Dear Florida

First let us congratulate you on beating Oklahoma, it was a hard fought game and you came out on top. Unfortunatley that trophy that got put in your hands is not something that you deserve. The National Championship should go to the best team in the country and sadly that is not you. There is a team out there that didn't lose a game all season...shouldn't that team be the Champs?
Please do the right thing and turn the trophy over to the true champions, The Universty of Utah Runnin' Utes.

Thank you ,
Ute Fans Everywhere

Utah Rolls the Tide 31-17, Huskers Clip the Tigers 26-21

Just wanted to through up a quickie to congratulate both the Utes and the Huskers on great seasons. The Huskers battled all year long and our only losses came to ranked teams. Coach Pellini did an awesome job bringing our defense back to respectabilty and I think that very good things are in store for our program. The Huskers played a great game and despite trailing most of the game outplayed Clemson in the second half. And when it came to crunchtime the Blackshirts stood tall and won the game.

As for the Utes, once again they proved that they belong on the nationl stage. The orginal BCS busters were the first non-BCS team to play in their second BCS game. And despite the fact that literally none of the so called experts gave them a chance, They rolled all over the Tide and their gutless leader the Nicktater. (who else thinks that old coach Saban might bolt for that New York Jets job). After jumping out to a 21-0 lead the Utes held fast even after Bama appeared to be taking control cutting the lead to 21-17 early in the second half. But the Utes answered as Brian Johnson lead them down the field and got the lead back to 28-17. Bama just had no answer for the speedy Ute defense, and the Utes are now the proud owners of another undefeated season.

Now how long before the honks at the BCS realize what a sorry conference the Big (read little) 10 is and replace them in the BCS with the Mountain West? or give us a playoff so that the deserving teams like Utah (and Boise State) get a shot at playing for a title

pics

if anyone can tell me why blogspot insits on cutting my pics in half when I post please let me know and what I can do to fix it

A New Review

Don King Presents: Prizefighter

Now I have always considered myself a mild boxing fan, I like to watch the occasional fight on TV, and I enjoy playing boxing games, but I have missed out on the last few boxing titles to come out, the last one I really played was the first Fight Night (formerly the Knockout Kings series) on the original Xbox, So i was some what excited to play this one. I had heard mixed reviews on it but was excited for my first taste of Next-gen boxing (that brings up another issue now that the xbox 360 is 3 years old can we really call it "Next gen"...well that's a rant for another time).

Prizefighter is half boxing game half documentary. This has to be one of the most unique game presentations I have ever seen. A lot of games immerse you in the story and have you feel as though you are playing through a movie (The Halo series is a great example of this) but this game literally has filmed a documentary (its a fictitious story of course) to surround the in game action. The game has you create your fighter nicknamed "the kid" and then goes about chronicling your rise to world champion. You train in between fights which consist of button timing type mini games to boost your stats and will occasionally get offers to do TV commercials or other various things that take away from your regular training. Along the way you run into a little bit of everything from breaking your hand before a fight (thus only being able to throw punches with one hand) to having the opposing boxer hopped up on pain killers and virtually indestructible. The story is very well done and the documentary aspect adds a nice touch around the game play.

As for the game play itself its fairly well done. The control is well laid out with the face buttons being your punches and the triggers and bumpers handling blocking and punch modifiers. The in ring action is fluid and is a somewhat accurate representation of real boxing, though as with any boxing game I have ever played the pacing is not accurate, there is way more action than a true match, but it is a video game so that's expected. The difficulty is one gripe I have, I started on the default medium setting and promptly got my rear end handed to me 3 straight fights (which oddly enough earned me an achievement...LOL) so I ramped it down to easy and sailed through the rest of the game never losing a fight. I really should have gone back and played another fight on medium to see if I had improved but didn't get the chance.

Overall Prizefighter was a decent boxing game but not worth a full retail purchase so it gets the stamp of.....

TRY IT

Happy Hollidays

Let me start off by saying Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year to everyone. Obviously there has been a lack of posts latley and that can be blamed squarly on the wonderful holliday season wich has limited my free time, but I plan on getting back into the swing of things. I hope that everyone has been enjoying my posts latley and hopefully I can get a little more regular with them. And please if you enjoy my blog and know anyone else that you think might enjoy it pass a link along, the more the merrier.

Review of the Week

So this week we present TNA Impact, now for the record I was only mildly interested in this one, While I have pretty much completely stoped watching wrestling altogether I do still enjoy the video games. This was about 9 games down on my que but its what showed up so here we go....

Now the WWE products have always been fairly well polished affairs, (save for the RAW atrocities on the XBOX) and I was hoping for the same here, sadly the TNA game (much like the product its based on) shows its not quite ready for Prime time.

I went ahead and jumped right into the career mode right of the bat. It starts off with a narration of a wrestler named Suicide chronicling his rise to the TNA Champion, he was supposed to take a dive in the championship match and didn't so a couple of wrestlers beat the snot out of him and dump him in Mexico, this is where you come in...Basically you create your character and are Suicide reincarnated. The character creation is very basic and nothing compared to the depth offered in the WWE games.

You start off fighting a bunch of nameless wrestlers in Mexico eventually winning you're way into TNA. The story is lackluster at best and is basically just there to progress you through the matches. Speaking of the matches where WWE always has a wealth of modes to choose from in TNA there is really only two types basic match (single and tag) and the Ultimate X match (witch I'll touch on a little later). As for the in ring action again the lack of polish really sticks out here, all the wrestlers basically have the same exact moves and it gets really repetitive after awhile. Also the reversal system is abused by the AI, basically anytime you get close to doing significant damage to the CPU they will start reversing almost everything you attempt. This really sticks out in the Tag Team matches as you can be dominating a match, but then have the AI reverse everything, tag in their fresh partner and suddenly destroy you.

The Ultimate X match could have been the one shining point in the game, as it is one of the things that sets TNA apart from the competition. Sadly its just one more area where the game becomes a letdown. The goal of the match is to grab the big red X hanging in the middle of ropes that crisscross above the ring. Sadly there is really no strategy in the matches, basically get your opponent down once climb up try to grab the X, get attacked, Rinse and Repeat.

Graphics wise the game looks good, but the little details are missing like intro video's on the jumbo screens. Also some of the cutscenes are animated while others are just snapshots, its really weird.

One final note is the roster there are only like 25 wrestlers to choose from, and some of them are very questionable choices, compare this to the WWE games which usually approach 50 or 60 and it once again points to a lackluster effort from the developers.

Overall TNA Impact could have been a good game if they had just taken the time to add the little details that make or break a wrestling game. As it stands TNA is a very poor effort and leaves alot of room for improvement.

OVERALL RECOMMENDATION: AVOID IT

New Review Finally....

So Gamefly finally delivered my game last week and after spending some quality time with DiRT here we go.....

DiRT

DiRT is the fourth game in the Colin Macrae series produced by Codemasters, Now while Codemasters hasn't done much right in video games, this series has always been top notch. The game does a nice job of giving you a rundown of everything you can do the first time you boot it up, I spend all of my time in Career mode which is the bulk of the game. Career mode is set up as a tier system. You start at the bottom tier and as you clear events you unlock more on your tier and eventually the next tier. As you go through events you can buy new cars and will sometimes be forced to because only certain cars can race certain events. The really nice thing about career mode is that you can start of easy and ramp up the difficulty as you get better. Another nice touch is the loading screen you spend a lot of time looking at it but the nice thing is it will give you a rundown of your current stats, such as average finish, longest jump and so on, Its a little touch but its nice to have something engaging to look at while you are waiting for the next event. In addition there is no shortage of information to be had, pressing Y on just about any screen will give you some info about what you are looking at, whether it be the type of even, car or the track itself, its another simple but nice touch that makes this game feel really polished.

Now DiRT is not a standard racer its all about rally racing and there are a few differences in the way rally cars handle as opposed to street racing. The main thing you half to get used to is the looseness of the cars, they really have a tendency to slide on you if your not careful about braking and accelerating properly. Once you get used to it though they really become fun to drive. There are a few different types of races to keep things interesting, and a wealth of different cars. The modes range from straight rally point to point races, to crossover races (you race around a track that crosses paths at the halfway point), to my favorite the Rally Raid which is 6 cars or trucks on the track at once in an off road race. The cars and trucks also came in many forms from standard rally cars to big rigs and each perform like you think they would (the big rigs for instance are slow to get moving and really really loose) it is fun learning how to handle each different type as you come across them.

Now graphically the game is nothing short of amazing, I thought Rallisport Challenge on the original Xbox looked good but this thing blows that out of the water. You can even see individual weeds along the side of the road as you go roaring past. Also the real time damage to your car looks good and behaves like it should, it will even throw mud onto the side of your car as you drive along.

My main gripe with DiRT comes in the repetitiveness, after awhile everything starts to feel the same, sure the cars change but all the events start to feel like the same thing with different pictures after a decent amount of time with the game. Also this type of racing is not for everyone it can be very unforgiving on the higher difficulties and for those reason's my recommendation for DiRT is going to be.........

TRY IT

This is definelty one you want to check out and make sure you like its style before taking the plunge.