The Others

Lots of good writing from other people today (like that's anything new).

First off, Kieron Gillen has an article in The Escapist about Guitar Hero, and he does an excellent job of capturing the sheer giddiness of the game.

That's right--I used the word "giddy." I have never used that word in my entire life, and am highly unlikely to ever use it again, but in the case of Guitar Hero, it's entirely appropriate.

Here's Kieron's lead:
You hit an unexpected realization: Boston was probably one of the top ten videogame level designers of all time.

Here's the link to the full article:
Guitar Hero.

Second, there are some excellent posts over at The Blog for the Sportsgamer about MLB2k6, including a link to Bill Abner's review over at Gameshark. As bad as this game is (and it's bad, believe me), a new, crippling bug has popped up. Some people are having the season schedule truncated to 10 FREAKING GAMES after the first season in Career or GM mode. Here's Bill's summary of the game from the blog post:
So, to recap, we have a game with:

• A lot of seemingly random (put highly annoying and sometimes hilarious) on the field and boxscore bugs
• A franchise mode with piss poor player development (as in they don't develop)
• Poor CPU manager AI
• Shitty animation
• A poor stat engine
• And now the franchise mode drops games after a new season starts

I think that pretty much sums it up. And this is is a major disaster for 2KSports. Maybe this will force them to spend more time completing their games and less time adding new features that are meaningless unless the game itself works.

Here's a link to the Sportsgamer blog (lots of good stuff over there):
Sports Gamer.