Month: December 2009

Bowl Championship Series and Polls

BCSEverybody despises the BCS so it is not a shock if I pour on some extra hate as well. The problem is, besides almost universally wanting a playoff, critics of the current system identify a number of different failures in how we choose a college national champion. It is hard to argue that the BCS isn’t at least better than what we had before, where teams would just play in random bowl games and get ranked afterward, where #1 and #2 were not even guaranteed to play each other as they are now. So where can improvements be made? I want to specifically discuss the computers, polls, conference champions, bowl games, and of course, a playoff bracket.

College sports do something that their pro counterparts do not – they keep track of national rankings. The reason is fairly simple: 32 teams are much easier to manage than 120. BCS rankings have a computer component, of which fans criticize the algorithms, and the human poll component, which is often blamed for playing favorites.

The computers themselves aren’t so bad. Whether or not the statistical calculations need tweaking over time, we can all at least rest easy knowing that everybody is on the same level field. There will be optimal strategies for ‘gaming’ the system – scheduling strong or light, running up the score, favoring offense or defense. This is no different for any sport (or game really) where people are operating under a set of rules. This actually gives the NCAA power to guide the sport in new ways as well. If they feel like teams aren’t playing enough home games or are playing too many Division II opponents then the computer algorithms can reward or penalize teams across the board. This is no different from how the game evolves whenever penalties are added and removed from the game.

The other two-thirds of the rankings formula are much less objective and that’s why human polls are horseshit. Coaches and media members tend to vote favorably for old school powers and not give enough respect to up and comers. This immediately brings bias and unfairness into play. Compounding the problem are preseason rankings, which are official rankings based purely on speculation. It is media masturbation at best, but at worst it puts overhyped teams above legitimate contenders, making it hard for the lower ranked teams to pull ahead. Human voters will usually not let a team drop in ranking unless it loses, so if you climb to #2 by beating better opponents than #1, you will still be stuck below them. It is exactly why Alabama was a lot better than Florida but remained below them until they beat them.

As bad as preseason rankings are, with human polling abolished and computers recalculating every week, there is no bias against being ‘jumped’. We can let the media and coaches rate teams based on whatever they want but as soon as the season starts and the computers are turned on those ‘guesses’ are thrown in the garbage.

Even conferences and divisions are bad. Conference champions are not always the best representative for the conference. Two 11-1 teams in one division can only send one to try and win it. Meanwhile, the best team in the other division is 8-4. If that 8-4 team happens to upset the 11-1 team, how does the other 11-1 team feel not being able to have a shot at the conference title? Surely one of the two 11-1 teams should have gotten that title. The NFL isn’t a good analogy. Not only does it have the same problem but it is smaller with a more difficult barrier to entry for new teams. The NFL has a much more controlled climate and a balancing mechanic called *the draft*. Balancing NCAA Football teams and conferences aren’t feasible.

The idea of conferences and regional titles itself is outdated. It makes sense on a less national stage. In high school football you want to know who the best is in Florida. But college conferences span large areas of the US, college teams travel, and television creates a national stage. I say do away with conference championships completely. Why force #1 Florida and #2 Alabama to play before the postseason?

What can green do for you?

In college, of course, the post season is dominated by bowl games. And because of the money tie-ins to all the schools and investors that is not changing any time soon. Who gets bowl bids? Why guarantee a team from every conference is in a BCS bowl game? Why automatically give a champion of a weak conference a bid when other, more deserving teams are out there? We are starting to see the messes that this backroom dealing has created.

The ultimate and eventual cure is a playoff system. You can talk to 10 different people and they will have 11 different schemes for how the playoffs should work. It is not an easy task but it can be done. To get this out of the way right now, anyone countering that a playoff system would add too many games is using a weak argument because Division II does it. Here is a playoff scheme that would work: 8 teams, top ranked, only computer polled, strength of schedule taken into account but not the end all and be all.

What are we talking about here? If things were in place now we would take the top 8 teams based on the computer rankings only. None of them would have been in danger of a lower ranking because of conference championships because those games weren’t played. The top 8 teams would all be respectable- no one is undefeated or nearly so by padding their schedule with cupcakes because their rankings would reflect these shortcuts. Right now there is a lot of grumbling about whether a #3 team was screwed out of a championship game – wouldn’t the same thing happen with #9? Well, between 8 and 9, you lose your bitch card. There is a galactic difference between, a) possibly being the best in the country and not playing for the title and, b) having 2 losses while another 2 loss team is deemed more worthy to get beat down by the top rated seed. In other words, there will be no national sympathy for #9.

Playoffs

It is important to note that there will still be many bowl games outside of the playoffs. That is ok. If a team doesn’t make the playoffs but finishes with a winning record and gets invited to a random December bowl, I have no problem with that. In fact, the playoff games themselves would eat up a few of the most important bowl games now. A team making it to the national championship game would play in 3 playoff games – if you subtract the conference championship and the bowl game they were going to play anyway, you only added 1 extra game to the season – and this is only for the best two teams in the country.

It makes sense. Remove the human polls, remove the bowl bids, remove the impropriety. You think people love bowl season? You think people love March Madness? It is nothing next to the fanaticism that will emerge with a true college football playoff.

Prince of Persia (2008)

Prince of PersiaDon’t get me wrong – this is a pretty good game. Its American fantasy animation style makes for some beautiful visuals and a unique setting, which should be noted involved neither a prince nor Persia. The animation and running on walls and climbing, while not inspired, is solid traversal stuff. There’s also a couple cool pieces of tech that the developers experimented with- cloth tech for the character’s clothes and blobby tech that reaches out to the player as he walks by.

Vista

Ubisoft Montreal, the developers, put a lot of good into Prince of Persia. They, however, broke the golden rule of game design: A game is not the summation of its parts. They tried to cram everything in and hope it came together without a care for what the final experience was like. Ubisoft has been guilty of this before (see Assassin’s Creed aka. why I didn’t buy Assassin’s Creed 2) and doesn’t understand that making a player repetitively perform the same tasks is not fun.

There are basically two sides to this game:
1) Traversing the level, killing an enemy or two before battling the boss,
and
2) Traversing the level collecting soul power seeds to unlock later levels.

These are both very traditional game mechanics that we are all familiar with. The problem I have with these two parts is that the developers make you go through every level once for the first thing, then populate the level with collectables and make you traverse the very same level again before you can move on.

Mind you, collecting games can be fun. Mario and Sonic had a healthy amount of collecting *mixed in* with the combat. But separating them out to be done at two distinct times over the same level? This is just lazy design. It is basically doubling the length of the game by making you play it twice.

Imagine a level that is a tower. I climb the tower and kill a couple guys on the way up. At the top, I kill the boss. Then the land is healed and magical light seeds appear everywhere. I go down the tower (a different and faster way than I came up) and collect seeds on the way. Now, at the bottom, I can move on to another level, or I can go BACK UP the tower again to collect the seeds on the way up. So now I repeat the initial level again just so I can obtain a reasonable amount of light seeds. Now I am at the top again with nothing to do there, needing to go back down. I go down, again the way I went down before, without even any seeds to collect this time around. Well, that was a lot more work than i wanted to do. And the most annoying part is that Elika, your sidekick, keeps urging you to hurry up to the temple or something even though the game wants you to go on an Easter egg hunt.

Making the game longer by stuffing filler in doesn’t only make the game less fun, but it means you’ll be playing a less fun experience *longer*. That, sir, is not the way to entertain. You cut the fat, let the players play the good parts, and have them finish the game wanting more. That’s how you sell sequels. And expansion packs, apparently, since you can purchase a few download-only levels from the PlayStation Store.

With the underlying fundamental flaw of Prince of Persia out of the way, there are still other problems. The combat system in the game attempted to be intuitive by assigning a button to ‘magic’, ‘throw’, etc. but in practice came across as a Dragon’s Lair button reaction game. There is a complicated combo list of what buttons can be hit at certain times that I only started to get the hang of at the end of the game. And by that I mean I used the one combo I knew over and over.

Combat Controls

All the animated attacks look very cool in combat but the experience didn’t end up as freeform as what I think the developers initially envisioned. Every fight takes place on a raised platform and you can instant kill guys by knocking them over the edge. Imagine my surprise when I fight a boss, and after a cut scene where he says how bad ass he is, I position my attack correctly and knock him off the edge in one hit. It took me about 1/3rd of the way through the game before I found an enemy who wasn’t this easy to kill, and I was thrilled for the challenge.

The theme of the bosses, on the other hand, is very cool. There are some obvious Shadow of the Colossus influences at work here. Most of the game is level traversal and boss fighting, with very few generic fights in between. You almost feel sorry for the bosses when they are killed. Even the concept of using a dark god to bring a girl back to life, at the sake of the land, is copied. But Prince of Persia fails to match the elegance of Shadow on almost all fronts.

You can choose your own path in this game, and I honestly don’t see the strength in that. If there are 4 levels per boss and I can beat them in any order, then there is no feel of progression. Instead of feeling like you are slowly defeating a boss, you simply fight it in 4 identical battles with the same generic evil dialog beforehand. Linearity could have been a strength to this title and allowed the story to be presented much better.

Instead, we are treated to stilted and disconnected dialog. And might I add, horrible dialog at that. The two characters squabble back and forth without making a semblance of a point. Oftentimes when one of them mentions something important the bickering takes over and the subject matter is lost. Sometimes you are treated to lengthy explanations of mundane things to flesh out the world, and other times you have to sit through bad jokes. The game doesn’t even take itself seriously- one time you are fighting a boss and you keep pushing him into a wall to defeat him, and the hero says, “I hope he keeps falling for this.” This breaking down of the fourth wall with chatter became more of an annoyance than anything else. What’s worse, the two main characters follow the hollywood romance model of fighting until they are attracted to each other. So when it comes time for me to save Elika from death, well, I don’t really want to- she likes to argue too much.

Relationship Development models

In the end, it sounds like I am being much harder on Prince of Persia than I should be. I almost stopped playing it because of its faults, but about 40% through the bosses get more challenging and the necessity for light seed collection goes down. I actually trudged through and beat it, which is more than I can say for a lot of video games these days. It was fun, but it could have been outstanding. Using Shadow of the Colussus as a roadmap was not a bad decision but Ubisoft didn’t have the heart to see that through.

Prince of Persia is like that relationship you had that lasted a couple months and was never incredibly exciting. Sure, you are broken up now and are glad it is over, but at the same time you can appreciate the experience as a pleasant distraction where hopefully you learned some things and got a couple blowjobs.