Real life sports

billy

beets The thing about FanBoost is that it’s promoted as having a greater impact than it actually does. The extra power it affords comes out of the driver’s overall allowance anyway, meaning many drivers (when they actually use it) hit the button then immediately lift so as not to run out of energy by the end of the race. For a while, some drivers even had an informal agreement not to use it against eachother. It also makes the driver ineligible for Fastest Lap points, so the drivers at the sharp end often avoid it for that reason. I could probably count the number of times it’s actually impacted a race on one hand.

Attack Mode, on the other hand, is absolutely brilliant.

beets

billy Yeah I was being a bit over the top about fan boost. I already understood that it has very little difference in the race, I just dont like it being part of the sport.
I do like how expiremental Formula E, I guess not everything will hit. I’m still shocked they used to swap cars mid race, it seems so cartoonish.

treefroggy

I love the fact that so many of the Bass Fishing games released for Playstation 2 are extremely Japanese, including tons of wacky voice samples, and were played by redneck step dads nationwide. I always lose my sanity on the rare occasion I notice Sega Bass fishing on the dusty media shelves in otherwise normal people’s milquetoast homes, or in a country thrift store. Like what did that person think when they heard all this commotion:

Much more common than you think!
Anyways: recommend me those good baseball games, old or new! I like ones with RPG mechanics or arcade style!

yeso

treefroggy dusty diamond’s all-star softball!

Syzygy

spin to win

antillese

Syzygy spin to win

I watched this and it was a dope move - thanks for sharing!

I don’t know if you were also aware that this phrase is a bit of a meme in competitive cycling. When you first get into the sport, you have to re-train your brain about what riding a bike feels like. Humans behave more like Honda engines in that they are efficient at high RPM and low torque as opposed to say, a VW TDI engine which is low RPM and high torque. Kids and recreational cyclists probably pedal around 40-60 RPM because they are shifting too early. Elite cyclists can maintain 90-100 without any problem. It feels really weird when you’re learning because you don’t feel like you’re pushing, but you can go further, faster, longer, by shifting the way your legs burn energy from a fast twitch (high power, high energy release) to a slow twitch response.

I got into riding about a decade ago when I wanted a way to maintain some fitness after I had my first kid and I bought a road bike for commuting. I don’t commute on it anymore (job changes make it impractical), but last year I rode over 1000 miles and did over 100k feet of climbing! Finally something good came of being home more because of pandemic isolation.

As far as competitive cycling as a sport, I pretty much ignore it. I do use Strava which is a GPS-enabled cycling and running app which I love mostly as a way to force myself to work harder and try to get faster. I did a few local races about 10 years ago and I didn’t enjoy it at all. I watched a few stages of the Tour de France this year on a whim, but it’s not very engaging in my opinion. So I’m a huge amateur cycling enthusiast, but not one that engages in the competitive aspects beyond trying to get faster times up the local hills.

yeso

fascinated by the youtube subculture of “good sportsmanship” compilations. Strong little league values

yeso

great work from the video game histoyr foundation

https://gamehistory.org/powerupbaseball/

game looks hilarious

Jtwo

Do you guys remember the meme of big sports wins set to the Titanic theme?

Its my favorite shit.

xct

Cycling is a very cool sport to watch, so I’m going to go ahead and write a bunch of words about it.

Actually, there was a question on the pod a while ago along the lines of “How would you make a good Tour de France video game” and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since because road cycling generally, and grand tour cycling in particular, is ripe for analysis as a piece of mad, baroque game design. It’s not like anything else. Unfortunately that makes it hard to read if you don’t know what you’re looking at, but when you start to see how all the pieces work together it’s amazing.

A grand tour works like a race series over three weeks of mostly-consecutive days. The prize for the individual who “wins the series” is the most prestigious, but some (most, even) teams go to the race with no serious prospect of competing for it. They are there for the individual stage wins, or for one of the minor classifications (like the sprinter’s prize or the climber’s prize). The smallest teams are mostly just there to get their sponsor’s logo on TV as much as possible. So all these teams are motivated to act differently and deploy different tactics on any given day, but they are all on the same road at the same time, bound to each other by the iron laws of aerodynamics. The easiest way to ride a bike fast is always behind somebody else, so riders who cooperate with each other go faster, and the more there are the faster they can go. So ad-hoc alliances form between groups of rivals who have an immediate common interest in outrunning everybody else - alliances which inevitably end with everybody stabbing everybody else in the back as soon as it’s expedient to do so.

All these clashing and shifting motivations create all kinds of emergent situations which are hard to see coming, but when you look back at how the pieces arranged themselves on the board you can see how things never could have happened any other way. Last year’s Tour de France was won by an individual rider masterfully taking advantage of an entire rival team’s hard work to cruise along in 2nd place, before delivering a finisher of Mortal Kombat level brutality and virtuosity on the final day to win. Last year’s Giro d’Italia was won because of the circumstances arising from the winner’s team no longer trying to win.

In short, pro cycling owns and you should go and watch it!

antillese

Strava leaderboards are great, they’re kind of like Cycling: The Video Game. I’ve never been interested in doing any competitive sports, but if you come for my KOMs god help you.

hellomrkearns

chill with this

SuperEffective

Antinovice let’s go wizards!

I too am a John Wall fan even though he has been traded. I like NBA, I also like baseball and the NFL kind of. Ive been a San Diego Padres fan since I was a boy. I still really like their classic logo called the swingin friar.

No wait, not that kind of swingin!

antillese

xct Actually, there was a question on the pod a while ago along the lines of “How would you make a good Tour de France video game”

That was me. 😛

Cycling as a strategy game I think is the way to go. That’s what makes it interesting. When to time your breaks, when to chase or not, who is caring about the green or polka dot jerseys. There is a lot going on! It just seems that those TDF games are leaning into the “mash the X button” rather than the Football Manager side of things.

xct if you come for my KOMs god help you.

You’re faster than me if you have any Kings/((or Queens) of the mountains. But I did a Strava training program last summer that was shaped around doing a 15 minute climb faster. I did this two mile segment near my house for conditioning so many times I got the Local Legend (person who has ridden a segment the most times in the last 90 days) for it. I also got the local legend on the climb, and you know what? I feel pretty proud about it!

🚴‍♂️💨

xct

antillese

Well, that was a good question, it certainly got me thinking! Yeah, the minute-to-minute tactics are definitely where the fun is, rather than the mechanics of pushing on the pedals. I was imagining playing as the DS in the team car, or the road captain sat in the peloton, watching the dynamics of the race and giving the orders. But at the same time, a lot of the most interesting tactical decisions are made by the riders themselves in the moment (do I follow the break? Do I start skipping turns on the front? Do I sit up and save my energy for tomorrow?) so I can see why it’s tempting to make the game be from a single rider’s perspective. And if you tried to combine all of this into one game it would probably be an incomprehensible mess (just like real life!).

Re Strava leaderboards, I know I’m never going to get a whiff of the top 10 on any major climb around here, so for me the game is about finding segments that are a little out-of-the-way, with an attainable-looking record and going for those. Put a route together that links up a couple of likely-looking segments, turn yourself inside out and the worst that can happen is you give yourself a good workout and discover some new roads you wouldn’t have been on before!

whatsarobot

Watching the Leafs play the Canadiens last night, I noticed that Carey Price’s new mask might be the most badbutt goalie mask I’ve ever seen. Any thoughts?

https://www.nhl.com/news/canadiens-carey-price-new-mask-is-biomechanical-skull/c-320121484

hellomrkearns

whatsarobot wow..i would not want to meet the 12 year old who designed that. Got me down a rabbit hole now:
Scariest goalie masks in NHL history

Syzygy

Reminds me of Air Gear / Oh!Great’s design sense in general:

Blrb

Growing up I played Aussie Rules, and later hockey too. Don’t really like watching hockey, but I loved playing it. Also loved swimming and long distance running. I wasn’t a great footy player, but I was good at tackling people. Shame I didn’t grow-up in a Rugby state maybe? I miss playing sport, and was talking to someone about joining a mixed Aussie Rules league but then the plague came.

I don’t like crowds, but I do like going to AFLW games when they’re in my ’burb. Great local footy atmosphere, but with a more diverse crowd. The was a footy ground at the end of my street when I was a kid, so local footy vibes and sounds are appreciated.

I started getting into F1 ’cause of that Senna movie and that Drive to Survive series, but all my memories of watching it in the 90s are that it was really boring. Still keen to see how Ricciardo and MacLaren do this year though. I have no interest in cars, but I’m into watching people who are really really good at stuff, and F1 brings a lot of those people together.

Playing ISS64 got me into soccer (actually playing that pretty F1 on the 64 got me curious about F1 too), but I don’t really have a local team, ’cause the one I liked (Melbourne Heart) got bought by Man City. None of the A-League teams have any history, and most have shit names. It blows. But I’m into the FFA Cup, and am itching for them to get a proper league going with relegation and stuff so maybe some of the older clubs can get back into it. But yeah, without a team I tend to lose interest. So mostly I just pay attention to the national teams. I’m still bitter about Italy diving during the 2006 World Cup.

I like teams that wear vertical stripes, either red and white or black and white. Applies to plenty of soccer teams, but no local ones, so…

I don’t fuck with solo sports (unless they’re biffo ones), but I have a soft spot for Nick Kyrios.

I don’t fuck with cricket ’cause all the Australian players seem like massive fucking tools. I liked the Boony era. I liked spin bowling in the backyard with my brothers.

whatsarobot

Really enjoying hearing about everyone’s relationship to sports (especially ones I don’t know much about or aren’t a big part of Canadian/Japanese culture). Thanks to everyone who’s posted here!

Part of the reason I started this thread was to talk about the ways sports evolve over time. Each sport has its own meta-game, where problems are solved and rules or play styles must be adjusted accordingly.

Now, Ken Dryden (one of the most celebrated hockey goalies of all time) has written this amazing (though, warning, extremely lengthy) piece about what the NHL needs to do next, and over the course of this piece, talks about how the NHL and NBA have grown and changed their styles of play in recent decades. I loved this, and wanted to share it, in case anyone here is interested.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/02/hockey-goalies-are-too-big-now/618021/

wickedcestus

whatsarobot I feel like this article put into words a lot of thoughts I have had over a few years about the “ugliness” of hockey. It’s extremely hyperbolic of him to say that open-ice skills are coming to not matter, and I do think that play in tighter spaces can still be engaging (such as watching co-ordinated teammates cycle the puck along the boards), but I agree that the style of play of “throw it at the net and screen the goalie and/or bang away at the rebound” just doesn’t feel right. And I agree that shot-blocking, to be honest, just sucks. It hurts the players, and just doesn’t feel like the way things should be done, lol. I have opined (mostly to an empty room) on such extreme views as “you should get a penalty for blocking a shot,” which would be impossible to enforce and probably stupid, but always seems to occur to me whenever I see someone limping off the ice after taking a puck to the shin that the goalie, realistically, probably could’ve stopped himself with much less trouble.

rejj

I don’t know what I did to make this happen, but the almighty Algorithm on youtube has started offering me videos of Americans reacting to foreign, and in particular Australian sports clips.

I don’t even really enjoy watching AFL (Australian rules football, mentioned a few times in this thread already), however watching people that have never seen the sport react to it is somehow entertaining. The same goes for watching people see cricket for the first time, although I genuinely like that sport.

Seeing baseball people watch cricket is a thing to behold. They start out bewildered, like most people do. Then start drawing parallels between it and the sport they know (or play!). Then start understanding the skills on display, and relating it to highly skilled play and players they know. Usually a lot more wholesome than “lol this sport is weird yo!”

« Previous Page Next Page »