Early Reports on Madden

So you have pre-ordered the game and waiting until 12:01 to get it. Here’s the early key thoughts on Madden.

• Franchise has the same leftover issues. Some impressions note key free agents (Manning) are not being signed by anyone.
• CPU running game needs help. Without CPU sliders this might needs a roster update to address the problems.
• Franchise draft logic has not improved.
• Defenders still fall down a bit too much on the pass rush but you sacks are possible.
• Robo-QBs not as bad as NCAA.
• Atmosphere drastically improved from the stale 08.
• The engine is more refined than the NCAA 09 engine. The wide-openess of NCAA 09 is not seen in Madden.

FIFA 09 Soccer Video Thoughts

Here are two videos showing off head-to-head play in FIFA 09. From fifasoccerblog.com

I’m impressed with a few things:

• Ball looks livelier and with realistic pace. Granted it’s hard to tell if the guys playing this aren’t that good.
• Player physics looks improved but still not as organic as I would hope. I saw a few pancakes when a dribbler ran into a defender. I was hoping for more jostling and less fall-down tackles but it does look improved.
• Smoother control.
• Passing accuracy might be a problem. I didn’t see a lot of offline passes.

Back Up (No throw-away articles)

I stopped writing in January because I thought a few sites were taking initiative in writing clever, thought-provoking articles.

As we enter another football season, and reading a few of the features on other sites, I think they rarely post good articles and analysis for sports gamers.

So as I move forward, the goal here is to focus on good articles around the net, and in-depth analysis for the sports gaming audience.

Really Slow and Other Interesting Things

As you can tell by the less frequent posts, there’s just little out there in terms of sports gaming news.

In the void, there are tons of stuff in you like electronics coming out of CES. Engadget at CES.

NFL Street comes out this week. Which I’ll look at later this year as a rental.

In the world of politics, WoW’ers have formed an online march for Ron Paul. See Game Politics. Put this in the list of things, the founding fathers would have never envisioned.

Kotaku has done a piece, on the Wii tackling the grey (Ebay) market.

As of this writing I cannot say if this was a calculated move by Nintendo to thwart the profit-hungry eBay grey market or simply a happy side-effect of a last-ditch effort to save face in the eyes of consumers worrying about where the product they wanted to purchase was, but Reggie’s press conference and the subsequent console flood neatly nipped in the bud what could have been a terribly expensive Christmas for families looking for a little motion-controlled joy. Whatever the case may be, the end result is a small victory for the hardworking folks out there more worried about the smiles on their children’s face than the thickness of their wallet.

The million dollar question is when will we see the Wii regularly on the store selves? And could it be another year of Wii shortages?

Happy New Year

I took a little longer than expected hiatus from SC but I’m back to blogging today.

Happy New Year everybody.

Irony of Gamefly

So two of my 360’s go done over the holiday period. I only have two because, when my first 360 went down they weren’t fixing them at no cost.

Guess what appears as sent…College Hoops 2k8. Fantastic. I guess I’ll get to play that sometime in March. That sounds about right.

Merry Christmas

Sensible Coasters will return on the 26th.

Happy Christmas to everyone.

Sensible Coasters

Welcome to Sensible Coasters!

Over the last few years there have been some really great sites and blogs that covered sports gaming. But their have been a huge vacuum of any sort of critique on those sites, reviews, so-called journalists and the sports game industry.

This is a new endeavor and hope you will enjoy it.