Random notes

- Man I was pretty upset after that Jets/Dolphins game. Overall it was a good game and it was very exciting at the end, but the fact that the difference ended up being that completely lucky TD the Jets got on 4th and 13 killed me. Favre throws up a wounded duck after getting hit and the ball sails in the air for what felt like 4 seconds, and somehow there was a Jet receiver at the goaline waiting for it and no Dolphin players were around to break the play up! How could there not have been any defenders around the ball when it was in the air that long?! ARGH!! So frustrating!

- Finally, the new Madden rosters are out, so I grabbed those last night and finally started a franchise. Played my first preseason game against the Bucs. I won 41-35. Point total was a bit high and surprisingly my QBs were way more accurate than the CPU (I only had about 5 incompletions the whole game). I'll review my slider settings after the preseason is done so that I have a bigger sample size, but it feels good to finally start a franchise. This is why I play video football games. I really hope EA releases the "Sim Gamer Pack" they mentioned on the Operation Sports forums. That will greatly improve the way the game plays (if the CPU sliders actually work of course).

- Speaking of Madden and Operation Sports, I am liking the involvement that the Madden 2010 team is having on the forums. Their lead designer, Ian (screen name: TheFuture), seems to really want a lot of the things the sim gamers of OS want. At least, he is saying a lot of the right things. I am not holding my breath, especially given the short development cycle, but I am real curious to see how Madden 2010 comes out.

- Check out the Little Big Planet walkthrough videos over at Gametrailers. This game looks very impressive! I can't wait!

- I beat Bionic Commando: Rearmed. Great game. I am going to start it up on a harder difficulty and try to work through all of those challenge rooms (man, these things are TOUGH!)

- I am thinking of picking up Castle Crashers when they fix the online problems.

- I picked up Condemned 2 (360) from Target for $20. I enjoyed the first one and thought it was a severly under appreciated launch game.

- This weekend I switched over from DirecTv and Bellsouth DSL to Comast. I had no real issues with DirecTv, but I just wanted a faster internet connection than what DSL could offer. Plus I will end up saving some cash by consolidating my bill.

I went ahead and got the HD package from Comcast (I never had the DirecTV HD package). The HD stuff looks great of course, but I get better picture quality when I get my local HD channels with my regular over-the-air antenna. I guess they need to compress the HD signal for cable (and satelite) so it doesn't look quite as sharp, but since I get iffy reception with my rabbit ears and lose the signal a lot, I'll take the stability over the slight loss in quality.

The standard def channels look better through Comcast than they did through DirecTV. I mean, they still look like crap, but it is an improvement.

My internet connection though is faster. A lot faster. Like, it is probably faster than it should be. The first thing I did after the technician left was do an internet speed test and this was the result:

Wow. That is about 10 times faster than what I had through DSL!

Yes, I am a happy camper. =)