Category Archives: Sports

worms in my brain get them out

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I’ve liked the Worms series for a long time now, though the spin-off games haven’t generally done too well.  So it was mostly out of curiosity that I checked out Worms Crazy Golf today.  The mechanics are pretty simple, just get to the hole on a 2D map, using standard direction-and-strength shooting.  And, as expected from a Worms game, there are some tools to adjust the gameplay (e.g., a parachute for your ball), and various ways to interact with the terrain, like destructible blocks or cannons you can fire out of.

There are some things like unlockable alternate clubs, hats, voice packs, etc., goals to meet, and challenge leaderboards to sustain longer-term gameplay…but the glaring omission is that there’s no online multiplayer, only local hot seat.  Worms is best when played with multiple people, and there isn’t even an AI to play against here, so I’m not really interested in doing much more with it.

(It is pretty generous with the achievements, at least; I got five on the first hole!)

No Baseball For You!

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Well, I was going to try Out Of The Park Baseball 11 today, as my first Mac game in this series, but by the time I’d finished mucking about with patches, I’d kinda lost my enthusiasm.  The base game ran okay, but I was getting errors about the face generator, sound was missing, and it froze on the credits when I chose ‘About…’, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to look for a patch.  There was one, but the patch file from the store I got it from was for the Windows version.  The technical support forum directed me to the publisher’s site for updates for the GamersGate version I have, but that also turned out to only have the Windows patch.  Back in the support forum they did have a Mac patch, and I figured I’d give it a try anyway, but it couldn’t find the existing install and wouldn’t let me proceed even after manually selecting the install directory, and confusingly it wanted the location of “OOTP 10” even though it had the OOTP 11 logo in the corner…

It is supposed to be the best baseball management sim out there, by far, but I’m two versions behind on it by now, the latest versions are fairly expensive (I got this one for cheap since it was right before a new version release), and I just don’t have much patience today.  Maybe I’ll revisit a future version if I ever find it cheap again.

Coachin’ Ain’t Easy

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I also browsed through the PSN store looking at the recent stuff, and although Ratchet & Clank: Quest For Booty looks tempting, I should probably finish off the R&C Future game I already started first… Instead I grabbed the Head Coach 09 demo; normally I’m not much of a football guy, but I was curious what it would be like from the management side rather than as a player.

As expected, it’s rather stat-heavy, with people representing not just the players but all of the support roles on your team as well like position-specific coaches, coordinators, and trainers, with skill levels, purchasable skill trees, cross-league effectiveness rankings, different ways you can ask to change their behaviours, ‘needs’ that each of them wants fulfilled, approval ratings, etc…

It’s all rather overwhelming and there didn’t seem to be much to do anyway since the demo starts you off with an already well-developed team, so I skipped ahead to the first game. Since it’s a management sim, you don’t control the players directly but instead do things like pick what plays to run, make adjustments to the defensive line, and respond to other events that come up like injuries and requests for substitutions. Or you can just let your coaches make the decisions and see what happens, which I pretty much had to do thanks to my complete ignorance of football.

Interesting, but it’s really for people who are true football fanatics, not me.