Day: July 26, 2004

Madden Challenge 2004 hits Chicago, in the likely overcrowd Navy Pier on August 21st. This is going to suck – I’m guessing they’re using the same location and it was overpacked last time – and rule – COMPETITIVE VIDEO GAME PLAYING! what’s not to love – at the same time. We go all the way from SIX! days to have the game and prep to EIGHT! I feel for the people in Minneaplis and Green Bay, who get two and three days between the time the game hits stores and when their competition is.

In some respects, I think it is nice to have it early is a funnier contest, because the game you can’t poke around for shotcuts in a short time. You’re playing the video game against each other instead of trying to exploit the flaws in the video game.

It’s just when it’s so early that you may or may not get to play it that it becomes a problem; it’s no fun doing a Madden 2005 competition when you’re mentally playing last year’s version, since that’s all you know. I may have to get get a hold of NCAA just to get some practice in. I preorder Madden online, but I don’t have enough experience to know when it’ll show up.

We’ve been debating which teams to pick for a couple weeks now, without, you know, knowing actually how good they are, and haven’t gotten to a clear conclusion. Last year, I believe I had absolutely no passing ability, so I took the Bucs to make one side of the ball good. That pick this year would be the Ravens, but I have even less faith in their offense. I’m thinking, at the moment and don’t hold it against me, Patriots. I figure they’ll be the best and most complete team.

I expect to see about five hundered people playing Michael Vick. Which means playing against the option in NCAA will be even better practice.

Still 2 minute quarters (booo but kinda understandable). In the rules, they bury a note that $4 of your $10 guys to a 6 month trial subscription to EGM, and you can even get that $4 back if you send a bunch of photocopies. Money’s still going to charity this year (COMPETITIVE VIDEO GAME PLAYING FOR CHARITY! can it get much better?), though they don’t actually specify how much as they did in the past.

Remind me to steal/borrow a digital camera for this.

Crucial Rule Change of the Year To Annoying People: No one is allowed to stand in front of the TV while setting audibles or anything similar.

Crucial Rule Change of the Year for everyone else: It’s now a sudden death situation for tied at OT, as opposed to last year’s wacky (though dramatic) field goal contest.

Rule Most Sure To Not Be Enforced: No coaching allowed (people in the crowd telling the player what to do while playing)

(With this post, there are now more posts – though not all of them visible – on this blog than the CMLLBlog. I don’t know why that’s important. But I’m really not accomplishing much.)

While watching baseball, I threw together a beta version of the 2004 RAW TV Index. Lots of holes to fill, but the main problem is I keep getting confused on which PPVs are for which brands later on in the year, and I can’t find a good list. This is what I’m thinking

AUG SummerSlam – Both
SEP Unforgiven – RAW
OCT No Mercy – SD!
OCT Halloween Havoc – RAW
NOV Survivor Series – Both
DEC Armaggedon – SD! ?
JAN Royal Rumble – Both
FEB No Way Out – RAW ?
APR WM 21 – Both

My ideas for the Iron Man match, thinking back to the last one
– Punt the rest of the show; do something for the main event slot, but schedule as many breaks between the 1:05 and 1:40 marks in the show. I’m sure they’ll try their best here – stuff like the Diva Search is made for 2 minute buffers between commericals.
– Start with mat wrestling. Brock and Angle went immediatly to Brock dominating with power, and really didn’t have enough different material to go the full hour. That shouldn’t be as big a problem with these two, but keeping it on the ground to start will save them from having to pull out more just to get through. It’s a big part of both guys styles, so I expect they’ll try.
– Tie goes to OT. This was the rule on the SD! Iron Man match and the WM one, but not for Triple H’s last Iron Man match. I’d actually like to see the OT worked with “most falls in X (5? 10?) minutes” rather than sudden death, since it fits the format of the match better. Either way, setting this up in the first hour leaves a nice opening to take this extra.
– Build on the spots from previous Iron Man matches. In real life, I’d assume Benoit and Triple H have been watching the past matches for ideas and strategies to use, but they shouldn’t forget that their characters should be thinking about those past strageties. Should Triple H get himself DQed again to try and win a fall? Is it better to stick with their primary move or to try and pull out something unexpected? Hopefully, JR and King will spend at least as much time talking about what’s going on in the match as they will talk about how great the match is.
– I’d even think about guest commentators for portions of the match, to give new life to the commentary. You’d get another dimenstion – Flair doing a segment with his knowledge of doing a sixty minute match, Jericho talking about having faced both men and how to gameplan against – without taking away from the match. I think this is a little out there to try, though.
– Don’t do falls during commerical breaks. Yea, it’s totally realistic, but I think you’ll find more people willing to give up a little bit of realism to see the meaningful moments of the match. If at all possible, don’t even do changes of momentunem during commerical breaks. It takes viewers out of the match when they aren’t allowed to changes in action.
– A clean finish. You really don’t need Eugene to get involved to heat up that feud. Anytime you ask people to invest a lot of time into a match and give them an unsatifying ending, you’ll end up with a lot of annoyed people. It doesn’t make sense to do a 59 man minute match and 1 minute screwjob finish, because the focus will be on the 1 minute finish and the rest of the match could’ve been 3 minutes long for all it matters. You can do inteference – it’d work fine as a side show late in the match when you want to give the guys a rest – but you don’t want it to have the deciding impact on a gimmick match, or the gimmick is diminished.

Judgement Day ’00
Winner of Fall #1: Rock
Winner of Match: Triple H

SD! Iron Man Match
Winner of Fall #1: Angle
Winner of Match: Brock

Obviously, Bret/HBK doesn’t follow that pattern, but I’m guessing tonight’s match will.

Things You Wish You Never Knew: Peter King reports Ricky Williams had a unpleasant body odor. This story offically got well past annoying to me when Dan Patrick asked Peter Gammons his thoughts on it, and if he would’ve been happier in baseball. (Dan sports radio oversimplifcation of this into pot vs NFL decision is quite tremendously as well.)

Pete Rose as not in Cooperstown signing autographs this year. That’s opposite of last year, but in line with his non-presence after the negative reaction to his book. The easy assumption is he’s doing this to get back in MLB’s favor. The true test of his low profile status is really going to be when ESPN’s bio flick airs on 9/25.

Buy rates

Following up on Sven‘s comment

Maybe I’m confused and the last week of June is entered as July? Because we’re short one PPV, or there’s a PPV in this group really had a very small buyrate,

The best I can figure is whoever set up the backing Excel spreadsheet isn’t clear on how they want to handle two PPVs in one month yet. There should be some distinction that it’s two seperate numbers in one month or people are going to be confused.

So I think we’ve got

061304 RAW ~250ish
062704 SD! ~240ish?
071104 RAW TBA?

240 for SmackDown! would go with that Meltzer mention of mid happiness with GAB buyrate, because the rematch would be a nice 15-20% increase over the first match.