Gaming

OK so this may sound rather sad but please indulge me.



The Powerplay Manager Hockey season mentioned in the post on 21 November as just starting season 4 has now completed the league season and play offs.







After the initial couple of wins my team – IceRayz – slumped before an influx of overseas players and full use of available tactics pulled the team back up to a 5th league place finish and 6th overall after the play offs.



Unfortunately the 1.1 million prize isn’t real and goes towards next seasons team and facilities.



Each game has a play by play account and a match summary with detailed game statistics. It is evident from the text of how the games unfold that the developers have a knowledge and love of ice hockey. Just a few of the many different quotes is below.

Julien Maillet skates out of the crease to stop the dumped puck at the back boards. But the puck takes a bounce. Roland Laurent also misses it and the puck bounces into the slot to Michael Alexander who has an open net and scores! This was an easy put-away and he couldn’t miss. Both the goalie and Roland Laurent are just looking sadly at one another, wondering what just happened.



Connor Walsh wins the puck in the corner, he skates in behind the net. Passes it into the slot to Corey Gibside who onetimes it. His shot is deflected by Dominik Korytko onto the stick of Billy Viveash, who has no problem flipping the puck over the sprawling goalie and scores.



Býly Andely start an attack in their defensive zone but they mess up. Prokop Machácek gets to the puck and takes a onetimer. Dominik Korytko makes a kick save with the right pad. The puck gets to the stick of Jay De’Ath who takes a quick shot from point blank range, and Dominik Korytko can’t stop that rebound. The goalie is mad at his teammates and he lets them know, that they shouldn’t be causing him such troubles.



Stanislav Tajovský gathers the loose puck in his zone and passes it. But it is a dreadful pass. He sends it right on the stick of the opponent Corey Gibside, who passes it quickly to Connor Walsh. He is closed down by Štefan Kompas who attacks him heavily. That was a textbook crosschecking penalty. Connor Walsh goes down on the ice while Štefan Kompas argues with the referee that his play was legal. And the referee has the same opinion!!! That is a questionable call and the fans are not happy with the decision.

The game originates in Slovakia so the language may appear unusual at times but it does the business.



As in reality not everything goes according to plan and I had the annoyance of buying a couple of players only for them to be injured within days of joining the club. Then just as the play offs were due my starting net minder – all of 21 years of age – suffered from angina and was pulled from the squad. Mind you he recovered after 2 days to re take his place. Hardy stock these ice hockey players don’t you know!



The really sad bit is that as Powerplay Manager is still at the BETA stage when the formal online game is launched I expect to loose my current players and arena and have to start from scratch again. I’ve nurtured these players and don’t want to loose all of them – a couple I’d be happy to see the back of but mainly we’re in this together so I’d like to take them further.

While visiting family in the north east last week, the local paper ran a story about a boy, Archie Lovett who used his grandfathers eBay user ID to to bid on a Nintendo Wii.



Nothing perhaps too unusual about that as it seems to be a regular occurrence kids bidding on items. However the kid had the successful winning bid – the problem is it was £197,654 (365,881.58 USD) or about the cost of buying 1,000 of these from Amazon.



While this makes for a fun story for the paper what bothered me about reading this is that for this to be the winning auction bid some one else needed to have bid £197,554 to push the maximum bid up to level the item ended at. So the vendor has had 2 people messing around on his sale or the story is made up.



Someone else has also picked up on this in the comments to the story, but while looking around the net a number of other papers including the Daily Telegraph have run the story so it must be true.



Makes the cost of me buying FFXIII seem a bargain.

About 10 years ago I gave in to the games console generation and bought a play station. After failing miserably on a couple of racing games I tried a game that had rave reviews from Amazon customers – Final Fantasy VII. From day 1 I was hooked. Admittedly it took me the best part of 9 months to play my way through to the final battle.



I’ve since played it to a conclusion another twice, plus FFVIII, & FFIX on the PS1. Version 2 of the PS2 was bought to accommodate FFX & FFXII. Eleven is a multi player on line version that I’ve avoided. Now it looks as though the saving needs to start for a HD TV & PS3 in readiness for FFXIII:

Gorgeous and I’m sure it will continue the line of epic stories, fun and challenging side quests and more importantly characters that you care about. This last point is the one that I feel sets the the Final Fantasy series above all other games – you care what happens to them and share there emotions. In my first run through of FFVII, one of the characters in the story dies, a tragic moment. I replayed that section about 6 times to see if I could avoid the murderous blow but I couldn’t and had to accept that it was a part of the story. Distraught or what?? ...Well perhaps sad.



Especially sad considering that FFXIII would mean an outlay of £1,000 for TV, console and disc.