Simulation of a simulation

I’m not a professional baseball player. If you’re reading this, you likely knew that.

But sometimes, I think MLB 11 The Show doesn’t realize that. And, so, it expects me to be a person with the attributes of a millionaire athlete, namely extreme patience, lightning quick reflexes, an incredible sense of a strike zone, and maybe steroids?

That’s too much to ask, game. I don’t play you to feel inadequate about my baseball playing skills.

In fact, I typically play games for exactly the opposite reason – to feel adequate about skills that I specifically don’t have (shooting stuff, driving things, punching people, etc.).

This is why I’ve never been huge on The Sims. I’ve been a person; I know what that’s like. I don’t need to “simulate” that.

I don’t mind that a game is challenging – as an option. But the easiest modes of The Show would probably rank in the all-star range of the rookie-veteran-all star-hall of famer spectrum of typical video game difficulty.

When I find games with these extreme levels of difficulty, I often wonder about the people who play those levels of difficulty – assuming they exist. What are they like? Do they sleep at night? Do they have just five fingers on each hand? Do they rely on food for sustenance and energy?

Unrelated Thought of the Week:

Roger Goodell is winning the NFL lockout. Here are five reasons why:

1. Prospects decided to go the NFL draft without so much as a blink (and why wouldn’t they?), showing no sense of respect for or solidarity with the current players (and why would they?).
2. A group of mid-level players wants to split from the Players Union and form a different group just so they can be involved in negotiations. Evidently, they can’t, but they still tried.
3. Chad Ochocinco tweeted – this is when it might be useful for me to be on Twitter – that he had an hour-long phone conversation with Goodell. Ochocinco was Christmas-morning excited about it, even though they’re presumably enemies.
4. The 2011 NFL schedule already exists. The season doesn’t, but the schedule does.
5. The players are locked out.

Men-dozing

Monday night’s NCAA Championship was so boring it literally put me to sleep. I was like my parents at 9:30 on a weeknight: nodding off in the living room with the TV on.

But it’s not like I’m eight and it was passed my bedtime. On a typical weeknight, I’m generally awake at the time when “One Shining Moment” played; this game was just legitimately that bad.

I finally gave up on the game some time late in the second half, after UCONN went on a run and had a ten-point lead – it was probably 32 to 22.

I’m sure there are tons of writers and bloggers around the country trying to put a positive spin on the game: praising the defense, celebrating Butler’s back-to-back championship appearances, cheering for dog mascots.

But I can’t do that.

If there had been any other basketball game on TV Monday night, I would have changed the channel.

(By the way, the entire NBA took Monday off. Not a great move, in retrospect.)

Stat of the Week:

Butler and Connecticut combined to shoot 26% from the field. That’s a bad batting average; it’s a terrible shooting percentage. Butler’s .188 wouldn’t even have cleared the Mendoza line

A good ending

My week-long experiment with blogging every day is coming to an end, and I think it might be a good time to put an end to my blogging in general.

It’s been a nice long run, dating all the way back to the MySpace days, but my blogging just isn’t the same anymore.

As I look back at my blogs this past week, I’m not happy with my writing, I’m not happy with the response, I’m not happy with any of it really, and I just don’t see the point of continuing this self-absorbed monument to futility.

The internet doesn’t need me anymore. It’s time for me to hang up my fingerless blogging gloves and just go back to talking to myself.

Even of the Week:

April Fools’ Day.

Teamwork is for suckers

So, there’s a whole website devoted to co-op gaming, but occasionally I still feel the need to talk about it.

I had no plans to buy MLB 11: The Show. I was content to know what 10 was like and to continue playing my FIFA. But then I saw this commercial and eventually realized that there were four people in the same room playing the same game, which meant at least two of those people had to be on the same team.

I care about same-room co-op gaming, and I care about baseball games. So, I bought the game.

Then I was Charlie-after-his-first-bar-of-chocolate-doesn’t-have-a-golden-ticket sad to realize that the co-op gaming in 11 is limited exclusively to exhibition games and isn’t available in the franchise or season modes.

Something I’ve written about extensively before, game designers’ decisions to limit their games’ multiplayer options (really, in any way) is just baffling to me. In many cases, I imagine their (potentially legitimate) justifications are technical in nature: there’s too much coding, too much testing, and too much Mountain Dew and trance music necessary to make the game physically work in a particular multiplayer fashion.

With MLB 11: The Show, technical or practical problems can’t be the stumbling block. The cooperative mode already exists. There is a moment before any exhibition game (and presumably during it) that I can very easily select cooperative play. And then it happens – no problem. Bryan and I have controlled players from the same team at the same time during the same game.

So, why can’t we do the same during franchise play?

If it’s not a practical decision, that must mean it’s a philosophical decision, which means that at some point during the production of this game, some person, with the altruistic tendencies of a fox in a chicken coop, actively decided that cooperative play shouldn’t be available outside of exhibition mode because that would somehow undermine the philosophical goal of the game.

That’s a decision I just don’t understand.