Author Bio
Friday, June 2, 2017
06:52 PM - June 2, 2017. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Kevin Scott
After recently offering an introduction on how to build a Diamond Dynasty team on the cheap, it quickly became clear there was still more advice to impart on specific role players who can become invaluable when going toe-to-toe with people online. Best of all, these cards can be acquired for a relatively affordable number of stubs. With all of those coveted diamond cards commanding as much as six figures on the marketplace, you don’t have to blow your entire wad to compete with squads who have managed to stack their lineups with these intimidating diamonds. Instead, you just have to think outside the box a little bit and find creative ways to use all of the different tools baseball players can possess to fight all of those Goliaths out there with your very own Davids. Trust me when I say there are few feelings more satisfying in MLB The Show 17 than managing to take down a team full of superstars and legends with a rag-tag group of misfits that you’ve thrown together like some kind of inspirational sports movie.
Here are a couple of options for a few different key roles on your squad...
Read More - Affordable Diamond Dynasty Cards to Help Your Team in MLB The Show 17
Tuesday, May 16, 2017
08:07 PM - May 16, 2017. Posted by Steve_OS. Written by Kevin Scott
While Diamond Dynasty remains the crown jewel in MLB The Show 17 for SDS -- receiving the most attention from the developers, thanks in no small part to being a cash cow that sees players spending small fortunes to stack their teams with powerful squads -- it’s a mode that still remains intimidating and inaccessible for many. This is likely because many players simply refuse to invest the same kind of capital as others and therefore believe it’s not even worth trying to keep up with all of the Joneses with deep pockets. But the reality is you don’t actually need to spend so much as a dime in order to put together a competitive Diamond Dynasty squad. You just need to know how to harness all of the resources the game provides you free of charge to cobble together a team that can take you up the leaderboard.
Here are some tips that can have you climbing the Diamond Dynasty ranks in no time.
Read More - How to Build A Diamond Dynasty Squad on the Cheap in MLB The Show 17 (Written by: Kevin Scott)
Thursday, April 13, 2017
03:31 PM - April 13, 2017. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Kevin Scott
One of the best things about MLB The Show 17 is how well it replicates the real-life duel between pitcher and hitter. Every at-bat becomes an intense chess match where both parties are constantly trying to get in each other’s head to figure out what to expect next. Each pitch then represents another opportunity to stay one step ahead of your opponent and create a situation where you can grab the upper hand. Of course, the old adage in baseball is that good pitching beats good hitting, and with that in mind, we offer you a handy guide on how to get out the best of hitters and dominate while on the mound.
Read More - A Guide to Pitching in MLB The Show 17
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
06:20 PM - April 5, 2017. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Kevin Scott
While we wait for the The Show servers to continue to stabilize, it’s at least comforting to know there are some game modes where you don’t have to worry about games freezing or being sent to the queue to potentially be lost forever. One of these modes is an updated offline franchise mode that, as usual, has not received quite the amount of attention from the developers as the more lucrative and increasingly popular Diamond Dynasty mode that is keeping all of those servers overworked. However, that doesn’t mean that franchises have been completely ignored this year.
When it comes time to play what can be an intimidatingly long baseball season, The Show has given you a few ways to help you work your way through your team’s calendar. Naturally, you can just choose to play the full 9 innings for the entirety of your 162 games, but going that route will likely take you right up until the release of MLB The Show 18. So it may seem a little funny to say that one of the biggest changes to franchise mode this year is a feature that will actually keep you from playing more of the game itself, but that’s the truth when it comes to the The Show’s new quick manage option.
Read More - MLB The Show 17's Offline Franchise Offers a Slight Upgrade
Wednesday, March 29, 2017
02:22 PM - March 29, 2017. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Kevin Scott
As it is with the dawn of every baseball season, the launch of the newest MLB The Show game brings about the usual sources of excitement that we’ve come to expect over the years from playing the series: a bunch of new and promising features waiting to be explored, loads of welcome tweaks to an already solid core of gameplay and — of course — a flurry of people logging on at midnight when the game's officially released, causing the overwhelmed servers to quickly become unstable.
Okay, that last one is probably more of a continued source of frustration than excitement, but at least we can say the servers have been a little better than they were last year.
With only limited time to play the game since its release on Tuesday, here are a few stray observations on what has stood out to me so far, besides the inconsistent online gameplay...
Read More - Early Impressions of MLB The Show 17
Thursday, March 23, 2017
03:30 PM - March 23, 2017. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Kevin Scott
Not all curses are created equal. When it comes to the kind that have befallen the players who were lucky (or unlucky) enough to find themselves featured on the cover of Madden over the years, there are those who have been fortunate enough to escape relatively unscathed and there are others who could not help but succumb to its unyielding wrath.
In an effort to determine who has been hit the hardest by the Madden Curse, and perhaps warn others who would hope to one day receive the honor, I have devised a complex scoring system to help rank all of the previous cover stars. They have been placed into three different groups based on the severity of curse, and ranked 1-10 in the following criteria...
Read More - The Definitive Ranking of the Madden Cover Curses
Thursday, March 9, 2017
05:18 PM - March 9, 2017. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Kevin Scott
As we attempt to wait patiently for March 28 to finally get here so we can dive into MLB The Show 17 ourselves and see how this year’s game measures up, we’ve been treated to the usual series of developer streams in the meantime to whet our appetite ahead of its release. While it may be impossible to gauge the game’s components without actually holding a controller in our hands and feeling how things actually play, that’s not going to stop us from making some snap judgments based on everything that we’ve seen so far. Here are the three best and worst things we’ve noticed in our initial impressions of the highly anticipated release.
Read More - The Three Best and Worst Things We Know About MLB The Show 17
Saturday, February 18, 2017
11:57 AM - February 18, 2017. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Kevin Scott
While we recently featured the 90s title Mutant League Football in our Throwback Thursday, it's the kind of game that can always use further exploration. Luckily, the newest episode of web series 30 For Nerdy, who last brought us the tale of spacey hockey goalie, uses clips from both Mutant League Football and Mutant League Hockey to reflect on the rise and fall of the post-apocalyptic league through the eyes of super-human linebacker Gory Guts and league founder, businessman Stan Whippleman. It's a tale filled with trolls, skeletons and devious tactics both on and off the field that you might want to check out before a new generation of the Mutant League is born.
Monday, February 13, 2017
11:22 AM - February 13, 2017. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Kevin Scott
Many football fans purchase Madden year after year with the lofty hopes that the game will mirror the actual sport they love as closely as possible. And while the folks at EA continue to take strides in the right direction in terms of making this dream a reality, there are still a number of areas in which improvements are needed if the game is ever going to measure up to what we see on the field on Sundays (and Mondays and Thursdays and every other day of the week NFL games are now held).
Read More - Six Ways to Make Madden More of a Simulation
Wednesday, December 28, 2016
01:45 PM - December 28, 2016. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Kevin Scott
Focus On Improving Gameplay
It seems every year sports games are so determined to impress their loyal fan bases with all sorts of new card-collecting modes or grinding missions, but when it comes time to actually play the games, it all feels a little too familiar. Many people simply compare the version they just bought last year with streams from the new one and decide whether it might be best to skip buying the game this year -- if only because when they do finally buy the game the following year, it will then feel like a more significant improvement. This is why it behooves these companies to attempt to bolster the game action each year by leaps and bounds rather than the slight fine-tuning and roster updates so many fans grumble about upon release.
Read More - What All Sports Games Could Focus on Improving in 2017
Monday, December 12, 2016
12:15 PM - December 12, 2016. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Kevin Scott
For anyone interested in delving into the lighter side of sports gaming, the YouTube series 30 For Nerdy parodies the ESPN series 30 For 30 by using clips from video games to bring to life the greatest sports stories that never happened. Having already detailed a potentially fixed game in Major League Baseball and the horrific story of how an under-qualified ambulance driver cut short the career of a young elite quarterback, the comedy series now turns its focus to the world of hockey.
In the newest episode, "Black Ice," we’re introduced to Cooper Snoodge, a hard-partying goalie who goes from languishing in obscurity in a small league in Norway to starting for the New York Rangers under the bright lights of Madison Square Garden. He’s able to thrive in the big leagues for a little while, but when his raucous lifestyle finally catches up to him, there’s no way to escape the inevitable consequences.
Finally, in the tradition of Dock Ellis -- who once managed to pitch a no-hitter while high on LSD -- Cooper inadvertently plays a game with drugs still in his system and the results are not quite as triumphant as they were for Ellis. Let Cooper guide you through the overwhelming prospect of trying to stop pucks while under the influence of a mind-altering substance and see for yourself what it looks like when a professional athlete is not quite himself in front of a large audience.
Saturday, November 19, 2016
01:18 PM - November 19, 2016. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Kevin Scott
It's an exciting time for sports in Cleveland these days. The Cavaliers succeeded in finally bringing a championship to the city, and the Indians nearly managed to follow up that feat with another one in baseball. But there's still one team in the city that continues to be an emblem for futility and an inspiration to raging dumpster fires everywhere. Of course, I'm talking about the Browns.
With the Browns currently sitting at 0-10 and on a very real path to a winless campaign, plenty of people are pondering how to possibly salvage this mess and return the franchise to a greatness it's never really achieved. But unlike them, I'm not interested in proposing some tangible path to making this happen, but instead looking at what could have been done before all this even happened to make the 2016 Browns a better squad.
The most obvious reason the Browns currently find themselves in the predicament they're now in is because they have whiffed on so many draft picks in recent years. So in the interests of altering history, I've decided to go back to the future (and the past) to determine how the team might fare in a simulated 2016 if they had made some better picks along the way. Some rules for this experiment...
Read More -- Rewriting the Browns' Draft History in Madden NFL 17
Wednesday, November 9, 2016
12:02 PM - November 9, 2016. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Kevin Scott
So you’ve been playing Madden 17 a lot and fancy yourself somewhat of an expert. Maybe you’ve won the Super Bowl a few times in your offline franchise, dominating the CPU every chance you get by exploiting and capitalizing on every one of its inherent flaws. Perhaps you’ve even won some games online against random strangers, oblivious to the fact that your opponents could very well be kids and/or football newbies just dipping their toe into the online realm of sports gaming. But are you ready for the ultimate challenge?
If so, it’s time to tackle the daunting world of online franchises and pit your skills against other dedicated Madden players. But where to begin? There are just so many franchises out there. How do you know which one is right for you? Well, here are some tips for finding a franchise that will keep you challenged and engaged for as many seasons as you want to devote.
Read More - Madden NFL 17: Tips for Finding An Online Franchise
Monday, October 17, 2016
12:07 PM - October 17, 2016. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Kevin Scott
Building a team with all of the winning components is among the most difficult tasks for any sports franchise, and the same is certainly true in the EASHL. The job becomes even trickier for anyone who was unable to coerce enough friends into buying NHL 17, denying you the opportunity to at least put together a squad of your own. Instead, you’ll be forced to confront the same harsh reality that so many players online face: being thrown together with a bunch of strangers and attempting to build some chemistry on the fly as quickly as possible. Welcome to EASHL drop-in games.
In the course of starting from scratch every game and hoping this is the time you’re finally paired with a talented group who will only help complement each other's abilities (or failing that, at least some people that won’t quit on you), you’ll slowly start to realize you tend to run into the same kind of players throughout the course of your career in the EASHL.
Here’s a rundown of who you can often expect to find on your team as you lace up the skates and fire up your mic time and time again.
Read More - The Five People You Meet in EASHL Drop In
Friday, September 23, 2016
02:06 PM - September 23, 2016. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Kevin Scott
Though the running game may have earned a large portion of the developers’ attention on the offensive side of the ball -- resulting in linemen being more trustworthy than they’ve ever been -- there are logic issues in blocking that remain unresolved. These become especially apparent on pitch plays, where a pulling lineman will frequently get confused about who he should be attacking on the outside to best spring a back for big yardage.
Read More - What Does Madden's AI Need to Do Better?
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