Alkaiser

Dave D:

The thing is, very few of the people here are actually angry at the notion that Portland's getting jobbed.

Most of the commentors are angry at the completely illogical methodology of his article. You want to make a case that Portland's getting jobbed? Go for it. But don't try and tell me you're doing a "mathematical exercise" that fails at the most fundamental of levels. Why even bother doing the exercise if you're not going to care to follow-through on the most basic levels of diligence?

If you run a macro on bad data, you absolutely KNOW that your end result will always be the same: garbage.

"Garbage In, Garbage Out", it's a fundamental axiom of computer science.

No, Tom, YOU'RE missing the point.

The point is that your flag-raising macro, is meaningless without better data. If you only use the box score, it's a completely worthless macro. THAT is the point. You may as well use a macro that raises flags based on the margin of victory. That's how pointless your macro flags would be!

The play-by-play is ON PAPER. The technical fouls are ON PAPER. It wouldn't take much to create a macro that makes a reasonable judgment on intentional fouls (fouls delivered in the last 2 minutes when the game's within 10, occurring < 5 sec. after a possession change.) and you could then use THAT macro to raise some legitimate flags.

Your macro, as has been pointed out to you, would be almost, if not entirely, useless. Don't get all whiny and defensive, you wrote a bad article based on a bad premise. Man up and accept your criticism.

Ziller, you've gone and written the moron's article.

"Now, this is a math exercise meant to show whether a macro-based red flag should be raised about the foul-calling in this series. Based on the statistical expectations going in, the data would indicate Game 3 should shoot up a substantial red flag, and Game 4 should offer a minor one."

No, what you have is an exercise grounded soundly in stupidity. Without looking at the context of the fouls, just matching up FT numbers means precisely NOTHING.

Now maybe you've closed off your mind, but it's mind-bogglingly easy to completely destroy your argument. A rational person would realize after reading what I have to write, that you have absolutely no logical ground to hold your stated position. Ready?

Oh no, "Game 4 provided a tighter alignment with expectations: Portland shot 17 FTAs, Houston 22."

But wait... "What's this!?" says the guy who watched the game, "Wasn't Portland INTENTIONALLY giving up FTs at the end of the game to stop the clock? I wonder if those account for the blip?"

So our curious reader heads over and looks at the 4th quarter to see how many FTs the Blazers ASKED THE REFS TO GIVE THE ROCKETS.

http://scores.espn.go.com/nba/playbyplay?gameId=290426010&period=4

Answer: 6.

Meaning the FT disparity isn't Houston 22 - Portland 17.

It's Portland 17 - Houston 16.

BOMBSHELL.

OMG. Houston shot less called FTs than Portland. It's so, so hard to win in this league when you're only shooting one more FT than the opposing team, isn't it, Tom?

Game 3: 8 intentional FTs given at the end of the game AND a technical FT given up by Pryzbilla. Final tally:

Houston 15 FTs - Portland 10.

Oh my word. How will the guys from Portland EVER cope when the refs are causing such horrible skews in distribution.

Your so-called math exercise is worthless, because it fails to take even the simplest of context (Technical and Intentional fouls into account.) As the popular counter to "figures don't lie" says, "But liars do figures."

Jazz fans were crying about this last year while giving up 10FTs in the final minute. OMG LA shot 13 more FTs than us! UNFAIR! Well don't give LA 10 FTs for fun, and you'll only have a 3 FT differential.

Maybe if these teams STOPPED INTENTIONALLY FOULING the fans would have a gripe.

Now, Mr. Ziller, you obviously feel that you're a cut above the random guy posting comments on a blog, (the pay alone should indicate that.) so you've gotta be held to a higher standard. I'd expect a blogger to have some pathetic snipe back, but I expect someone who's ostensibly a paid journalist to man up, admit their mistakes, and post a humble correction.

So what's it going to be?

Riiiiight.

The guy who writes the crap story for Advent Rising AND the bargain bin liner Neo Hunter blames the game industry for not being creative enough.

While I agree with the fact that storytelling does need to be much more of a focus than it is now, he's definitely not a person that has any more stories that I feel the need to hear.

Here's a Neo Hunter review if you, like everyone else, are unfamiliar with the game:

http://www.netjak.com/review.php/1173

The jokes about the Wii name may be old news to everyone here, but the mainstream audience has yet to start cracking jokes on it. Wait until your local newscaster has to cover it.

For the record, yes, I DID like the name Google to begin with. It actually makes sense.

Google didn't have to announce it's name complete with a primer on all the reasons you should appreciate how clever and completely non-stupid its name was, either.

Spiritualized:

That article you quote is BS. He's playing the same build I played, and that build of the tennis game doesn't do any of that.

People on the floor at E3 were all amped to say things like that. I even had some other game journalist claim the game let you control you players' movements, because he was so high on "Wiiphoria" he wasn't actually looking at the game, despite the Nintendo rep showing off the game REPEATEDLY saying to everyone picking up the controller "You don't move the characters, all you need to do is swing."

In the build I played, you can't add backspin, topspin, or power. You determine the vague direction of your shot based on how early or late you swing. It's effectively a game of "time your swing and see who misses first". When someone mistimes a swing badly, you'll end up with the ball going out, or in a lob situation, and you can smash the lob. That's it.

I did everything I could possibly think of to try and vary up my swing motion to get a different response out of the game. I exaggerated my swing, I clipped my swing. I swung forehand, I swung backhand, I chopped, I lobbed, I ended my followthrough pointing the remote in a direction to try and guide the ball. None of that did anything.

I'm tired of people ascribing things to this game that it's not actually doing, and because of its simplicity, it seems to have happened with this game more than any of the others. When you actually look at the game objectively, you'll come away with something like what this IGN guy is reporting and then you can figure out whether or not you thought it was fun enough for you.

But that's not what I'm hearing. I had people tell me this game was just like playing a game of tennis...people who, when asked, then told me they'd never actually played a game of real tennis. This rose-colored fanaticism isn't going to make anyone happier about the finished product, people. If you're going to try and report objectively about a game, you had better well be objectively examining the game.

I can't comment on the rest of Wii Sports, as I haven't played them, but I have heard from people I trust, that bowling is a lot of fun.

I agree with 32 and WhiteRoseDuelist.

Board gaming's as alive as ever for me and my group of friends. We have a weekly board game/pen & paper RPG session. 4 of us are former Squaresoft testers, 1 of us is currently a developer, as is one of our other guys who's just too swamped to show up anymore, and another who moved up north to work at Namco Bandai.

If you haven't played Puerto Rico, Alhambra, Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, Arkham Horror or Twilight Imperium, you guys are missing out on a lot of fun.

I generally watch the cutscenes until I've figured out the plot. This usually takes maybe 10-25% of the game, and then I just start skipping everything, if possible, because the people who write the dialogue just end up reiterating and constantly overtly alluding to whatever was in the cutscene that it honestly doesn't matter.

How many parents currently use Xbox Live Silver/Gold accounts to leave their kids' memos on their 360s?

Yeah, I expect the same number to use the Wii to leave notes to their kids.

Here's the parental note progression:

1) Pen & Paper
2) Phone Call
3) Text message to cell.
4) Learn how to use the game console to send a message.

How many kids' folks don't even use e-mail these days?

If you're bagging on Vlad for the "pugdy bastard" comment, remember, he's the one that had enough "guts" (pun intended) to put up $500 of his own cash that said he'd lose a bunch of weight over the summer...and then he didn't. It's supposed to self-deprecating humor.

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/05/21/photos_of_katamari_d.html

Consdering that this isn't the only public display of the ol' katamari in San Francisco this year, I'm pretty sure that the game is the inspiration for the ad.