Radical Georgia Moderate

I picked up a copy of NCAA Football 2008 for the Xbox 360 on my lunch break. I’ve added my Xbox 360 Gamercard to the sidebar so you can see when I’m online, and shake your head at my lack of achievements. If you have an Xbox 360 and NCAA 2008, look me up. I’m not very good compared to some other people who play on there, so it will probably be a free win for you.

Oh, and you can make your own taunt-o-gram on the NCAA web site. See this one that I made for Jen.

If you guys want to take a break from solving all of America’s foreign policy issues from the last fifty years, here are two things that only some of you are going to think are funny.

First, college football fans shouldn’t miss Georgia Tech coach Chan Gailey’s interview with James Lipton, Inside the Actors Studio fame. A snippet:

JL: We will now move to our quick questions as given by the students. What is your favorite play?

CCG: Run up the middle and then throw the ball out of bounds on two consecutive plays.

Second, here’s a video parody of the Apple ads for those of you keeping up with the progress of the next generation video games systems from Nintendo and Sony:

h/t Macspoofs

The siren’s song of NCAA 2007 for the Xbox 360, which won’t even be released until July, proved to be too tempting for me to resist. When Best Buy sent me an e-mail offering 10 percent off anything ordered online, that was the final straw that bent my will toward the monopolists EA and Microsoft. My Xbox 360 should arrive late this week or early next week. I am weak. I am not sticking to principle here. But, c’mon, this is the first screen grab I saw:

Project Gotham will have to tide me over until I get my NCAA Football fix.

Related, does anyone want to buy a Gamecube with two controllers, two memory cards, and +/- 10 games? I’ll update this post with a full list when I get home tonight, but these are the games I remember off the top of my head:

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
Madden 06
Metroid Prime I and II
NCAA Football 2004
Resident Evil Zero (I’m pretty sure it’s Zero, but need to double check)
Starfox Adventures

Also, I lent Mario Sunshine to my brother. Hopefully he hasn’t sold it. And there’s a third-person shooter I can’t remember the name of. Maybe one or two more.

UPDATE: The action game is Dead to Rights. There’s only one memory card, but there’s also a rare promotional copy of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, which was ported from the Nintendo 64 and given free to people who pre-ordered The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker.

Also, my Gamecube is one of the older ones with the hi-def component output that they quit making at some point, and I have the cable for it, which is also hard to find (I had to order mine from Korea). Here’s a photo of all the schwag:

UPDATE 2: I have an ad on Craigslist now.

I understand that hate is a strong word that should be reserved for Karl Rove and Barbara Boxer, but my hatred has finally gone beyond the realms of this world, and have now journeyed into the digital universe.

From the EA Sports website: I see the exclusive NCAA license, but I don’t see a Gamecube version

In an April post, I wrote about how Electronic Arts secured exclusive licenses to use NFL teams and rosters and NCAA teams, giving them a monopoly on the league-licensed football game market. It appears one of their first acts as a monopolist has been to scrap the Gamecube version of NCAA Football 2006, depriving players who own that console the opportunity to play any NCAA-licensed football game. There was no explanation in the NCAA 2006 press release, and EA’s publicist refused to email me back. You’ll notice the game isn’t on EA’s release schedule. I’ll stress again why this means something to you, the non-gamer, by quoting from my last post on the subject.

The video game industry is a bigger business than movies now, doing $9.9 billion in 2004. Microsoft sold $125 million in Halo 2 copies the first day it was out. Spiderman 2 — which, to date, had the highest-grossing opening weekend of all time — only did $114 million its first weekend.

So, it matters to you because it’s not going to be long before powerhouse publishers like Electronic Arts dip their hands into other forms of entertainment, and push smaller publishers out with their massive bankroll, which will be drastically fattened by what will become their near-monopoly on the football video game market.

EA has demonstrated itself, in a matter of only a few months, to be a poor steward of the NCAA license. More importantly, the company has shown it is willing to abuse its monopolistic position in the marketplace. And that could one day have far-reaching implications on media you view and listen to. Already, EA’s decision will push sports gamers further from the Gamecube platform, and Nintendo is powerless to call upon any company (including itself) to fill the void because of EA’s sole ownership of the license. That’s not right.

this is a great computer game - i think the latest version out is IV, but its great - its like dugeons and dragons except on a computer. its also very similar this other computer game called civilization.
anyway, its great for role-playing and the castles have different themes like hell, druids, wizards, ghosts, et al.

also, i don’t have sims 2 yet, but its supposedly amazing

Here’s another article that gives me the willies. Electronic Arts had (unbeknownst to me) already acquired exclusive rights from the NFL and Arena football leagues to produce games using league team names and player likenesses for video game consoles and computers. Now, they’ve also gained the same rights from the NCAA for football games — for six years. So, when you buy that shiny new XBox 2 or Playstation 3 or Nintendo whatever-they’re-going-to-call-it, if you want any kind of football game with real teams and players (which I suspect outsell titles with names like Nintendo Playaction Football, considering those games have been produced infrequently in recent years), EA will be the only game in town. No more ESPN NFL 2K5. No more NFL Blitz. No more NFL Gameday. No more NFL Quarterback Club. There will only be John Madden football.

“But I don’t play video games. Why does this matter to me?” you ask…

Logitech rules for making its stuff Mac-compatible. Now I can play my Nintendo, Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis ROMs from 30 feet away.

I really didn’t mean to write two posts related to video games today, but you have got to check this thing out. Definitely a “why didn’t I think of that?” moment.

It’s a pad where you can arrange the keys any way you like on the board, and it supposedly works really well. Read about it at Tom’s Hardware.

When did the AJC start this section (login)? I’ve read occasional mention of video games under the all-encompassing guise of “technology,” but this [game on] section (my God! lowercase letters! how scandalous, edgy and hip!) appears to be a section dedicated to the narrow purpose of video game news and reviews. Do they appear in the print edition? What content will the paper publish to distinguish its content from the heavily-saturated video game magazine market? The writer of the review I’ve linked to has an ajc.com email address, so I would be led to assume this was a local editorial decision and not something handed down from the behemoth Cox, though that’s only speculation. Do they plan to build a pseudo-wire service within Cox for game reviews? Inquiring minds would like to know the reasoning behind this strategy.