I just turned off Saving Private Ryan, which is on TNTHD right now, to play Call of Duty 3. It occurred to me as I did it that I was doing so in part because the movie was getting to the part I dislike, where Upham has his cowardly moment. So, I go from a movie that shows one of the challenges of war, to a game where war is no challenge (”Respawn already!”). Bravery, honor, and valor have no equivalent in video game war.

I don’t really have any deep insight here, just saying I found the transition interesting.

This addresses the major issues I had with the game, based on the announced fixes.

I’ve been singing the praises of the XBox360 for some time now. Between Call of Duty 3, Gears Of War, and Madden, I’ve seen the best that the console has to offer for graphics and gameplay. Hooked up to a 1080p LCD TV, this setup looks beautiful. I even began to believe that maybe Microsoft could actually make a good product.

Playing with these games on XBox Live, however, has reminded my why I hate Microsoft products. Madden was relatively smooth and I have few complaints there. It’s a simple online experience, after all, just 1 versus 1 and basic voice communication. Gears and COD3 have been a nightmare by comparison.

The fact that both games suffer from similar troubles makes be believe that the issue is Live, not the games per se. Both games would’ve benefited from a lot more testing of their online experience, no doubt, but the biggest issues have come up with creating or joining games. All of this functionality relies on XBox Live, and in both cases it sucks.

Gears has specific issues finding and joining games. Every time you attempt to join a game that’s close to full, you have at least a 50% chance of getting an error back from the game. The error is cryptic (connection to host lost), but I think it’s the result of what should be an expected and handled error, the game filled up before you got in. It happens often enough that it takes several attempts to actually launch a game.

There are also several gameplay bugs that are pretty annoying. Chainsaw someone and try to move at the same time and you’ll get frozen to the spot until someone kills you. Join a ranked or player match last and sometimes your voice communications won’t work (you’ll be able to hear everyone else, but they won’t be able to hear you). Join a player match after other people who have been through one round already and you won’t be able to hear or talk to them. Those are the most egregious bugs I’ve seen in a console game.

COD3 is even worse. The game requires the most specific router setup possible with either UPnP on and configured correctly on the router (not the case on my newish Linksys router) or port forwarding configured for the “XBox Live” ports (88 UDP and 3074 UDP & TCP incidentally). Without the proper network setup, it’s more or less impossible to join player matches and very difficult to join ranked matches. The game is pretty much unplayable online in this state.

After spending some time investigating all of this, I was able to get online. It got better, but still was and is a horrible experience. It takes upwards of 10 minutes to successfully join a ranked game (after about 2-5 tries). Joining player matches has the same problem as Gears. Overall, the experience is painful to the point that people who otherwise love the game are complaining about it.

Then there are the gameplay bugs. Often times, joining a game in the Abbaye map will put you in an impossible position. I’ve been stuck so that map is offset (I think I’m at one point on the map, but everyone else sees me at a different point), or I get dropped through the floor of the map and continue free falling while everyone is playing miles above me. While it’s cool to be stuck in this weird, cloud filled globe, I want to play the goddamn game. Especially after waiting 10 minutes and trying over and over again to join it in the first place!

The kicker in all of this is that both of these games have been patched once already!

While consoles have generally focused on the single-player or single-console experience, all of the next gen consoles are emphasizing their connected functionality. XBox 360, for example, allows you to download videos, movies, etc. onto your XBox via XBox Live. The online experience is part of the next gen feature set. That’s why I’m just amazed at how bad these games are so far. If Microsoft wants to keep their momentum, they need to fix these things. PS3s seem to be available everywhere now and Christmas is past, so they should be battling on equal footing. The online experiences need to be better if they expect people to use even more services from Xbox Live.

The graphics on Gears of War look pretty amazing already, but these two trailers for Halo 3 are incredible, if they’re what the graphics from the game engine will look like. The lighting is impressive. We’re not that far away from video games looking like Hollywood features. The sound is already there (5.1+ surround). The video is so close now. Check out these two clips. Even with the horrible Flash video encoding that YouTube uses, these look good:

That was the trailer. Here is the TV spot I found:

1080p, solid lighting and sound… just a few more polygons to smooth out and chisel out human features and we’re there. The metal uniform on the Halo characters looks amazing already.

It’s been reported to death if you follow the gaming world, but if you haven’t seen this, watch this video for Call Of Duty 3 for the Nintendo Wii. The controller concept is ingenious, though I worry about how tired gamers will be after a few hours of gaming.

The new TV commercial is pretty good, too. You can watch it here

I’m home today sitting in front of the newest addition to the toy family, a 40″ Samsung LCD HDTV that does 1080p. Now, I still haven’t found a source that can push the TV at 1080p, but this TV is as future-proof as I can get right now. Even though this TV isn’t a 50+ inch behemoth like my mom’s TV, it still commands the room it’s in.

I haven’t really used the TV enough to do a full review, but so far it’s been great. The TV is hooked up via a set-top box to Comcast’s HD Cable service, an XBox 360, and my old Series2 Tivo. So far, I’m impressed with the HD sources and the Tivo looks as you might expect an SD source to look on a TV like this.

The XBox 360 is a surprisingly good upconverting DVD player. I thought it played HD-DVD disks, but that was a mistake (btw, anyone want an HD-DVD copy of Sky Captain?). HD-DVD capability is coming this year, so maybe I’ll get a chance to try it out. I’m watching Mr. & Mrs. Smith which looks really good.

A quick note on the XBox 360: I think Microsoft may have actually built a good product here. This might be the first one since they rolled out Windows 95. I’ve played Madden in HD on this TV at 1080i and it looks gorgeous. The online play looks pretty cool, and the always on nature of XBox Live seems like a really good idea.

I’ll write more about these things later, but I need to get back to work now. The bottom line right now is that I’m really happy, especially considering that I got the TV, XBox 360, Madden 07, and extra controller from Best Buy for right about $3100 and zero interest financing for 24 months. The price on the TV was $2559 after the discounts for the XBox 360 bundle deal, Comcast HD discount, and the discount I found on BestBuy.com. Not a bad deal all around.

• Samsung’s site for the LN-S4095D.

Full Tilt has a set of pros that play exclusively on their site. Chris “Jesus” Ferguson is one of those guys. Today, he was in a 1800-person freeroll tournament that’s a satellite to a large tournament on Saturday. I was just playing because it’s free and because, well, playing in tournaments is fun. Anyway, I was looking around at the other tables and saw this:

I’m number 9 on the right, circled. Seriously, this will never happen with actual money on the line.

Update: Into round two this weekend. Not sure how I’m going to pull that off during Heidi’s shower…

Someone just passed on that Full Tilt Poker now has a native Mac client for their poker games. Pretty sweet. Finally, someone sets one up. No more ugly Java apps (not that I play online much).

the system I’m envisioning would look like so:

Team A, B, and C are interested in player X.
A has 12 cap points remaining
B has 10 cap points remaining
C has 50 cap points remaining

Let’s say that player X is Samkin Gado this past week and all three teams bid “max points” in the style of free agency I proposed. The way this would work is that Gado would go to team C for 13 points. Everyone bids as much as they can until they run out or win. Very simple, right?

Let’s say player X is Wilford and A and C bid 10 points and B bids 7 points, the tie between A and C is resolved using the waiver order.

That’s pretty much the entirety of how complex this proposal is. Let’s take an example sent in an email to me (interpreting what “a max bid up to 22″ means under the current rules):

Side note: In regards to Paul’s statement… yes, he is bidding 22 points regardless of how he writes his statement… the 22 is the bid.Depending on who else bids… if no one does, he pays 1 point… if another person with a lower priority number bids 10, he pays 22…. if a person with a higher priority number bids 10, he pays 11…. as it is stipulated in the rules….. it does not mean “+1″ up to 22 points.

That’s pretty complicated, IMHO, and too complicated. Why is it +1 in some cases and the full bid in other cases? It should either be blind bid or always +1, that’s what I was proposing.

So, in all cases, if the owner with the second place bid offers 10, the winner gets it for 11. The phrase max bid would always mean the maximum I can bid before I run out or I win.

If you’ve ever bid on ebay, you know how they do their blind bids. You bid a number, but only pay what it takes to actually win the player.

To process the free agent requests, you simply take all the bids on a particular player, order by bid (ties resolved by waiver order) and then take the bid in second place and charge the winning owner that bid +1.

We’ve been having discussions in our fantasy football league about how to do free agency in our league. To understand the background of the debate, you need to know a few things about our league. We play fantasy football with a salary cap system that uses an auction draft to determine initial market values and a nightly blind auction system for free agency. The rules for this free agency system are specified as so in our rulebook:

B) Free agents may be acquired between 9:00am Tuesday and 8:00pm on Friday. The Waiver period ends each day at 8:00pm.

C) Dead Weight Cap Hit. When a player is dropped from a roster 25% of their value (drop the decimal point) and carried as cap value. Dead cap space will be halved each week (drop the decimal point). Dead cap space means you have you have that many points less then 150 to spend on any other player.

D) There is no Dead Weight Cap Hit for any NFL player placed on IR and lost for the season.

E) Waiver System. Teams will be given a waiver number from 1 to 12, 1 being the best and 12 being the worst. Original numbers are assigned after the first week of play. The team with the lowest point total will be assigned the first number and the team with the most points will be assigned the twelfth number. Owners can call or email the Commissioner and state which free agents they are interested in acquiring. Along with that request, owners will submit a maximum point bid for the player they want to select. The owner must state the name of the free agent, maximum amount they are willing to spend on the player, and the player being released from the roster. All information must be supplied or the bid will be considered invalid. The owner with the lowest number (closest to one) would have first crack at the player but if an owner with a higher waiver priority number has a higher maximum bid for the player, that owner would jump over the owner with the lower waiver priority number and have to spend their maximum bid on the NFL player. The owner with the lowest waiver priority number (closest to one) will only be charged one point over the next highest bidder for the player if they supply the highest bid. If only one owner bids on an NFL player, the cost of the NFL player will be one point. Once a player has been selected, the owner will move to the number twelve on the waiver priority list.

F) The Free Agent Period ends the Friday night before Week 14.

I’m proposing a rule change to the section E, specifically pertaining to the part I’ve bolded above. In particular, I’m asking to change the bidding system to one where instead of the winning bidder getting charged their max bid for a player, they will only get charged the second-highest bid plus 1 point. I just sent a mail to the list that explained my logic thusly:

So… the question will come down to whether we like this type of Free Agency or not. I was going to propose this in the offseason as a rule change/clarification, but here it is now.

I’m clearly in favor of what I’m calling the “Ebay style” free agency, where the winning bid is the second-highest bid plus 1 point (or in the case of ties, the high bid with the highest waiver priority).

The system we have now I’ve dubbed “Rosenhaus” Free Agency, where the free agency process simulates closely what happens in the real NFL where agents are (supposed to be) the only ones that know the competing bids coming up for their player.

I prefer the Ebay style for two reasons:

1. it’s the most beneficial to the owners both in terms of time and also cap space (lowers the research demands, makes it easier to get a keeper bargain)
2. We’re not dealing with real players and agents. The goal is to make a competitive game. If you’ve managed your cap space effectively, we should do the most we can to allow you to use it. You shouldn’t miss out on a player because there’s no agent saying, “I just got a better offer, do you want to counter?” for one or two points.

I have several other reasons, but those are the two most important ones to me.

I know there are former NERFL players that read this along with some pretty avid fantasy players, so I thought I would open up the discussion to the wider audience. Feel free to leave comments, disagreements, rants, whatever on this topic. I’m curious what folks will say.

I’d also like to mention that this is probably the easiest unofficial way to get ideas or feature suggestions to the ESPN.com League Manager team. While this site is independent of ESPN.com, some of those aforementioned readers are on the LM team.

My lunchtime distraction: Letters 2, a very cool Flash based game. Check it out.

(via Suw Charman)

(Disclaimer: the comments here are my own and do not reflect the views of ESPN, ESPN.com or Disney)

One more quick note before I run out to do all the yard work I’m avoiding. Most of you know that EA signed an exclusive deal with the NFL, making Madden the only NFL football video game on the market this year. You’ll also remember how I feel about it.

Well, the reviews of Madden 06 are in and they’re not good at all. This is a game that routinely garners rave ratings for previous editions. I’m an NFL 2K fan, so I don’t know if I’m going to get this game anyway, but regular, hardcore Madden fans in my office have already complained to me about the new quarterback features and other lackluster features. Of course, with no competition, gamers have no where to go and gamers like me might just skip getting an NFL game this year anyway. Of course, the price is back at $39.99 after they lowered prices in the face of competition from the 2K series (which was only $19.99 last year). In fairness, the game has generally been over $49 in previous years, so maybe they didn’t jack em up all the way.

I wish there was a way to explain to the NFL that the short term cash from these exclusive deals hurts them in the long run. Fewer fans play these games and fewer fans have a reason to watch. We all come at sports from different places. Some of us start watching because a buddy roped us into a fantasy league. Others really get into the strategy of the game because we started playing video games. All of these things give us different reasons to watch football. The more places people can do one of these ‘on-ramp’ activities, the more people watch the NFL games, get into their local teams, and become great fans (who spend). These exclusive deals restrict fans’ access to the game which just will hurt the game in the long run.

Just my $.02.

I really do

Just got an email from zipcar:

We’re in the process of equipping ALL Zipcars with XM Satellite Radio. XM is America’s numero uno satellite radio provider with over 150 digital channels - 100% commercial-free music, over 30 channels of news, sports, talk and entertainment, over 20 dedicated channels of XM Instant Traffic & Weather, and the deepest play list in the industry! And it will cost ya nothing to use. Yup, it’s 100% free.

Now you’ll be able to take your favorite Zipcar out for a spin and listen to great tunes or talk along the way. Just think, no more lugging around CDs or remembering to bring your iPod. It’ll take us a few months to equip the entire fleet. So, your reservation confirmation will let you know if your Zipcar has it. Look for the first Zipcars equipped with XM to hit the streets this week.

Swwweeeeeeeetttttt!!!!!!!!!! (to quote Napolean Dynomite)

Jealous sujal??