Not quite summer, but I may as well go back as far as May for a couple of things that I can think of worth saying something about, both have had fairly new things too so perhaps it’s good to bring them up again. I’ll be doing this in roughly chronological order but I forget exact details.

Let’s start this off with Ironman 2. It just came out on DVD but I haven’t got it or seen the new releases yet (if I even do). It’s a pretty standard superhero movie, probably on the better end of that spectrum (but there’s been a lot of very bad ones, so that doesn’t mean too much). Fun enough, but nothing exceptional. I wouldn’t think it would be possible (especially in the superhero style with an origin story in the first movie) to put more exposition in the sequel but somehow they succeeded. Fun but nothing special.

Also coming out in May (I think) was the game Red Dead Redemption. Made by the same company that does Grand Theft Auto, it’s basically that but western. It’s weird how this game has ended up, I really enjoyed the story, and played that through till completion (unless there’s another ending after the last one I saw, there was like 3 endings that I played through). There’s a few side things I never completed and I kinda wanted to go back and do that, but it just doesn’t have that same feel going back afterwards (especially with the *trying to avoid spoilers* drastic change your player goes through very near the end) and I can’t bring myself to want to play it again, despite the fact that they’ve definitely tried to add some levels of replayability to it. Multiplayer seems tacked on, bland and not well balanced but they keep adding DLC (with prices on the high end for more avatars and a game mode or two). The highlight of the game is the single player experience, and the scenery, and once you’ve done that there’s nothing left, and they’re not even trying to add to it while trying to add to the worse parts.

Inception is probably the most overrated movie since, well since Avatar. I suppose that’s not that impactful, since one year isn’t that long, but honestly I can’t think of anything that compares to either of these two in that respect (maybe the first Shrek). The story and all the details made no sense, and I don’t mean this like I didn’t understand what was happening, I did, it was just dumb and poorly thought through. Let’s start with what I think is the worst example of this, his top. He uses it to tell if it’s in a dream or not, as in his dreams it doesn’t stop spinning, but in someone else’s dream it does, so if he spins it, and it doesn’t stop then he’s obviously dreaming, but if it does stop then either he’s in someone else’s dream, or he’s in the real world. What garbage is this? It doesn’t work, and if you think about it at all you see this problem. Why was one character able to change shapes and no one else? My suspension of disbelief is willing to allow the movie to have coherent dreams which follow causality (which dreams don’t) and it’s willing to allow the technology to go into someone else’s dream. However, it does not allow things like “we’ll make it so that when your sleeping body falls you wake up” only to show many times sleeping bodies falling without waking up (but then they do when they try to wake them up). Why is gravity all screwed up on one level, but not the next? Luckily I think this is also the type of movie that after everyone talks about how good it is, largely forgets about shortly afterwards, as long as people don’t go bringing it up again, months after most people forgot, those Jerks!

On the other hand, Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World was a great movie that apparently no one went to see. The biggest complaint I’ve heard is that some characters were so funny they kind of stole the show from the main characters. I think the books are better than the movie, and although I agree many of the changes are things that are needed to condense the story to fit in the movie, and many of them were really good (this is the kind of thing that happens when you actually involve the original author in the making of the movie) I’m still kinda disappointed that in the movie, Scott never fought any robots, why would they take out fighting robots? One thing I find kinda weird too, is that people talk about Michael Cera being typecast, and that this is another instance of that, but the character of Scott Pilgrim isn’t really like any of his previous roles at all. Unfortunately that wasn’t conveyed in the script or to the director or to the actor. Scott is supposed to be a huge narcissist, and also quite stupid. It’s kinda weird, Scott Pilgrim the character from the books has many character traits similar to characters from a TV show apparently no one watched called Arrested Development. One however is almost the complete opposite of Scott Pilgrim, and I leave it to the reader to guess who I’m referring to. (If you don’t know, I guess you’re going to have to go and read the Scott Pilgrim books and watch Arrested Development, and even if you do know you should do those things again, because they’re so awesome).

The last Scott Pilgrim book also came out this summer (before the movie) and it was also good, but I’m not going to talk much about it, instead I want to talk about the game they made for PS3 and 360. Its release corresponded with the release of the movie, but followed more of the book (until the end, when it went off on its own, but the movie did that too) which among other things means in the game you do get to fight robots! I’ll claim here that this is easily one of the best games based off a movie, partly because it wasn’t really based off the movie. The game, the movie and the last book were all made at about the same time. It’s really quite amazing how well the game (with gameplay based of those old brawlers like Double Dragon, River City Ransom, or the Ninja Turtles games where you just walk through the levels beating guys up) feels like it belongs with the story (which is actually a pretty typical romantic comedy). This probably has more to do with Brian Lee O’Mally’s books than Ubisoft’s game but this game is easily worth the price to download (probably even a better value than a ticket to go see the movie).

NHL 11, EA’s most recent game in their ongoing series had what sounded like enough improvements that I felt like I should pick it up this year, and so I did, they talked so much about their new real-time physics, which is a big help, the thing that really sold me on it was the inclusion of the CHL (which to those of you who don’t know is made up of 3 leagues, the WHL, QMJHL, and OHL). Yeah I pretty much picked it up because I can play as the Kitchener Rangers in it. Year after year, at least lately, it’s been EA’s NHL series winning sports video game of the year awards, and there is a reason why. That said there’s still lots of room for improvement too. Off the top of my head, I can tell you that it’s really frustrating how the CPU is able to take the puck away from you, and skate on, whereas your methods to try the same thing only result in the puck being knocked away (often to just a different player on the other team). In EA’s soccer games, the players will try and take the ball away from another player just by running close to him, in their hockey games, the CPU will do that too, but the player will sit there and do nothing making some frustrating and unrealistic plays. There also seems to be a problem in this year’s game where players will pass in the wrong direction, often sending it directly to the other team, without any teammate who could have received the pass in that direction. Players will often move out of good scoring positions and into heavier cover for some reason, and they’ve still not fixed the problem where players do nothing to try and keep the puck onside (so if a player is near the line, they’ll often take the puck out of the zone and then put it back it for seemingly no reason causing a bad offside. Sometimes I wish EA’s different teams would work more closely together though. The NHL franchise has many good things about it, but could use some of the features from FIFA and some from Madden, and so on, it wouldn’t even cost much, as everything involved is already theirs.

I was going to talk about Civ 5 here too, but This is long enough for now, and since it came out September 21st I can call it a fall release and do that some other time.

A few weeks ago we decided to go see a Jays game as the first of my “see all the professional teams in Toronto” plan. I had been in the library that’s close to here, waiting for Kathleen to check her email (we hadn’t actually had internet access yet) and I saw that day’s edition of the Star, and among other things saw that the Jays were playing that night. I asked Kathleen if she wanted to go to a game bought some tickets and a few hours later we were leaving to see the game.

As a side note here, regarding buying tickets for these events, Ticketmaster has such a horrible website with almost no usability, and random extra charges added on they alone kinda make me want to rethink this sports thing, as I’ll have to use them to get tickets to pretty much every game I want to try and see.

On arriving at the Skydome (I’ve already said in this post that I dislike Rogers, so is it a surprise to see me call the place by its old name instead of its current one?) we had to walk across to the box office to pick up our tickets and saw something that made little sense to me. Did you know that you can order cable or internet at the Skydome? Rogers actually has one of their Rogers Plus stores inside the building. I really want to know if they’ve ever sold an internet package at that location.

At least 5 times on our walk from Union Station to the Skydome we were approached by scalpers offering to sell us tickets to the game we were off to see. I find this really quite odd, as the stands were quite empty, and although I know they don’t even bother trying to sell tickets for most of the seats there were still hundreds if not thousands of seats available. Why buys scalped tickets to something that’s not even close to being sold out? Do they sell the tickets cheaper, and if so is that cheaper price worth the chance that they’re not legit tickets?

After a very small complication picking up our tickets (I had ordered them and given my new address, the person at the box office asked to see my drivers licence, which was under the old one, and got confused) we went into the building. I feel like I could get in trouble for saying this, but if you ever want to take something into the building that you’re not supposed to take it, give it to a female. Security pats down men but not women, I guess they follow the TSA method of security, make it look like they’re doing something, when really they’re not.

We hadn’t left ourselves enough time to eat before going to the game, so we decided to try and get food there. It was probably a mistake, but then again the food is part of the experience, There’s probably not many of these sporting events in the city where a hot dog and a pretzel cost more than the price of the ticket but that just goes to show how little you can get tickets for (and some of how expensive the food is). It turns out they have some promotions where you can get a ticket and all you can eat hot dogs, popcorn, nachos, pop and maybe other things too, and although I don’t remember the price anymore, it seems like it could actually be a good deal, especially with how long baseball games are. I think if they’re still doing this next year I’m going to have to try that.

I was kind of surprised, although after thinking about it, not really, that Kathleen said she’d never been to an MLB baseball game before. I had been to so many when I was younger, my schools would plan trips every year where they got some buses and families could buy tickets to go to a game at a group rate. Her growing up twice as far away from Toronto as me probably makes a bit of a difference on that, and I feel like it’s safe to say that sports are a much bigger deal in my family than hers.

Like the hockey games we’ve gone to in the past, I spent most of the evening explaining the rules of the game to Kathleen and pointing out various other little facts about the game, and location. It reminds me of the one story I kinda like to tell about Grade 8 gym. We got to the time of year where the gym teacher decided we were going to play baseball. There were really only two people in the class who knew more of the rules of the game to be able to play it, and I was one of them. I’m not sure if it’s something to be proud of or disappointed in others that the nerdy kid who spent his lunch hours playing Magic: the Gathering, or Sim City in the computer lab also apparently knew (some) sports better than everyone else. Back to the Jays game though, most of my interesting tidbits were so out of date, I also had to say “I’m pretty sure this isn’t true anymore but there was a time when…” They messed me up quite a bit when just as their “Let’s Go Blue Jays” song was finishing I was going to say how (and I know this isn’t true anymore) the Jays were the only team in MLB that played their own song during the 7th inning stretch whereas everyone else played “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” they started to play “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

The article I had read in the Star which alerted me to the fact that this game was even happening had spent some time talking about how the Jays were the team in the leagues who had the most home-runs so far in the season, and that they were so far ahead there was really no hope of them being caught. That didn’t prepare me for how many home runs were hit this game there were a lot, even a few hit by Texas. Maybe it’s just that the last time I paid any attention to baseball the players didn’t use steroids as much (or more likely, the steroids weren’t as good back then) but I was quite surprised by the amount of them. They ended up winning the game, and quite convincingly too (although there was a point in time in the middle of the game it was close) and we began our trek home.

It was weird walking down the ramp leaving the stadium, because any game I’ve ever been to in the past it’s been really crowded and slow moving, whereas we didn’t see anyone else (although could hear a couple other people). I was also kind of surprised how many random people we passed by walking back to Union, and then on the subway asked how the game went, I figured for the most part people don’t really care enough about baseball to even know there was a game. Then again, if you’re at Union Station and you see a crowd (albeit a small one) walking from the skywalk with some of them wearing Jays paraphernalia I guess it’s a pretty safe assumption a game just ended.

Was a fun night, but I think either the Leafs or the Marlies are next, and I think that’s going to be far more exciting (although also far more likely for the home team to lose). That said I can easily see myself going to more Jays games while we’re living in the city, and I can’t imagine affording to go to multiple leafs games even if prices seem to be going down because they’ve been sucking so much.

I suppose one of the most talked about things this year seems to have been the absence of video replay, especially since we’re at a point where the technology could have a conclusive decision faster than the way it is now with the players mobbing and arguing with a ref, as any player trying to argue a replay call would most definitely find themselves with a card pretty much immediately.

The argument FIFA has against this is that it would slow the game down, and the counter argument is “no it wouldn’t.”  I think the truth is that they’re both right.  If the feed going out to the world can show that England did indeed score on Germany while the players are still arguing that means the refs could have looked at it and seen the result and had complete certainty.  The problem becomes what do you put replay on because I also don’t think you can argue that holding up a game to check whether there really was contact or if the guy was diving wouldn’t slow things down, and what if the ref’s original call was “no contact, keep playing” but he looks back and finds out it’s wrong?  Do you turn the clock back and discount stuff that’s happened?  You just can’t go to the video replay for every offside and foul in a game, as that really would slow the game down.

The best answer to this problem seems to be to be to look at the NHL.  I may say that partially because I’m Canadian, and a much bigger fan of hockey than pretty much any other professional sport.  There could also be other leagues with rules like this, but I don’t know them so this is what I have.  It’s simply that video replay is only used to determine whether a goal is good or not.  Penalties are not watched on replay, but the league can punish you after the game with things like suspensions so even if you get away with it in game, that doesn’t mean you get away with it completely, and that is also a system I would support in Soccer, if replay after the game finds him diving, then do something like start him off with a yellow card in his next game (or give him a 1 game suspension or something, but then again practically these two things would probably be the same, why would the coach start you in a game with a card when he can put someone else in without a substitution).  So if we only allow replay to be used (real time) on goals, problem solved right?  I’d say not quite.

What if the player got the ball, and shot immediately, but was offside?  Well replay is used for determining if the ball went in via legal means (ie. no handball) and while play was still going (by the way, even in the NHL where they do use video replay, that goal the US got screwed out of still wouldn’t have counted, the whistle went before the ball was in, and whether it goes in or not after the whistle it doesn’t matter, play’s over, video replay wouldn’t have fixed that problem) not whether a player is offside or not.  However, it seems really obvious that you shouldn’t count a goal if the player was offside.  What if he was offside in the middle of the field and ran in on a break away, I’d say that’s different than if it happened very quickly inside the 18 yard box.  What if the shooter was onside, but it got passed to him by someone offside?  You’d have to draw a line somewhere, but then every time something happened that was near that line we’d have pretty much the same controversy we have now without that line.

The other thing about cameras, especially high-speed cameras is that they’re not cheap.  The 2010 world cup was also a lot more than a month long tournament in South Africa, it’s been going on since 2008, and been played all over the world, the tournament we just saw was merely the last stage (that’s why you can use the term “world cup finals” to describe all that happened in South Africa, not just Spain vs. Holland), and when we put it into that perspective cost of cameras could be an issue.  I think it would be hard to deny that one of the main reasons soccer has become so popular is that all you need to play are the people, a ball and a place to play, and no matter where in the world you are, and no matter how poor that’s something you can manage.

Sure at the higher level, the place you play needs to be measured out better and more exact, and there’s also travel costs, but imagine you are one of FIFA’s smaller members, only barely able to put a team together and afford to send them to play, I’m sure it happens.  Well now we’re asking them to potentially add thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of equipment (plus ways to prevent it from being damaged or stolen) to a field that an island with 100 000 people on it want to play their games.  I agree that for most nations these cameras won’t be prohibitively expensive, but for some they could be, and I’d say that that is bad for the game.  I guess you could say then that the cameras only need to be used during the finals themselves and save others some money, however, then I would know you’re not from Ireland (by the way look up France vs. Ireland if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

The fact is that no matter what happens there will always be bad calls somehow and when your team is on the wrong side of things it’s going to be upsetting to you.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to improve the system, but, the overall benefit compared to the cost (and I don’t just mean money here) however seems to not really be in favour of cameras right now.  Personally I think if something is done to the game, some level of rework to some rules to make the game more interesting should be considered.

This could again be a hockey fan saying what he really wants to watch is hockey so other sports should become more like it, but I’d still say this is worth thinking about.  Back before the lockout the NHL was running into a little bit of a problem with games not being very interesting.  Some teams would play super-defensively and only go for things like a 1-0 win, and that worked well, so if you were to put the best teams together to play each other instead of getting a high paced game full of exciting moments you would see a lot of control, a lot of passing, and almost no offensive pushing at all.  That’s not to say they weren’t highly skilled, and it could be interesting to watch, but gets boring after a while because all the games have the same slow pace.

The NHL said “hey this is no good” and have changed rules in order to up the pace of the game and make it more exciting.  I’m not trying to say more goals is necessarily better, there’s few sports I can think of that would be more boring than basket ball, however when scoring is easier it means one goal isn’t enough, you need to know that they could score so you better go for another.  The other way to see it is that the team that plays worse, but gets a fluke goal is less likely to win.  Sure if you’re the better team you can still lose, and even if it’s still a one goal difference it’s hard to say that a team that wins a game 3-2 doesn’t at least somehow deserve the win more than a team that wins 1-0, as although one fluke goal is possible when you’re being out-played, something like 3 is just not going to happen.  As for where they could start with soccer rules changes, I’d say do something about making it easier to get past the defenders without being offside, and also maybe something more (possibly even unlimited substitutions) to keep the player energy levels on the field high.  They could even have an official who part of his job is to make sure no one goes on the field without someone coming off, but allow it anytime not during a play stoppage.  You could even solve both of these problems by making defenders switch off back near their own goal, so if you get caught on a bad change then the offense has plenty of space without being offside.

The simple fact here is that the NHL’s schedule is not fair to the various teams.  You play 50% more games against one team in your division than against another team in your conference, you also play 33% more games against the 4 other teams in your division than you do against the 15 teams in the other conference.  Conferences and divisions are divided up geographically, and this is good as it reduces travel time on the players, and tends to lead to more games against rival teams which tend to be more exciting for the fans.  However, this is also the source of the unfairness because teams aren’t very well distributed around the continent in terms of skill.

Let’s look at the Washington Capitols and their season this year, 54-15-13 for a win percentage of about 74% (loss in overtime counts as half a win).  No doubt this is an impressive record but let’s look at how they got it:

These numbers show something that is perhaps a little different. Looking at these, we can see only two divisions whose win percentage is actually above their total for the season and that those divisions are the ones that Washington played the most games against (well alright, there was a tie between Atlantic and North East). Over half of their games were played against these teams making up one third of the league, against the other two thirds of the league they didn’t play nearly as well. Well enough to get a playoff spot sure, but I don’t think well enough to win the Presidents’ Trophy.

Speaking of playoff spots let’s look at the teams that got playoff spots in the eastern conference.  Washington, New Jersey, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Ottawa, Boston, Philadelphia and Montreal (in the order of their rankings).  Looking at this we see three teams from the Atlantic Division, four from the North-East, and only one from the South-East.  That one team from the South-East?  Washington.  None of the other teams they played so many games against were able to make the playoffs, not even playing against the other not so good teams in their division.  Montreal, on the other hand, comes from what I think would be fair to describe as one of the hardest divisions in the NHL, where four of the five teams made it (and this is where that Toronto reference from the title comes).  So, that says something about this year that hardly proves that one division is harder than another, so let’s look at the past 10 years.  In that time there have been 72 possible playoff spots in the eastern conference, 28 of them have been given to the North-East division, 30 to the Atlantic and 14 to the South-East.  Remember too, that the division leaders are guaranteed a spot so that means there has to be at least 9 handed out.  In the last 10 years there has never been more than two teams from the South-East Division make the playoffs in the same year, and four times only one team has made it.  Both other divisions in the East have not had only one team make it at all, and both have 3 times had all but one team make it.

Oddly enough the amount of Stanly Cup finals appearances over the last 10 years show only 1 appearance, a loss, by the North-East Division, 5 appearances, 3 wins, from the Atlantic, and 3 appearances, 2 wins, from the South-East, which considering the amount of times teams from that division make the playoffs seems kind of impressive.  However, this really only says that this 5 team division can only consistently put out one or two good teams a season, and not even the same ones year to year, however, whichever team that is tends to do very well (except this year) whereas the other divisions are constantly doing well throughout the season (and the North-East is just blowing it in the playoffs).

almost 750 words and I still haven’t directly answered what my title here said I would.  Washington’s 1st seed was inflated by having an easier regular season, whereas Montreal’s 8th seed is a little low because of having a much harder season.  As for  Toronto, yeah, the Leafs have been horrible the past couple years, but I bet if they were in a weaker division, they would only have gone the past 3 years of not making the playoffs, instead of the past 5.

Also, this is why the Jays are screwed, they’re in the same division as both the Yankees and the Red Sox, and in Major League Baseball there’s half as many playoff spots (keeping the same division leaders get in) for the same number of teams