. I doubt there were more than four drives all night that didn't end in a touchdown. But what the game lacked in defensive intensity, it made up for in offensive razzle-dazzle, and of course emotional intensity... we wanted to win. Badly.
It came down to the last two minutes, as these things often do. Having been down 34-31 at the end of the third, we scored a TD early in the fourth, and even though a penalty set our line back five yards, we managed a two-point conversion to go up 39-34. A Bruins field goal knocked out lead down to two (39-37) with a bit less than two minutes to go. We scored on our final possession, running out as much clock as possible (the Bruins had burned all their time-outs) and finally scoring with 20-odd seconds left to go up 46-37. (I write this for those even more clueless than I about football: this was a reasonably safe score. The best -- the absolute best -- the opponent could have done was tie, with a TD and a conversion, to force OT. And this they would had to have done while maintaining enough focus and discipline to play the clock by passing and/or running out of bounds. A tall order for a professional team, much less a bunch of 17 year-olds, even those who'd been playing since age 5.)
It was a barn-burner. Aesthetic objections to offense-heavy games aside, it was a true thriller. I'm glad a co-worker persuaded me to go, when all I'd really planned to do last night was play NBA Live 06.
4. Speaking of NBA Live 06: I like it. Its new graphics, physics, and gameplay elements are very nice. I have only two objections:
First, the "superstar" moves so heavily touted by EA, while fun enough to pull off, amount to game-imbalancing superpowers for the players with stats high enough to possess them. Superstar moves are nearly unbeatable; the game requires significant tweaking of realism sliders to bring it somewhere near alignment with reality. Out of the box, it's just too easy to dominate with superstars.
Second, there's an unbeatable move that the CPU has, which consists of a player first running back and forth under the basket for a while, and then tossing the ball up in a sort of reverse-layup that never misses. Ever. And is unblockable. Believe me. As a huge fan of shot-blocking, I have my shooting-guard avatar's block rating set at 99 percent, and the shot-block ability slider set at 100 percent, and I can block any shot in the lane, except for the Reverse Layup of Doom. The Reverse Layup of Doom is not listed among the superstar moves, and the CPU does not require a superstar to pull it off. Anyone -- anyone -- from D-Wade to AI to Dirk Nowitski to Brevin Knight -- can do it. If the game included cutscenes of the refs goofing around between quarters, I'm sure you'd see them scooping it in there, too, without looking.
(If this were an EA forum board, at this point there would be a number of huffy responses along the lines of "Dude, their called sliders" and "dog u must suck on d try learning to play defens b4 u post ur sory-a$$ beyotching." To forestall such penetrating insights, let me assure you that I've set every applicable CPU shot slider -- layup percentage, adjusted shot percentage, poor-release percentage, short-range scoring percentage, etc. -- to zero in an effort to stop the no-look RLD. No joy, just a lot of lopsided victories for me -- despite the CPU's continued ability to put the ball through the hoop whilst not even looking at it and going the wrong way. And I love playing defense. Love it. Live for it. Believe me: this is the only shot the CPU can get on me down low. Anything else, if my posts don't get it, my two-guard will. Except the RLD.)
I'm going to study the RLD, and as soon as I can divine its secret, I will teach it to our real-life players. They'll be unstoppable.
