Lou Pickney's Online Commentary
Showdown Lowdown
Saturday
June 19, 2004
Every now and then there's a video game that captures my imagination and gets me really intrigued. This sort of thing happened more when I was younger, as you might imagine -- I remember the intense excitement of the month before Christmas, counting down the days to receiving Lakers vs. Celtics and the NBA Playoffs for the IBM PC. By today's standards the game is a relic -- to point, it only included the playoff teams from the past season (sorry Sacramento video game retailers!) But they say you always want what you can't have, and such is the case with games.
With adulthood has come many great things, one of which is discretionary income. Games that before had to wait to be requested for gifts can be purchased at will. Not to say that I'm going to be like my FRHS classmate Larry, who in the fall of 1991 as a high school freshman amazingly owned literally every game made to that point for the Super Nintendo. But if I want a game, I can buy it. This is a good thing.
|  | | Showdown: Legends of Wrestling is scheduled to be released this Tuesday. |
I have my new game to be excited about... Showdown: Legends of Wrestling. Acclaim has made some sub-standard video games in the past, but all indications are that its new LOW game is excellent. I've been watching online videos about it and getting really anxious to get to play it. The last time this happened for me was when the original NBA Street came out for the PS2.
The game comes with 73 wrestlers, which is a whopping number. I wonder how much Acclaim had to pay for the rights to all of those guys. But it all comes down to gameplay and fun, and the game appears to be packed full of both (god, I'm coming across like a cheesy video game reviewer now). But seeing Andre the Giant grab Koko B. Ware and slam him to the mat with ease made me laugh out loud... and the chance to relieve classic matches (Steamboat vs. Savage from WrestleMania III, for example) is tempting. The game really needs Ric Flair, but with him under WWE contract that can't happen. It's too bad, since having him alone would've made classics vs. Steamboat (take your pick), Kerry Von Erich (Texas Stadium), Sting (Clash I), Savage (WrestleMania VII), etc. would've been great. But there's some guy on GameFaqs.com who is supposed to be great at making the "Create A Legend" guys who plans to make Flair, so all is well.
Okay, enough Frink-ing out on you for now. They have these teaser story links from MSN when you log in and out of Hotmail (which I am seriously considering replacing with Yahoo as my #1 e-mail of choice due to Yahoo's new 100 MB mail storage), and for once I found one worth linking on here. What your father never told you about women is the title (since it's Father's Day weekend themed), but it's a pretty interesting read and, in my opinion, it's spot-on true (though rather sugar-coated for the mainstream MSN audience).
Anyone trying to call me on my cell number didn't make it through today. The reason: my number is in transit from AT&T to Sprint. I called Sprint at about 11:30 AM and talked to three different customer service reps, finally talking to a guy in the "ports" department who told me that he showed that Sprint had the number but that it would take two to six hours for it to activate with my cell phone. That six hour window has come and gone, but still nothing. Not good. But, I suppose this is the price I pay for keeping my number...
|
