Author Bio
Jayson YoungHome Town: Nashville, TN.
Sports: Football, Basketball, Hockey, Soccer
Games: Old: Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball, Tecmo Super Bowl III: Final Edition, NBA Hangtime, New: All Pro Football 2K8, NHL '09
Teams: Vanderbilt Commodores, Tennessee Titans, Nashville Predators, Memphis Grizzlies
OS Username: OS: wEEman33 Xbox Live: wEEman33 BSD
Tags:
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
01:45 PM - February 18, 2015. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Jayson Young
As its small population (pictured above) suggests, Online Versus Play is a dying mode in NHL 15. When the EA Sports Hockey League inevitably returns for NHL 16, that percentage of users searching for OVP games will likely dip into single digits if the mode is not significantly improved next season. What can Electronic Arts do to keep people interested in playing traditional, one-on-one multiplayer with real NHL teams?
Read More - Online Versus Play Must Improve For NHL 16
Friday, February 13, 2015
06:13 PM - February 13, 2015. Posted by Steve_OS. Written by Jayson Young
If you missed yesterday's MLB 15: The Show livestream, and you don't wan't to devote an hour to watching the whole thing, here are some cliff notes detailing everything that was discussed:
Universal Rewards
- Returning users will receive a "Gold Loyalty Upgrade" pack upon starting the game for the first time, if their PSN profile played MLB 14: The Show. That pack includes one gold Diamond Dynasty card and three gold items. Most items can be used in Road to the Show, Franchise, or Diamond Dynasty.
- All users will unlock one bonus item every day that they log into MLB 15: The Show. Players can also earn a "standard" pack every nine days that they check in. The standard pack contains six Diamond Dynasty players and two items. The days don't have to be consecutive; the requirement is just nine total days per pack.
- Simply completing games (in any mode) also gives you a chance to earn bonus items. You can buy and sell these items in an online, user-to-user marketplace.
- The items that provide attribute boosts will allow you to push a player's ratings beyond 99, for the first time in MLB: The Show.
- Some items are sponsorships that you can apply to your Franchise team. You can select three sponsors total, and their logos will appear during replays and on various score bugs. Sponsors will bring in extra funds for your Franchise team, based on how well your club performs during games. These sponsorships only apply to the team, and won't override the individual equipment deals for each of your players.
- The stubs you've earned in MLB 14: The Show will not carry over to MLB 15: The Show.
- It took only 21 seconds to load into a Franchise game after setting the team lineups.
- New split-screen replays will appear during big moments.
- Stadiums' flag poles will be hanging the appropriate city and state banners this year.
- San Francisco's AT&T Park will include the new garden section in its outfield stands.
- Sony San Diego plans to release a complete walkthrough for every updated uniform and stadium.
- Gloves now have seven customizable parts instead of three. Additionally, you can choose from seven different webbing styles.
- Neon pink, neon yellow, and neon green are the three new equipment colors.
- Hitters' shin guards are less bulky and more form-fitting, plus you can choose whether or not to use a foot guard.
- Helmets without ear flaps are now available, which will make the older legends look more accurate to their time period.
- You can now choose from thin or long eyeblack styles.
- Necklaces are finally in the game. You can have thick or thin chains, and can also customize the chains' color. Necklaces have to stay tucked underneath your jersey, though, and will only be partially visible.
- Wrist tape, wrist bands, and arm bands now have multiple lengths.
- Baserunners can now wear wrist guards.
- A low stirrups option has been added.
- The catcher's leg guards and chest protector look more detailed and are now more form-fitting.
- All the retired legends' Diamond Dynasty cards will look like their actual baseball cards used to.
- There won't be any "throwback" versions of current MLB players (e.g. 2004 David Ortiz).
- None of your Diamond Dynasty cards will ever expire. To compensate for the fact that you'll be able to keep everything forever, gold and diamond players will now be extremely rare. The bronze tier will include some everyday starters, and the silver tier will have some All-Stars.
- You are now limited to only one fully customizable created player. He can play at any position (though he won't excel at all of them), and you will have to boost his attribute ratings by "feeding" him player cards. Your created player will improve based on the strengths of the players that you "feed" him. Cards that are used as "food" will permanently disappear from your collection.
- MLB players cannot be trained via feeding. But you can at least edit their equipment, if you like.
- Whenever you play a Diamond Dynasty game, it will randomly select a starting pitcher from your rotation. You cannot see which pitcher the game has chosen for you until the game has officially started. All of your pitchers' stamina will now be fully restored at the end of each game.
- Extra Innings matches now reward cards instead of team budget. Budget is a concept that no longer exists in Diamond Dynasty. You odds of obtaining rare cards after a game will increase if you play on higher difficulty settings. The marketplace is now entirely based on stubs, since budget has been removed from the mode.
- It's unlikely that you'll be able to transfer your existing team logos/jerseys from MLB 14 to MLB 15.
- The developers were also uncertain whether or not there will be new cards introduced to the mode throughout the year. It was confirmed, however, that all the Diamond Dynasty cards' ratings will be automatically updated alongside The Show's regular roster updates.
Sony San Diego's "most talented guys" have been working on improving the series' troublesome online play. Their goal is to achieve one-to-one parity with the input registration for online/offline gameplay. More information will come on this subject during a later stream.
Written by Jayson Young, follow him on Twitter.
Wednesday, February 11, 2015
10:32 AM - February 11, 2015. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Jayson Young
Five feet, ten inches has been my height since junior high. To make up for my lack of size, one trick I often employed in pickup games was to ask the other players if we could score the contest with one-point and two-point shots, instead of the standard two-point and three-point shots. Most people would accept that rule change without any pushback, not realizing that they'd just agreed to give a smaller, perimeter-oriented player like myself a statistical advantage.
Read More - NBA 2K15: The Park's Scoring Needs To Change
Monday, February 2, 2015
05:17 PM - February 2, 2015. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Jayson Young
One benefit of making an unlicensed sports game is that the developers can include all sorts of crude dances and illegal celebrations that real sports leagues would instantly flag for unsportsmanlike conduct.
Football gamers may recall that Visual Concepts' All-Pro Football 2K8 let players hit one of five buttons after crossing the goal line (or making a sack) to perform a user-specified celebration. But if no button was pressed after reaching paydirt, the game would sometimes pick a secret celebration -- i.e., one that wasn't selectable from the game's list of 37 motion-captured TD routines.
One of those hidden animations (captured below) shows the scorer flipping the pages of an invisible newspaper while he squats down and plops the ball out from under his backside. This is a slight variation on the maneuver that cost Doug Baldwin 15 yards for unsportsmanlike conduct last night, when the Seattle Seahawks wide receiver pretended to pull down his pants and defecate on the ball after catching a touchdown pass from Russell Wilson in the third quarter of Super Bowl XLIX.
NBC cut away from Baldwin's act right as it was beginning, and declined to show a replay of the incident after the flag occurred. All-Pro Football 2K8, despite this scene, was deemed suitable for "Everyone ages 10 and up," due to the "mild language" that its players use while taunting each other between the whistles -- which makes you wonder if Visual Concepts ever showed their take on the now-infamous "poopdown" celebration to the ESRB.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
02:35 PM - January 31, 2015. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Jayson Young
If you couldn't attend last weekend's PAX South convention, here is your chance to try out one of the new PC sports games that was shown in San Antonio.
A post-PAX build of Super Slam Dunk Touchdown is now up for download on developer Tipping Goat's website.
The current build offers five different athlete types (soccer, hockey, basketball, football, and roller derby), which all sport unique skills and varied playing styles. Your team's objective is to shoot, kick, or toss the ball into one of the three target goals.
A low shot past the goalkeeper and into the soccer net yields three points. A field goal between the raised uprights registers four points. And a slam dunk through the high-up basketball hoop scores five points.
The game is best-played with four to six human players, but it can also be played solo, against the AI.
Super Slam Dunk Touchdown hopes to eventually make it onto STEAM and unspecified home consoles sometime in 2015.
Monday, January 26, 2015
01:57 PM - January 26, 2015. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Jayson Young
The back of Trials Fusion's box art is no longer a bold-print lie, as online multiplayer for two to eight people was finally patched into the game Thursday, more than nine months after its April 15, 2014 release date. The Xbox 360 edition, unlike its PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC cousins, is limited to a maximum of four simultaneous online riders.
While there are a mere 10 playable “X-Supercross” tracks at this time, a RedLynx community manager states that:
Quote:
| Originally Posted by RoguishRonin “The tools for creating amazing online multiplayer tracks will soon be available in the [track] editor, allowing for unlimited amounts of [courses] to be created by the talented Trials community. [You'll eventually be able to] create, share and play your favorite online multiplayer tracks. And just like [the] single-player tracks, [our] studio's favorites will find their way into Uplay's recommended list for all [Trials] players to enjoy.” |
Trials enthusiasts can at least toggle and tweak lots of interesting gameplay settings in invite-only matches, such as gravity, speed, invisibility, checkpoint amounts, maximum retries, and time limits. Ranked matchmaking sessions will turn off all the outlandish modifiers, and limit players to only a few basic bike options.
If you're embarrassingly bad at Trials, or you just want to watch your friends competing against each other, a spectator option is available. You can also form a riding “team” (branded by a selectable logo and a four-character clan tag) with up to 49 of your friends. The team feature will record your clanmates' total scores across all of Trials Fusion's online game modes. An “OperationSports” club has been created on PlayStation 4, and it is currently accepting new members.
Check out our video at the top of the article for a quick look at some of these new additions in action.
You can also read through Operation Sports' full written review for a complete analysis of Trials Fusion.
Saturday, January 24, 2015
12:30 PM - January 24, 2015. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Jayson Young
Last week's issue of Famitsu magazine confirmed that Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2015 will appear on the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita during the series' regularly scheduled spring release period. The suggested retail price for this year's game has not been revealed, thus pre-orders are not currently open at popular import shops like Play-Asia and NCSX.
Read More - Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2015 is Coming to the PS3 and Vita This Spring
Friday, January 23, 2015
02:48 PM - January 23, 2015. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Jayson Young
Are you struggling to light the lamp in NHL 15? If so, Operation Sports has compiled 10 different tactics that should help your team consistently score goals in the current-gen versions of NHL 15.
If the video above doesn't show, check it out on YouTube. Also subscribe to our own Jayson Young's YouTube channel while you are at it.
Thursday, January 22, 2015
09:27 AM - January 22, 2015. Posted by Steve_OS. Written by Jayson Young
Wednesday afternoon, NBA 2K15 installed a server-side update to its MyTeam game mode that changed the collection rewards for several NBA teams from 25,000 MyTeam coins to special edition "sapphire" player cards.One of those sapphire players, New Orleans Pelicans point guard, Jrue Holiday, turned out to be extra special, in that he has no arms, prefers to play shirtless, will often turn invisible, and shoots the ball like it was a shotput, because both of his hands are hideously stuck to his shoulders:
Holiday's handicap doesn't seem to affect his dribbling, passing, or shooting abilities, as I was able to score 21 points and hit 5 of 6 three-pointers in a test game with him and some of the other new sapphire cards. Mutated Jrue does have a hard time, however, grabbing hold of rebounds and loose balls, as there were a few occasions (at 2:13 and 5:47 of the above video) where he would bend over to pick up the ball, only to bounce back up holding nothing but air in his tiny, misaligned hands. Layups are also pretty difficult for armless-Holiday to hit, as the ball will teleport along an unusually low arc during those shots, making them very easy to block, or just errantly clank off the bottom of the backboard/rim.
Visual Concepts quickly recognized this bug and released a fixed, perfectly human version of sapphire Jrue Holiday late last night. So you can't get this glitched abnormality anymore, unless he's already on your MyTeam, or is sitting in your reward queue.
Thursday, January 15, 2015
11:46 AM - January 15, 2015. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Jayson Young
Programmer KingJavo has uploaded an early, incomplete version of his homemade PC editor, which allows gamers to alter all the teams and players on the Xbox 360 edition of All-Pro Football 2K8 in more ways than ever before. Version 0.1.3.0 of the editor, which can be downloaded for free from Mediafire, will only work on Windows computers.
KingJavo's latest software offers several improvements over All-Pro Football 2K8's previous PC editing program, which was released in April of 2011, and was coded by fellow Operation Sports community member, FlyingFinn. Here are some of the new features:
- Can change any player name or team name in the game
- Can switch any player's announced play-by-play name
- Can place any of the retired legends' faces onto other players
- Can choose every player's attended college
- Can select any signature player animation, such as Deacon Jones' head slap, Walter Payton's high step, Lester Hayes' low defensive stance, or Dan Marino's throwing/playaction motions
- Adds hidden "Bullet Time" and "Helmet High Tackles" player abilities
- Can swap out any of the 24 CPU-controlled teams and make them one of the 8 user-controlled teams (or vice versa)
- Improved roster sorter that shows a separate page for each team
- Can change a team's home stadium without having to reset their roster of generic players
11:43 AM - January 15, 2015. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Jayson Young
Mutant Football League is still in production, and is aiming for a Q4 2015 release on PC (via STEAM), PlayStation 4, Xbox One, iOS, and Android, according to the latest trailer posted on the development team's YouTube channel. The project is currently self-funded, though developer Digital Dreams Entertainment is seeking a publishing partner.
The new footage promises:
- 30 completely customizable teams
- Hazards and traps in each stadium
- Weapons like clubs, axes, and chainsaws
- 7-on-7 football, featuring passing plays (with receiver icons), running plays, and special teams
- Content targeting a "Mature" ESRB rating
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
11:01 AM - January 13, 2015. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Jayson Young
NHL 11 may be most remembered for exposing thousands of hockey fans to the HUT virus. But for players of Be A GM, Be A Pro, Online Versus, and the EA Sports Hockey League, that edition is more likely to be recalled as the last time that Electronic Arts made significant changes to its face-off system. While the simplistic "rock-paper-scissors" interface was considered an improvement by 2010's standards, the mechanics' inherent limitations and pre-scripted nature have started to feel antiquated in recent seasons.
If face-offs are an important enough part of professional hockey that the Nashville Predators would gladly send the Buffalo Sabres their first-round draft pick just to ensure that fourth-line grinder (and face-off expert) Paul Gaustad would take the majority of the team's defensive zone draws every evening, then surely it is worth expanding this neglected area of EA's NHL games.
Read More - Rethinking the Face-Off System For NHL 16
Friday, January 9, 2015
01:41 PM - January 9, 2015. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Jayson Young
18 games into my first Super Mega Baseball season, and my Sirloins team of “extreme power hitters” has already drawn 221 walks, netting an average of 12.3 walks per match. The most-walked team in Major League Baseball last year, the Oakland Athletics, averaged 3.6 walks per game.
In a video game where all the athletes have gigantic heads and hold gargantuan bats, seasoned sports gamers might expect Super Mega Baseball's long ball statistics to be a bit inflated; but three weeks in, and the game's small ball stats are what appear surprisingly off-mark.
Read More - Super Mega Baseball: Three Things to Improve the Experience
Thursday, January 8, 2015
10:25 AM - January 8, 2015. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Jayson Young
NHL 15 doesn't make much of an effort to explain what the many strategy settings inside the game actually do, so if you're a newcomer to the series, or even a veteran who's always left everything on default, here is a short guide for selecting the best team strategies on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One...
Read More - NHL 15: The Best Team Strategy Settings
Thursday, December 11, 2014
10:14 AM - December 11, 2014. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Jayson Young
Electronic Arts has released a new roster update for NHL 15 to reflect recent player injuries, line changes, and team transactions. Five NHL rookies have also received slight ratings increases:
Johnny Gaudreau (Calgary) -- 76 overall to 81 overall
Victor Rask (Carolina) -- 69 overall to 74 overall
Aaron Ekblad (Florida) -- 75 overall to 81 overall
Filip Forsberg (Nashville) -- 77 overall to 81 overall
Jori Lehterä (St. Louis) -- 77 overall to 80 overall
EA's twitter account also states that there were "big changes to CHL rosters."
Read More - New NHL 15 Roster Update Raises Rookie Ratings, Improves CHL
Working...