Hidden Pugmarks

Well, I have to start by saying congratulations to the Pittsburgh Penguins who won the Stanley Cup last night.

As for my Wings? I’m disappointed. I’m not disappointed that they lost. That I can accept. I’m disappointed that they didn’t play last night. Other than about two minutes in the second period and maybe another two minutes in the third period, that wasn’t my Detroit Red Wings team that I have come to know and love. I understand that most of them are injured. I understand that they had a long hard road to the final. In the end though, they just didn’t show up. It resulted in what has to be the least exciting game seven I’ve ever seen.

I am also disappointed by the officiating that took place in the final round. It was bad for both teams. It was bad for the league. That game last night was a return to the clutching and grabbing style of hockey we got used to in the mid 90’s.

I enjoyed the officiating in the first three rounds of the playoffs where they didn’t call every little thing like in the regular season, but in the final round they simply put the whistles away. It was a disgrace to the league and to the sport. I always hear the line “they don’t want a playoff game to be decided by officiating and power plays”, but I don’t understand. Isn’t that how the other 82 games a year that each team plays is decided?

One other disappointing thing for the league, is that because of the way the game was being called it went from what should have been one of the best match-ups to watch in this years playoffs to one of the worst. It couldn’t hold a candle to the hockey that I saw played in the previous three rounds.

You can’t structure the rules and the enforcement of them to let your stars shine, and then turn out the lights during the big show and plan to draw in more fans.

I’ve watched a lot of the NBA playoffs this year as well. They haven’t changed the officiating in the final. Just the other night half of the Laker’s starters were on the bench in the first quarter because of foul trouble. That’s the way it should be.

If the rules are going to be different in the playoffs than they are in the regular season, how can you possibly build a team to be great at both?

I also have to say that the scheduling this year has been atrocious. I miss the days when the playoff games were every other night. Again, it is just crazy to schedule back to back games in the playoffs, and then to turn around and have massive breaks between games of three and sometimes more days. It causes a loss of momentum for fans. You never know when the next game will actually be. I understand that sometimes the arena has been scheduled for other things; but honestly, aren’t those arenas normally built for the professional sports teams? Is it too much to ask them to keep the schedule clean for the few weeks that the playoffs last? I definitely don’t understand bowing to the schedule of NBC who doesn’t even pay to show the NHL playoffs.

Here’s hoping for an exciting off-season starting with an exciting draft.

Go Wings! Go!

It has been quite a while since my last post. 39 days to be precise.

I could blame it on work, which has been ramping up as we head toward our milestone on Tuesday. I could blame it on the NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs and how they have consumed my evenings and weekends. I could even just blame it on being busy.

But I’ll be honest here, that just isn’t the case. In fact I have started several, but just like a goal scorer going through a drought in hockey, I’m lacking finish. This one is going to get done.

E3 has come and gone. For those who don’t know, E3 is the most hyped part of the video game industry. Everyone saves up all of their big announcements, gathers together all of the gaming press and a few industry insiders, throws some crazy parties, and then in a rush announces everything. The big theme this year was motion.

Nintendo broke open the motion market, and with it the casual gamer market, a couple of years ago. I’ll admit I thought it was kind of cool at the time. To me though, the Wii is more of a novelty than anything. I have yet to find any consistently compelling gameplay on the Wii. I feel that it lacks good titles because the Wiimote is so gimicky. If I were a kid the Wii would be my favourite console. It would be an excuse to leap around and act crazy. As an adult (with a downstairs neighbour who complains about the cats running across the floor) it isn’t really an option, even if I wanted it to be.

This year both Sony and Microsoft announced their motion solutions. Sony with their higher resolution controller similar to the Wiimote(althoug the Wiimote is pretty good with the Wiimotion Plus add-on) and Microsoft with their controllerless Project Natal.

I have to say that this current direction in video games while cool from one vantage point is also concerning from another. Part of the reason I play video games is to relax. Like on a hot day like today, I just want to sit there infront of the fan and kill zombies, do parkour, play some professional hockey and maybe, just maybe, take on the roll of a Gear and kill some Locust. I don’t want to run in place, dodge and weave, hack and slash. That’s too much work!

While sometimes that might be fun to do, I just can’t see doing it for a marathon 3-5 hour gaming session. Can you imagine playing Zelda when you had to be standing up swinging a sword for 27 hours? Not to mention the fact that there isn’t really enough room in my living room to play most of the games as they were demoed.

I do see the good in it. I see that one day my children could stay in shape by playing video games. If those kids were anything like me though; they’ll stop playing games and go read a book.

As a friend of mine put it the other day “If I’m going to be active, running around the room, waving the controllers, throwing elbows and hip-checks; I might as well just go play real hockey.”

The other impractical side of it, and I mean this seriously, is that I could never develop a Project Natal game in my 6′ x 8′ cube. Especially a multiplayer game.

There is still one other thing about this whole shift that sort of bothers me. Personally, I don’t want to be tied any closer to my avatar in most of the games I play. I don’t want to be that character in the game world. I don’t want to be tied so closely that the swinging of my arms performs a decapitation. That the 1:1 motion mapping and trigger action results in me killing people in the game world. It’s a game, not reality. Games are currently about as real as I ever want them to be. I would never want to play a photorealistic WWII game, or a photorealistic operation game. At that point it starts to become the real thing. It starts to become something that I don’t want to be desensitized to, and it most certainly becomes something that I don’t want to feel that I am really doing.

Once again I have to stress, there is some great potential for games here. Tennis and Boxing are great fits for this type of motion control. Personal trainers and exercise games are another great example. Games that are quick and don’t have to be played for hours to get to a save point.

Don’t forget people, games are meant to be an escape. They are meant to be fun. Just like movies, music and books. Once something starts to become too much work, it tends to stop being fun.

Now to bring things to a conclusion I would just like to say that it will not take 39 days for my next post, and Go Wings Go!