The Superbus’s Thoughtpad

It seems that ever since Wayne Gretzky retired, anytime hockey’s been in the news, it’s never been a good thing. In 2000, Marty McSorely bashed Donald Brashear in the head, ending and subsequently obscuring a good career. In 2004, Todd Bertuzzi of the Canucks blind-sided Colorado’s Steve Moore, defining Bertuzzi, leading to talking heads calling the NHL a goon’s league and ending Moore’s career. The NHL then locked out it’s players for the entire 2005 season, ending hockey as a major sport in all of America outside of Michigan and Massachusetts and turning the NHL into a running joke for anyone looking for a cheap, easy target. Most recently, the NHL’s biggest fight has been to keep a rich, powerful and dedicated man with an intention to bring hockey to a bustling hockey market OUT of it’s league, fighting any and all attempts by Jim Balsillie to purchase an NHL team and move them to Hamilton, ON while saying with a straight face “we believe hockey belongs in Phoenix, AZ”.¹ This doesn’t take into account problems leagues outside the NHL have had, such as the major brawl during a 2008 QMJHL game where backup goaltender Jonathan Roy – son of NHL legend Patrick – beat up another goaltender to the point where the case is STILL moving through the legal system in Quebec. Even when good things happen, it’s usually hard to watch them because NBC insists on all weekend playoff games being played at 3PM, including one time where a game was pre-empted in favour of a horse race.

The latest strike against hockey as a sport is a rash of hits to the head, most of which have left players injured. The most recent hit was on Chris Drury of the New York Rangers by Calgary’s Curtis Glencross, which knocked Drury out of a game last Saturday and cost Glencross three games in suspensions. The most severe of the year, however, was the hit by Erie Otters player Michael Liambas on Kitchener Rangers player Ben Fanelli that you can see in the above Youtube clip. The hit fractured Fanelli’s skull, which could end his hockey career, and drew a match penalty for boarding and a suspension for the remainder of this season plus playoffs for Liambas; considering Liambas is an overage junior player with thirteen points in 124 games over four seasons, the suspension effectively ends his career as well, for anything above beer leagues. This hit – and the rash of other high hits that we’ve seen recently over the past few years – have started a call for retribution by both casual fans and talking heads. We need to suspend high hits! Five games! Ten games! Fuck it, shoot them at dawn! Hits that over the years have been greeted by oohs and aahs on Sportscentre are all of a sudden the cause celebre of people that are going to refine hockey to their liking, usually by just suspending anyone that gets in the way.

Just like with the incidents I mentioned in my first two paragraphs, the people commenting on them – from the bombastic Canadian Press to the completely ignorant American press – don’t know what they’re talking about. This issue goes deeper than just a few high hits. A complete examination as to what a body check is needs to be initiated, concluded and acted upon. It’s not going to be easy, it’s going to take years, and goes way beyond idiotic mandatory suspensions of players for hits that don’t take context into account. Read more…

Academy of Champions Soccer
Developer: Ubisoft Vancouver
Publisher: Ubisoft
Genre: Arcade Sports
Release Date: 11/4/2009

Being born and bred in North America makes being a football fan no different for me than it is for anyone in a more traditional football markets like everywhere else in the world except North America: I’m a bit of a football elitist. You can usually tell who the snobs are if you ask them if they watch Major League Soccer; a more casual fan probably does, whereas someone like me says something along the lines of “psh, Major League Soccer is the proverbial minor leagues. REAL fans import Setanta on DirecTV so they can watch Portsmouth and Wigan battle to a 0-0 draw in the Premier League!”. For those wondering, considering how much the Setanta package costs, that’s not only a bore draw, it’s a very expensive one at that. But at least I’m a “real” football fan! Right? … Right?

We’re like this with video games, too. It took people like me a long time to come around on the FIFA series, specifically because it’s not Pro Evolution; hell, Mohammad Al-Sadoon STILL hasn’t come around yet, specifically because it’s Pro Evolution. Imagine this mentality, then imagine being told “you’re being drafted into Academy of Champions Soccer because you’re the only North American that knows football. I literally laughed out loud. Not only because I was getting a football game geared towards kids – me, an “elite” football fan! – but also one that was geared towards kids while proclaiming the name recognition of Mia Hamm and Pelé himself. This would be fine, if not for the fact that Mia Hamm hasn’t been a relevant football personality in almost six years, or the fact that Pelé hasn’t been a relevant footballer since before I was born – for the record, that’s 1980 – and is as known in more cynical circles for being willing to do almost anything for money at this point as he was for his football. Basing a game around kids on two people that most kids have likely barely heard of seemed like a reach for me.

Needless to say, I had low hopes going into my initial playing of Academy of Champions Soccer (henceforth known simply as AOC).

Would my initial fears be born true, or would I come around on AOC the way I came around and eventually started supporting MLS side Seattle Sounders? Read more…

Space Invaders Extreme 2
Developer: Project Just
Publisher: Taito/Square Enix
Genre: Arcade Shooter
Release Date: March 26, 2009 (JP)/October 20, 2009 (US)

I won’t lie: I freaking loved Space Invaders Extreme, as did fellow colleague Mark B. It was my nominee for DS game of the Year for 2008, and shocked the hell out of me considering the fact that Taito was bought out by Square-Enix prior to releasing that game; while I hadn’t trusted Taito for awhile, I trust Squeenix about as far as I can throw your average Kingdom Hearts fanfiction writer. Since then, Taito’s been on an absolute roll, pumping out quality game after quality game after quality game; unless you really don’t like Rainbow Islands, they can do no wrong at this point.

I loved Space Invaders Extreme so much, that I didn’t even wait for the game to be released in America; I imported the Japanese game, at a cost of almost $50. Who cares if the American version would eventually come out, likely at the same $20 price point that I lauded the original for so highly? It came out in March, and the US version just came out in October; I didn’t want to wait that long. I happily played it, and didn’t review it only because of a time crunch on my part. However, we got word that we got the US version of Space Invaders Extreme 2 from Taito (yes, we got it free; happy, FCC?), and that it was ready to be distributed for review. I was able to tell Lucard, happily, not to bother; I could whip up a review within days, likely while the new version was still in the mail. Therefore, my fiancée gets a new, free game to play, I get to write up a game I wanted to write up in April, and Taito gets a review from someone who did the first game, and was therefore an expert on it. Everyone wins! Due to that fact, please note that this is technically a review of the Japanese game; on the other hand, note that there is literally no difference between the Japanese, European and American versions; they’re all the same.

So, with me being an unabashed fanboy of the series, did I think SIE2 lived up to it’s predecessor? Read more…

Need for Speed: Shift
Developer: Slightly Mad Studios
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Genre: Realistic Driving Simluator
Release Date: September 15, 2009

I went and previwed Need for Speed: Shift back in August when they had it for display at a pre-release event that showcased a lot of glitz and glamour, sometimes overshadowing the game they were trying to show off. However, as a true gaming journalist, and with the help of my beautiful, intelligent and borderline domestically abusive girlfriend Aileen, I was able to avoid the boobs around me and focus on the game, which I liked a lot. However, finances are finances, and the economy does stink, so when it came time for September 15th to roll around, I decided to pick up only one game – NHL ‘10 – and considering the fact that I called it the “greatest sports game ever”, one would be safe in assuming that it was enough to sate my desire for a new game.

Then, low and behold, Electronic Arts sent me a gift: a message from Alex, saying “you’re getting Need for Speed: Shift to review”. Oh boy! It’s like Christmas in October! Who cares if the game came in a couple weeks after it came out? I liked the little bit I was able to play and looked forward to giving it a full once-over.

However, there’s one bad part about reviewing video games for a job: deadlines. It’s not all rainbows and teddy-bears; we have a deadline to keep when we take games from companies to review, and unfortunately, I’ll be turning this one in massively, almost embarrassingly late. This is not because I lorded over the game, deciding not to play it, or because I disliked it to the point where I didn’t want to do it; in fact, I’ll make the rest of this review anti-climatic and state I do like the game a lot. The problem is that there’s a lot to do, a lot to unlock, and a lot of things that have to be done before someone with any bit of journalistic integrity can put a score on a game. Furthermore, it requires a lot of driving skill – something I have more of than Aileen, but not in abundance – to get far in this game, which took even longer. Have faith that I was able to play long enough to determine that NFS: Shift is the best Need for Speed game I’ve ever seen, and can at least compete with the likes of Forza Motorsport and Gran Turismo in the realistic driving simulation genre, and determine it accurately with hours of play time. Even if Alex is annoyed at my atrocious deadline management. Read more…

I have a dirty secret to announce to my readers: I was once a Yankee fan.

It started when I was very little. My grandmother raised me into it, having me either listen to games on WCBS radio – something she had playing 24/7 until the day she died in 2003 – or watch them on WPIX, channel 11 out of New York. Younger fans don’t really understand this in the days of DirecTV, massive TV contracts, MLB.tv and the Extra Innings package, but in the 80s, most games were available on free TV, back in the days when you only had regular channels and cable TV, the latter of which was pricey and had relatively few channels. Think of it as the premium package, if you will. WPIX had the dual benefit of being free, and having Phil Rizzuto as the play-by-play announcer, something he was so beloved for doing that it arguably got him into the Hall of Fame as a player. Combine my constant exposure to the Yankees, the fact that the majority of my friends were Yankee fans, and the fact that the rival Mets and Red Sox were all primarily on cable stations (the Mets were on Sportschannel, while the Red Sox spent their time bouncing back and forth between NESN primarily and WSBK sometimes), and it was a foregone conclusion that I would become a Yankee fan. Read more…

Last night, Alex Rodriguez continued what has been – for two games – a torrid playoff series against the Twins. In his first game, he had a hit that effectively busted open a 7-2 win. However, that paled compared to his second game, in which he hit a two out RBI single in the 6th inning to tie it up, then all but re-enacted the climatic scene of Monkey Shines with the chimp that’s been living on his back with a game tying, two run home-run in the ninth inning off of a potentially Hall of Fame closer to tie the game 3-3, just long enough for Mark Texiera to win it in the 11th. This brought the series to 2-0, helped Yankees fans celebrate their birthright, and spared everyone the humiliation of actually losing one baseball game to the five-time AL Central champion in eight years lowly Minnesota Twins. Considering Rodriguez’s playoff history, this was a tremendous – and welcome – change of pace.

Since then, the response has been predictable. The media have ridden his coattails and are loudly exclaiming that A-Rod is God, which is fine, because the media’s job is to find something small to talk about, blow it up, and watch the hit counts and advertising revenue come roaring in. Hyperbole is their whole purpose in life, and if the Canadian Press simultaneously asking if Jarome Iginla was ready to be retired to stud after not scoring in his first two (2) NHL games is any indication, they’re good at it. Therefore, we’ll let them slide.

Yankee fans are a bit more baffling to me. What’s confusing in my mind is that THEY are celebrating Rodriguez as the second coming of Jesus himself after this. “A-ROD! WOO-HOO! YEAH, THAT’S OUR BOY!”. This is classic Short Attention Span Theatre at it’s finest. For years, Yankee fans ignored the wonderous things he was doing in the regular season because he didn’t have a proven track record in October. Their reasoning was that the only games that mattered were in the Playoffs, and if you didn’t win the trophy at the end, the entire season and everyone involved with it (except Derek Jeter, who is not only all but exempt from criticism but has actually earned that right) was an abject failure. This is something ingrained in Yankee fans by their domineering – and overrated – owner, George Steinbrenner, a man so shameful that he once was banned from baseball for having a mobster dig up unflattering information on his star player. Naturally, most Yankee fans you see nowadays conveniently forget the Melido Perez and Kevin Mass era, but hey, they hold their team to an absolutely unrealistic, asinine standard, that’s their business. Read more…

Bubble Bobble Neo!
Developer: Taito
Publisher: Taito
Genre: Action Platformer
Release Date: 9/16/2009

Whenever GameFAQs or Gamespot do one of their best whatever polls – be it character, game, what have you – I generally am ambivalent. Fanbrats are a noisy, annoying spectacle on normal days, and when you put fanbrats of one colour against fanbrats of another colour, the resulting wank can be heard for miles. However, the past couple years have given me a small semblance of enjoyment, as the results of recent polls have been skewed somewhat. One of the character battles was won by the L block from Tetris, and I was only alerted to the character battle over at Gamespot because someone linked on a forum that everyone on the forum *had* to go over and vote in one particular battle. In the first round, in a match that generated ten times more votes than the others in some cases, the first “seed” – Master Chief from Halo – was losing comfortably to Bub and Bob, a couple of dinosaurs from a game that was last truly relevant when I was in the third grade. The two humans-turned-dinosaur, with some generous help from the /v/ section of 4chan, not only finished off Master Chief, but also took out Sonic the Hedgehog, and would have taken out Samus if Gamespot’s Keystone Cops didn’t finally say “hey, we think someone’s stuffing the ballot box”. You really think so, doctor?

What was most impressive about this was not so much the fact that Bub and Bob took out both this generation’s #1 marketing vessel and the hero to furries worldwide in a contest, but the comments from gamers who either didn’t like Bub and Bob, or more likely are too young to even have played their games. They didn’t take this poll upset for what it was – a combination of poll-rigging and rooting for the underdog – they took it as a personal affront to them and gaming as a whole. The latter comments were the most fun to read, as the “hardcore” gamers came out to say things like this, something that I am barely paraphrasing because I do not have the original in front of me: “I cannot believe that these two are beating a real character from a real video game like Master Chief. Halo is realistic and deep, and by voting for the other two, people are saying they hate good video games”.

I laugh at those comments because these “hardcore” gamers don’t have a clue of what they’re talking about. Despite – or maybe because of – the fact that the original Bubble Bobble came out before most of these “hardcore” gamers were born, it was legit. Bubble Bobble was an amazing game with near-endless replayability due to having a hundred stages, many of which were very hard. Anyone saying Bubble Bobble – or even Bust-A-Move – weren’t real games is fooling themselves and confusing blood and violence with realism. Then again, that’s basically the modern “hardcore” gamer in a nutshell.

Thankfully, the angry fourteen year olds crying on message boards worldwide finally have the chance for an education with the release of Bubble Bobble Neo! for the XBox Live Arcade. At the expense of just $10, and likely in a darkened room with the internet disconnected so that m@sterch1effan9324179156 doesn’t notice, he can see why this game was such a big deal back in the 80s. As for the people of my generation, the remake comes with questions, the primary one being simple: does Bubble Bobble Neo! live up to the source material? Read more…

Last year, I did not do a preview piece – at least one I can find – for the NHL season, but I said the same thing in the beginning of the season that I did in the playoffs: the San Jose Sharks were too strong, they were going to win the Cup, and we would finally see validation for Joe Thornton, who my friend Terrell described once as a “fucking faggot” due to his postseason troubles.

Cue the playoffs, and the Sharks getting blown out of the water by the eighth seeded Anaheim Ducks. Add that to the fact that my other Stanley Cup pick – the New Jersey Devils – got taken out by the Whalers when the greatest goaltender of all time gave up two soft goals in a ninety second span, and any of my readers would be forgiven at taking any predictions of mine with a humongous grain of salt.

However, if I’ve learned one lesson – other than the fact that preseason predictions are usually daft – it’s this: never trust the San Jose Sharks, Joe Thornton, or Patrick Marleau. With that in mind, I decided to handicap each conference, top to bottom, and make a preliminary Finals pick. Knowing my luck, one of my Finals picks won’t even make the playoffs while TSN’s prediction monkey throws some poo at me. Read more…

Gran Turismo
Developer: Polyphony Digital
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment
Genre: Realistic Driving Simulation
Release Date: 10/1/2009

In a podcast I recently did for SFX 360, there was discussion about Gran Turismo 5. I joked that I’d have to see it to believe it, and compared it to Duke Nukem Forever due to the amount of delays the game has seen over the years (Author’s Note: After writing this line, it was announced at the Tokyo Game Show that GT5 would be delayed until March 31st in Japan). Little did I remember at that time that Gran Turismo was announced for the PSP when the system was announced back in 2004. Of course, as Sony and Polyphony are known to do with their flagship series, delay after delay pushed the game back and almost out of our consciousness. Finally, with the release of Gran Turismo 5 for the PS3 at least on the horizon, Gran Turismo for the PSP is ready to drop, five and a half years and four PSP Models later, as a launch title for the PSP Go. Better late than never, I guess.

So, the obvious question: after five and a half years of development… is it worth the wait, and $40 of a gamer’s budget? Read more…

NHL ‘10
Developer: EA Canada
Publisher: EA Sports
Genre: Realistic Sports Game
Release Date: 9/15/2009

Every year, starting in July and ending in October, is the big sports game rush. For most so-called “hardcore” gamers, this is something they pooh-pooh while wearing a beret coloured like Mario’s hat and whistling on a flute shaped like the one in the original Legend of Zelda. For a sports freak like me, it’s basically my yearly holiday season. Unlike Christmas – or even eight-day long Hannukah – my holiday season lasts almost three good months. The season starts slowly, with NCAA Football, NASCAR and Tiger Woods in July, building up to what is essentially the Christmas of our little holiday, the Madden release which is celebrated by all, then heads into the NHL ‘10 release – our Boxing Day – and ends with the fortuitous releases of the NBA games. If you want to extend even farther, call the FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer releases our Chinese New Year.

Unsurprising to those that know me, I get more excited for Boxing Day than Christmas, in both literal and figurative ways. Ever since the original NHLPA Hockey ‘93 established the trend of yearly releases, I’ve had to have a new hockey game every year. Though it’s mostly been EA’s NHL franchise, it hasn’t been an exclusive marriage; EA’s been good enough to me to let me have one-year stands with games like Faceoff, Powerplay, Fox NHL Championship Hockey, Breakaway and NHL 2K, knowing that at the end of the night, I was coming home to it and our comfortable understanding. It’s hard to believe that this is my eighteenth year with the NHL/NHLPA franchise, having seen the highs (NHL ‘94, NHL ‘04, NHL ‘08) and the lows (NHL ‘96, NHL 2000, NHL 2005) of what is the most transcendent sports game franchise in history not named Madden. On Tuesday, like clockwork, a new NHL season brought us a new NHL game, NHL ‘10. Read more…